More than a decade ago, when I was naming an educators’ guild, we chose Cognitive Dissonance. The name wasn’t clever; it was honest. At the time, many educators were experiencing real discomfort as we began to understand how virtual worlds and MMORPGs supported motivation, collaboration, feedback loops, persistence, and identity; constructs deeply aligned with lesson design and learning theory. What clashed was not evidence, but belief. We were confronting the tension between
