Misaligned education

Abstract

I expand and adapt Thi Nguyen’s account of games to the context of university humanities education. I analyse ‘misalignment’, wherein the stakes of success or failure in a game undermine players’ capacity to submerge themselves in play, thus missing the associated benefits. I argue that in many ways humanities university education is misaligned: crucial pedagogical goods require submersion, but submersion is undermined by how success or failure underwrites future student success.