Soon after, the university recruited avid gamer and tech executive Mark Ollila to direct the Endless Games and Learning Lab, which has since built courses, hackathons and AI-powered tools to show how games can develop transferable skills. Now through a partnership with the cloud infrastructure company Aethir, the lab is working to take that vision even further.
Ollila and Aethir’s Chief Revenue Officer Paul Thind are both longstanding members of the global gaming community, which Ollila emphasized is an industry bigger than those of music and film combined. The two reconnected last year at a gaming conference in Las Vegas, Ollila said, and began discussing how Aether’s decentralized cloud system could support the lab.
“Our work with ASU is really about giving the students hands-on access to the kind of high-performance compute that powers real-world AI innovation,” Thind said. “Access to it has been limited, and so we’re changing that by offering decentralized, scalable infrastructure that students and researchers can tap into.”
ABOUT THE LAB
In its first year, Ollila said the Endless Games and Learning Lab focused on building a foundation for what gaming-based education could look like at scale.
Since the lab is still new, Thind said professors and students are really the ones that shape how Aethir’s compute is used.
“A data science class at ASU might be tasked with building an image recognition model for a real-world challenge, like wildfire detection in Arizona. Then by the end of the semester, they maybe have a working model that could actually help the state respond to wildfires faster," he said. “To me, that’s what democratized compute looks like."
Students in the lab also began to use an AI tool called Miranda, which, Ollila said, will potentially be able to build game models and LLMs that analyze and understand what a user is doing while playing a game — the steps they've taken and possible reasons why. Ollila added that Miranda will hopefully one day be able to recognize the real-world skills learners pick up both by playing and by making games, a process he calls "ambient learning."
“Maybe a student who spends hours building cities in SimCity might receive recognition in urban planning concepts, while one who develops strategies in the survival game Rust is demonstrating communication, planning, resource management, and again, skill sets that can be applied in the real world,” Ollila said. “You learn so many different skill sets [when playing and making games], and those skills can be applied not only to the games industry, but other industries. ... The scale that games have out there is untapped because there's so much ambient learning taking place. We need to capture and utilize that.”
The pillars of ASU’s lab, according to Ollila, are to have fun, understand that making and engaging with games is an art and, lastly, to prioritize play: “Play-to-learn, make-to-learn, learn-through-making,” he said.
But traditionally, Thind said, this type of cloud infrastructure has been scarce and prohibitively expensive. The ultimate goal of the lab is to give students access to powerful AI, without cost barriers and gatekeeping. He added that Aethir's partnership with ASU points toward a more decentralized, student-driven future.
“That’s why Aethir's relationship with ASU is so important,” Ollila said. “We want to leverage that AI compute to help accelerate all those three elements.”
BENEFITS OF GAMING IN LEARNING
ASU’s Endless Games and Learning Lab is one of many U.S. schools and institutions exploring the advantages of learning by making and playing games.
In Michigan, educators are using gaming platforms to boost student literacy and reading comprehension, where 77 percent of participating teachers reported improvements in students' confidence, comprehension, fluency, vocabulary and an overall enjoyment of reading.
Digital Promise, a global education nonprofit, similarly overviewed an initiative in Kansas where students engage in esports to help them discover their strengths and unlock future career paths. One school’s success with a pilot esports program prompted the Kansas City Public School system to consider more wide-reaching esports opportunities, according to their website.
Both Ollila and Thind expressed a firm belief that well-designed digital experiences can reshape classrooms into more engaging experience centers, enhancing traditional methods of learning.
“There are a lot of positive things around games that we haven’t yet captured,” Ollila said. “And that’s the ambient learning that happens while you’re playing games.”
According to Ollila, everyday gaming experiences inherently foster valuable real-world skills — things like planning, resource management and effective communication.
“Game design principles like rewards, progression and interactivity make learning addictive in a good way,” Thind said. “There’s also the aspect of multiplayer collaboration that kind of mimics real-world teamwork, prepping students for modern work.”
Thind added that AI's ability to personalize content to learning styles leaves room to imagine AI tutors or co-pilots for some of these games.
Ultimately, both Ollila and Thind agree the measure of the lab’s success will be whether students are empowered to create, not just consume, and the rate at which they learn and implement new skills through gaming.
“ASU was courageous enough to do something transformational, which requires the ability to acknowledge that, yes, there’s learning from games,” Ollila said. “No one has had the ability to really capture that, and that’s what we’re looking to do.”
