Scholars, educators, and media designers are engaged in a spirited debate over whether and how games might contribute to civic learning.  However, there are several barriers to advancing our understanding of games’ potential for civic education.  Participants in this debate value different kinds of civic participation based on their conflicting paradigms of citizenship.  There is a dearth of reliable empirical research that could establish what kinds of game design are most likely to inspire learning.  And there are few games that are designed expressly for civic learning.  To advance design and research, this article develops a more inclusive conceptual framework for how games might foster civic learning, based on two formative tensions: between the ability of players to exert agency in the game world and the constraints of the game’s structure, and between the logics of expediency and ethics that the game encourages players to practice. This framework yields many hypotheses about the design of games for leadership and other types of citizenship as well as for different kinds of civic learning.  We use the framework to indicate how games may lend themselves to fostering different visions of citizenship.  Although we value a broad ecology of civic games, we argue that there is a need for more games that help youth in particular to connect individual action and social structure, as well as ethical and strategic thinking.

For a copy of this manuscript, email craphael (at) scu (dot) edu.