Player Transfer: How Learning Transfer and Serious Games Answer Serious (and Transferable) Questions about One Another

This article suggests that research into the use of digital games for learning provides a fresh perspective on the concept of learning transfer and that equally serious game researchers and developers may have important lessons to learn from historical and contemporary transfer research. This paper, after broadly sketching the convergence of these two research fields, examines in more detail a number of important specific topics, as follows: the belief, implicit in many of today's serious game products, not only in the reality of learning transfer but in the ability of such products to facilitate it. Included here are a range of, it would appear, successful initiatives in the military/defence and medical fields and also a number of more recent "brain training" titles which lay claim to developing transferable key cognitive skills and strategies. the evidence for both low and high road transfer in the "everyday" playing of mainstream computer and video games the manner in which the affordances of modern computer and video games match the conditions for learning transfer posited in the literature in the field (e.g. multiple contexts for practice, metacognition) Despite such promising indications, empirical data, where it exists, fails to establish the 'transfer power' of games. One reason may lie in the fact that many of the experiments carried out to study learning transfer and/or just plain learning - from games are based on a 'one-shot', 'in vitro' approach similar to that taken in many classic transfer experiments. The author suggests it may not be realistic to expect transfer or significant learning to happen under such conditions and that the development of transferable learning is most likely based, like the development of expertise, on a certain, and perhaps considerable, amount of reflective and deliberate practice. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this thesis for the study of transfer in and from digital games and, by extension, to the study and facilitation of other forms of digital game-based learning.