How to make learners care: Lessons from game design

Why can someone spend hours playing a game, but in the workplace that same person struggles to complete a 20-minute compliance training module? The difference is engagement. Games are carefully crafted to keep players interested and invested at every step.

There is a huge opportunity here. By capturing learners’ attention and keeping them engaged, we can make learning feel motivating and even enjoyable. Game designers have already solved this challenge; they’ve tackled engagement at scale. Countless hours, research, and resources have gone into solving how to capture and keep players’ attention. We can apply the same principles when we are building our learning courses and programmes.

This article will explore three key principles from game design, along with a few practical takeaways you can use today, to maximise engagement for your learners.

What is engagement?

So, what exactly am I talking about when I refer to engagement?

Engagement measures how deeply someone is invested in an activity. It captures their emotional connection, focus, and the actions they take. Basically, it’s about how much they care, and how much they’re paying attention.

Why do we care about engagement? Research shows that higher engagement leads to better learning outcomes. For example, a Gallup study found that student engagement was strongly linked to academic achievement, with highly engaged learners showing 129% greater growth than their less engaged peers.

Learning from games

There are three key principles that game designers have used for decades, even centuries, to make their games engaging: providing a challenge, creating a safe space for failure, and designing feedback loops. We’ll explore each principle, showing you how you can apply these principles to your training modules today.

Providing a challenge

One of the key ways games keep players engaged is by providing a challenge. Games should be neither too easy (boring) nor too hard (frustrating). Research published in Applied Sciences found that 90% of players reported higher engagement when the difficulty was tailored to their ability levels.

To apply this in learning:

• Gradual difficulty curve: Start with simple tasks, then progressively introduce more complex challenges
• Immediate feedback: Give timely, clear feedback so learners understand their progress and can adjust strategies
• Adaptive challenges: Offer optional scaffolding or difficulty adjustments to match individual skill levels

Practical takeaway: Check in with your learners. Ask how they’re coping with the course and adjust as needed; don’t rely solely on a strict plan.

Safe failure

In games failure isn’t the end, it’s feedback. Players learn by making mistakes, adjusting their approach, and then trying again. Research shows that learners who make errors and then correct them retain information significantly better than if they study without mistakes.

Games create a psychologically safe environment in which players are able to experiment without real-world consequences. Risk taking is a vital part of the process.

We can build this into our learning programmes:

• Allow and encourage mistakes; let people fail and try again in a risk-free atmosphere
• Give people clear feedback and an opportunity to reflect on failure, in games you can hit the “pause” button to think, build in time for reflection into your learning interventions

Practical takeaway: Build failure and mistakes into your learning. Encourage people to experiment, reflect, and to try again; failure is a valuable learning opportunity, not a setback.

Feedback loops

In games, feedback is constant and immediate; actions have results, and results indicate progress. This instant visibility of outcomes helps players stay fully invested, creating a state of flow, in which they are focused and motivated. Research has found that learners’ perceived learning progress reliably predicts stronger engagement and flow, alongside improved learning outcomes.

How we can utilise this:

• Provide updates on progress through reviews, let people see how they have progressed and how they are improving
• Give clear feedback that helps learners understand their performance, allowing them to adjust their strategies and build confidence
• Display the connection between actions and results, make it clear and simple to understand; demonstrate how an action has a direct result

Practical takeaway: Make feedback timely, specific, and visible. Help learners see how their actions lead to improvement, this not only motivates them but also supports a flow state throughout learning.

Things to watch out for

Balancing fun and learning isn’t easy. The fun elements keep learners engaged and capture attention, but the learning itself is the most important part! Avoid turning your course into just an entertaining experience without meaningful learning.

Be cautious with excess gamification, this can end up as superficial mechanics like points, badges, or leaderboards without any real meaning. Don’t let gamification overpower the learning as it may have the opposite effect, demotivating learners with a patronising tone.

Wrapping up

I’ve highlighted three game design principles here, but there are many more that can be applied to learning. At Business Simulations, we draw heavily on game design to create effective learning experiences, using these techniques and others to maximise engagement and impact.

To recap the three ideas we have explored:

• Provide a challenge; enough to engage learners, but not too much that it is frustrating
• Create a psychologically safe environment, celebrate mistakes and encourage experimentation
• Give clear and constant feedback, show learners their progress and give them the information they need to adjust their approach

Through incorporating these techniques we can design learning experiences that are not only more engaging, but also more effective; helping learners to grow.

Further reading

For a deeper dive into using game design for learning, see:

Pasqualotto, A., Parong, J., Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2022). Video Game Design for Learning to Learn. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 39(11), 2211–2228. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2022.2110684

References

Gallup. (2019, October 22). Engagement and hope positively influence student outcomes. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/education/267740/engagement-hope-positively-influence-student-outcomes.aspx

Romero-Mendez, E. A., Santana-Mancilla, P. C., Garcia-Ruiz, M., Montesinos-López, O. A., & Anido-Rifón, L. E. (2023). The Use of Deep Learning to Improve Player Engagement in a Video Game through a Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment Based on Skills Classification. Applied Sciences, 13(14), 8249. https://doi.org/10.3390/app13148249

Qiang, X., Ma, X., & Li, T. (2025). Learning from errors: Deliberate errors enhance learning. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 82, 102379. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2025.102379

Lu, H., van der Linden, D., & Bakker, A. B. (2024). The neuroscientific basis of flow: Learning progress guides task engagement and cognitive control. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2409.06592