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Epistemic Games

Theory · All theories
Evidence · 1 claim (1 mixed) · 1 study (1 qualitative), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description

Epistemic games (Collins & Ferguson, 1993; Morrison & Collins, 1995) are "generative patterns of inquiry that underpin knowledgeable actions" (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017) — recognizable, rule-like sets of moves, constraints, and strategies organized around constructing a particular kind of knowledge (an explanation, a design, a problem statement). Each game has entry conditions, constraints on who can play and how, a target epistemic form (the kind of knowledge structure being built), and exit conditions; games can nest inside one another and a group can transfer out of one game into another and back. Earlier work on epistemic games focused mainly on the discourse moves involved. Arthars et al. (2024) extend the framework with an ecological analytical perspective (Goodwin; Hutchins), arguing that a game's moves are inseparably multimodal — language, gesture, gaze, body positioning, and shared artifacts (a whiteboard, a sketch) jointly constitute the "move," not language alone.

Studying interdisciplinary teams constructing a shared problem statement, Arthars et al. identified one overarching game — the shared understanding game — built from five recurring moves, clustered into three epistemic functions: - Explication — making different kinds of knowledge and epistemic standards explicit: knowledge sharing (surfacing what individuals already know, usually paired with an external representation) and knowledge validation (negotiating what counts as trustworthy or "good enough" evidence — the move most likely to expose unacknowledged disciplinary differences in what different fields treat as credible). - Grounding — connecting abstract ideas to concrete, relatable experience: perspective-taking (constructing another party's — a customer's, a future user's — likely experience, fluidly shifting across imagined past/present/future). - Juxtaposition — exploring and integrating multiple framings at once: simulation (creating and walking through hypothetical scenarios to surface cause-and-effect relationships) and negotiation (integrating individually proposed formulations into one consensual statement, often through iterative, visibly-revised writing).

Implications

Context

  • Applies to any interdisciplinary team task centered on constructing a shared piece of knowledge (a problem statement, a design brief, a diagnosis) rather than working in parallel on separable subtasks
  • Most useful for making visible — and then explicitly teaching or scaffolding — the specific interaction moves that experienced or successful teams use, rather than leaving "collaborate effectively" unspecified

Target Learners

  • Interdisciplinary teams (studied at the graduate level, but the moves are not level-specific) whose members hold different disciplinary standards for what counts as valid or trustworthy knowledge

Target Learning Objectives

  • Building the capacity to explicitly share, validate, ground, and negotiate knowledge claims across disciplinary perspectives when constructing a shared problem formulation

Claims

Examples

  • Epistemic Games: Shared-Understanding Moves — the five named moves operationalized as a teachable/scaffoldable instructional element
  • Epistemic Cognition — epistemic games' "knowledge validation" move is a team-level, interactional analogue to an individual learner's epistemic criteria for evaluating claims

Key Sources

  • Arthars, N., Markauskaite, L., & Goodyear, P. (2024). Constructing shared understanding of complex interdisciplinary problems: Epistemic games in interdisciplinary teamwork. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 33(2), 405-442. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2024.2341390
  • Collins, A., & Ferguson, W. (1993). Epistemic forms and epistemic games: Structures and strategies to guide inquiry. Educational Psychologist, 28(1), 25-42.
  • Morrison, D., & Collins, A. (1995). Epistemic fluency and constructivist learning environments. Educational Technology, 35(5), 39-45.
  • Markauskaite, L., & Goodyear, P. (2017). Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education. Springer.
Page metadata
Field Value
type theory
title Epistemic Games
description A framework describing knowledge construction as playing generative, rule-like "games" — recognizable sets of moves, constraints, and strategies organized around building a particular kind of knowledge — which can be enacted individually or collaboratively.
status review
canonical True
generated by claude/unspecified on 2026-08-29
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — arthars-et-al-2024

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