The ASU/E-Line partnership is founded on the premise that unlocking and utilizing the power of games and game-infused learning to genuinely engage, educate and empower our youth is a challenging, but solvable problem.

It requires a deeply committed, fully integrated world class team that spans core competencies in learning sciences, content domains, research methodologies, game development and ‘double-line’ publishing mechanisms for game-infused learning products and services built on sustainable models that can be continually optimized for effectiveness and scaled implementation.

Central to our vision of how to use video games for educational impact is to position them as a service—not a product; this service should be engineered into a larger implementation ecology that includes a flexible, modular implementation structure, a social-community system that leverages smart tools and gamification layers to track, support, and inspire participation, and a coordinated assessment framework to enable ongoing assessment, optimization and innovation. Therefore, we have partnered with E-Line Media, our industry partner to provide powerful game-infused solutions built on a theory of change that involves the full life-cycle of design: research, design, develop, implement, market, distribute, assess and optimize.

Our theory of change states that game-infused experiences must be treated as part of services that are integrated, managed, and continually optimized for ecosystem integration, ongoing sustainability and scaled impact.

These assumptions guide design decisions, and are instantiated through an integrated framework that includes more bounded game-infused experiences (i.e., small ‘g’ games) and a more general collaborative infrastructure (i.e., big ‘G’ games) that unite and extends the impact of any particular experience.

As such, our impact-focused theory of change includes bounded experiences through which the player can take risks and explore possible new ‘selves’ as they learn in the safety of a fictional experience to participation in more open-ended, real-world situations that involve user-driven extensions and adaptions of the lessons in support of real-world goals and outcomes is necessary if one wants the learning to bring about real-world change.