One of the primary sources for the theory underlying many of the introductory language textbooks in California and much of the U.S. is Krashen and Terrell's work on the Natural Approach.

The core of the Natural Approach classroom is a series of [four] Acquisition activities ...

[1] Affective activities attempt to involve students' feelings, opinions, desires, reactions, ideas and experiences ...
[2] Problem Solving Activities. The primary characteristic of these sorts of activities is that the students' attention is focused on finding a correct answer to a question, a problem or a situation ...
[3] Games can serve very well as the basis for an acquisition activity and are therefore not a reword nor a "frill", but an important experience in the acquisition process ...
[4] Content Activities. By 'content' we mean any activity in which the purpose is to learn something new other than language.

As noted both here and in the Natural Approach, problem solving and games are really the same activities. In addition, many video games today include all the sub-activities listed as affective activities, and draw upon extensive content besides language instruction. In other words, modern Play is at the core of the theoretical model underlying U.S. introductory curricular materials for the past 25 years. Unfortunately, while play in popular culture has evolved to allow for extraordinarily complex engagement, the difficulty in adapting production techniques has stunted the evolution of play in many of the mass-produced foreign language curricular materials beyond concentration and jeopardy games -- particularly in homework assignments. Instead, many of the innovations in play activities for the foreign language classrooms have come from innovative teachers working to independently orchestrate classroom activities or other projects.

To be fair, it is of course considerably more difficult to create a systematic set of mass-distributable curricular activities that are as rich as the activities youth are engaging in outside of school than it is for an individual teacher to put together an activity designed for a single use in their own classroom. As argued earlier, when done right, learning content can actually increase the entertainment value of a game -- however, doing so correctly is exponentially more difficult than simply creating an entertainment-only game. Thus, curricular designers are given a mandate far more difficult than other media creators, yet supplied only a fraction of the budget. It is therefore critical that we make extensive study of the work that has already been done on creating engaging play activities and focus only on extending it for pedagogical purposes.

The first two sections of this document offer suggestions on how to do this on a techincal level. Perhaps the most important, though, is that we study the psychological approach game designers take to understanding play. As Krashen & Terrell describe, "For us the most important goal of the early stages of the Natural Approach is to lower the affective filter. This is because a high filter will prevent acquisition -- the central goal of the Natural Approach."

Continue to Extending Play and Language Acquisition [alias]
Continue to Social Activities in Foreign Language Curricular Materials