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faculty of the Kellogg School of Management
OperationsSep 1, 2026
Education and Entertainment—Not a Zero-Sum Game
Gamified learning tends to be viewed as either instructive or fun, but research shows how smart design choices can make room for both.
Summary Video games can be both educational and entertaining, according to researchers at the Kellogg School. The team analyzed more than eight cumulative years’ worth of gameplay by over 25,000 players of PowerZ, an educational mobile game for kids ages six to twelve. They found that requiring players to complete an educational module in order to move forward in the game’s storyline not only maintained players’ engagement with the game as a whole but also increased their engagement with the game’s other educational content.
As video games become increasingly popular, they present a great opportunity to teach a variety of subjects. But that leaves companies attempting to both teach and entertain in a bind. Push the educational content too hard, and players might check out. But dial up the fun factor to increase engagement, and the educational mission could get lost.
This apparent trade-off has dogged educational-game design for years. Unlike gamified classroom tools, which teachers can compel students to use, true educational games are purely opt-in. That means that when push comes to shove, fun must always trump learning in order to keep people coming back. Luis von Ahn, the CEO of the popular language-learning app Duolingo, put it plainly in a 2024 interview: “If I could force you to sit there, I may be able to teach the material to you in five minutes, but it’d be a very frustrating five minutes,” he said. “Instead, what we do is teach it to you in two hours … but the whole time, things are animating on the screen and you’re getting dopamine hits.”
Kellogg researchers wondered if this approach really was the best that educational-game designers could do. “It comes down to a belief that education cannot be fun, that these are somehow at odds,” says Alexander Jensen, an adjunct lecturer and PhD candidate in operations at Kellogg.
Jensen and his coauthors at Kellogg—Sébastien Martin, an associate professor of operations, and Karen Smilowitz, a professor of operations—conducted a study on players of PowerZ, an educational mobile game designed to deliver math, English, and social-studies content to kids ages six to twelve. The study gave players three different versions of an educational module within the game: one that was totally optional, one that gave the players an in-game reward in exchange for engaging with it, and one that players were forced to complete in order to move forward in the game’s storyline.
To the researchers’ surprise, the third, mandatory version not only maintained players’ engagement with the game as a whole but also increased their engagement with the game’s other educational content.
“The assumption is that people have a fixed amount of brain power to do learning, and if you try and push it beyond that point, they will disengage,” says Jensen. “What we find is that if you make smart design decisions, you can actually shift their preferences.”
Pay to play
Getting permission to do experiments within educational video games is difficult because it often requires changing the gameplay in ways that players may not like. But in PowerZ, Jensen and his collaborators found an unusually willing partner: the company let the researchers analyze more than eight cumulative years’ worth of gameplay by over 25,000 players.
“It’s a massive amount of data,” Martin says. “You have second-by-second [observations of] what they do for many hours, in a rich environment.”
PowerZ is an “open world” game that lets players move about as they please and engage in a variety of noneducational and educational activities, such as minigames. The game’s developers had previously collected data that reflected the tension between education and entertainment: players were less likely to complete game milestones that required educational content, and they hoped to increase the portion of time that players spend on dedicated educational activities.
“There’s a huge variety in what people do within the game,” Jensen says. “Some play these educational minigames for hours on end, while others are more interested in exploring.”
“Requiring people to try new things sometimes makes them excited about it.”
The first experiment offered players a simple incentive: they could choose to play a math-based minigame in exchange for a reward, such as in-game currency or new character abilities. “Paying” players, unsurprisingly, resulted in players spending more time with that math-based minigame. And it did not cause players to reduce their overall time spent playing PowerZ.
However, the incentive didn’t increase players’ engagement with other educational minigames in PowerZ, either. Furthermore, those who did spend more time on the math minigame tended to be players who gravitated toward PowerZ’s educational content to begin with.
“The people who accepted the incentive were already more comfortable with that content,” Jensen explains. “It wasn’t really affecting the entire player base. So then we asked, Is that the best we can do?”
No choice in the matter
Emboldened by their initial results, the researchers designed a second, more-aggressive test of players’ tolerance for educational content.
Players now encountered one of three versions of the math minigame. Some had the option to skip it if they wished. Others were offered an incentive to play, like before. And some were told that playing the minigame was mandatory if they wanted their character to move forward in the game’s main storyline.
The researchers thought that the mandatory option would significantly reduce player engagement across the board. It turned out they were wrong.
“Surprisingly, [the mandatory option] didn’t lead to people leaving the game at higher rates,” Jensen says. “But not only that, it actually led people to explore other types of educational content and do more there as well.”
The researchers were careful not to overinterpret their results as a full refutation of the conventional wisdom that learning and gameplay are pitted against each other. One possible explanation, they say, is that because PowerZ’s educational content is clustered in one area of the game’s world, briefly holding players there (as with the mandatory minigame) might just make them more likely to play other games in the immediate vicinity.
Then again, Jensen says, “requiring people to try new things sometimes makes them excited about it.” He compares it with getting little children to try new foods: “They might find that they actually really enjoy it, and they’ll be more willing to try other foods.”
Win–win changes
A similar preference-shifting effect, the researchers say, could happen more often in educational games—if they’re designed thoughtfully. It’s not that forcing players to jump through hoops will always pay off. Rather, making the mandatory minigame in PowerZ feel integral to the overall gameplay—not just bolted on—was likely key to its success as an educational intervention.
“It’s about signaling what’s important in the game,” Jensen says.
Martin believes these insights could apply beyond educational gaming to the broader world of operations, which centers on how people perform tasks and achieve goals within structured settings, such as employees working within a team or firm. “A company is a complex environment with many things happening, like a video game,” he says. “But you can create a positive feedback loop, a system that actually influences people in a good way.”
The decisions teams and leaders make are full of apparent zero-sum trade-offs—just like the trade-off between learning and playing in a video game. In their study, that trade-off turned out not to be as intractable as it seemed, which may be the case in other scenarios, too. “If you look deeply at how things are organized, sometimes there are win–win changes you can make,” Martin says.
Featured Faculty
Alexander E. N. Jensen
Adjunct Lecturer of Operations
Associate Professor of Operations
Professor of Operations; Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, McCormick School of Engineering
John Pavlus is a writer and filmmaker focusing on science, technology, and design topics. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Jensen, Alexander E. N., Sébastien Martin, and Karen Smilowitz. 2026. “Navigating the Educational Video Game Paradox.” Working paper.
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