intrinsic integration

This note last modified August 18, 2025

Merely adding gameplay to a boring task won’t make it fun or effective, just like adding chocolate to broccoli won’t make it tasty. You need to your gameplay to align with and support the themes that you are trying to portray.

To take out the learning content would be to take out the game itself. The opposite of ludopedagogical dissonance

Also known as: endogenous design

For example, Review Of Trends In Serious Gaming For Education-Young found that a history game was ineffective. The game added the historical information as “interesting tidbits” on top of the game, rather than having the history be important to the gameplay itself.

stealth learning
- Well designed stealth learning can avoid intrinsic integration, but this may lead to players not properly associating in game learning with the real world.
gamefulness
- When learning goals are implemented in a gameful way, that’s known as intrinsic integration
gameful design
- Taking the good parts of games and bringing them to nongaming contexts. See intrinsic integration
endogenous design
- Maybe see Learning by Doing (Cutting, CHIPlay 2022)? intrinsic integration, I’ve also heard it called embedded design
educational games
- But regardless, educational games are great. I’m not talking about frog fractions (and honestly, a lot of research shows that those kinds of games are ineffective anyways), but things more along the lines of explorables.
designing transformational games
- A transformational game# needs to properly enmesh transformational objectives with gameplay, which is a difficult task.
Review Of Trends In Serious Gaming For Education-Young
- Avoid intrinsic integration
Intrinsic Skill Atoms For Gameful Design
- edutainment that merely uses games to cover up distasteful parts of learning (intrinsic integration) has historically failed. All activities can be motivating and enjoyable, but the system needs to be holistically created.
Interviews With Edugame Designers-Isbister
- No intrinsic integration
Educational_Game_Design_Narrative-Chaima
- Why have games with narrative failed in the past to improve learning? It’s because narrative elements are unrelated to the gameplay or subject. It also makes the game longer, which should be accounted for. (tag: intrinsic integration)