What are we talking about when we talk about video games and learning?
Video games are one of the most influential cultural and technological phenomena of our time, shaping how millions of people interact, communicate, solve problems, and experience stories. Yet discussions about video games in education often remain polarized, oscillating between enthusiasm about their potential and skepticism about their value. To move beyond these simplified views, the central question is how game-based learning experiences can engage curiosity, creativity, decision-making, collaboration, self-discovery, and the construction of knowledge itself.
When we refer to incorporating digital technologies into education, we draw on the work of educational technology researchers Mariana Maggio, Carina Lion, and Verónica Perosi, who focus on the relationship between digital innovation, teaching, and learning. They define these approaches as educational experiences that allow both the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of learning to emerge. Along the same lines, Lion and Perosi argue that video games are not simply entertainment tools but environments for imagination, identity development, and meaningful engagement, capable of creating learning experiences.
“We understand that the convergence between video game design, artificial intelligence, and learning is not the future, but our present habitat. When playful immersion and pedagogical architecture speak the same language, we manage to transform digital interaction into an inexhaustible engine of human development.”
– Javier Scher, SVP Technology and Head of Education AI Studio at Globant
Connecting Inner and Outer Worlds
These experiences find a solid anchor in classic play theories, especially in the work of pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who argued that play is far more than entertainment.
When we play, we use all our creativity, connecting the inner world with outer reality in what he called a “transitional space”. Winnicott described this “transitional space” as a unique environment where ideas, experiences, and emotions come together. For Winnicott, play is always a creative act and an essential part of how we learn, grow, and make sense of the world, and is always a creative experience in the space-time continuum, constituting a basic form of life.
The Universes We Inhabit
Taking the perspective of play into the digital plane, we could affirm that the space-time of the video game is one of the defining habitats of contemporary life. In The Game, writer and cultural thinker Alessandro Baricco explores how digital technologies have transformed the way we experience reality, arguing that we now inhabit a system in which the “world” (the physical, tangible space) and the “ultraworld” (the digital environment created through screens, networks, and platforms) constantly revolve around one another. Rather than existing as separate realms, these dimensions increasingly overlap and shape one another, producing new forms of experience and interaction within virtual learning environments and digital ecosystems.
As the boundaries between physical and digital life become increasingly blurred, Baricco suggests we are moving toward a form of “augmented humanity,” in which our identities, relationships, learning experiences, and ways of understanding the world emerge from the continuous interplay between the two spaces.
Video games foster critical thinking, offer scenarios for imagination, strengthen subjectivity, and create intense and profound commitments, as Lion and Perosi suggest. These commitments enable students to build knowledge in different formats and languages, while game-based learning and interaction facilitate collaborative work.
Each of these scenarios represents a habitat that can also be seen as a reality system with a dual driving force, in which the distinction between the real and the virtual becomes a secondary boundary, as the two merge in a single movement that generates a new reality.
Video games also allow us to have immersive, playful experiences and rehearse challenging learning proposals for students, where they put into play their prior knowledge, their daily practices, and their information of the digital, in a continuous time and space inside and outside the classrooms, inside and outside the boundaries of the world and the ultraworld. The value of including these worlds is that they become part of the school and social habitat, where non-linear formats and narratives converge, allowing a creative immersion in discovery and collaboration, and recovering emerging learnings in their connection to productions that are part of culture.
A World Within Worlds
As the boundaries between the physical and digital continue to blur, perhaps the question is no longer whether video games belong in education, but what they can teach us about learning itself.
Perhaps a key question is not what video games can teach us, but what they reveal about how we as humans learn. In the spaces where imagination meets experience, where worlds and ultraworlds intertwine, new forms of knowledge emerge. If play has always been one of humanity’s most powerful ways of exploring reality, what possibilities become imaginable when entire generations learn, create, and discover through these new habitats?
At Globant’s Education AI Studio, we help organizations design AI-powered learning environments that unlock human potential at scale. Connect with our team to explore the future of education.
