Written as a follow-up to the widely-cited (2012) Review of Educational Research meta-analysis Our Princess is in Another Castle: A Review of Trends in Serious Gaming for Education, Exploding the Castle is an edited volume intended to anchor collective thinking with respect to 1) the value‐added nature of games for learning and 2) the complexities involved in player experience, narrative context, and environmental‐player interactions.

The book is not aimed at debates about “gamification,” game violence, individual game quality, and other topics that have become standard fare in extant games literature. Rather, it emphasizes issues of scalability, the induction of player goal adoption, affordances of game‐based instructional environments, relationships between play and transfer, and the value of games as part of an ecopsychological worldview. As long‐time contributors in a field that had made a habit of playing it safe—pun intended—we sought to bring the dialogue in a more nuanced and meaningful direction that would reach teachers, researchers, designers, and players alike.