From fandom to inquiry: what game studies reveals about biology learning at the Pokémon Fossil Museum

Popular culture is increasingly used in biology education, but its value is often explained primarily through a narrow account of engagement: learners recognize a reference, enjoy the activity, and participate more readily. This Perspective argues that game studies offer biology education research (BER) a vocabulary for examining the deeper mechanisms that can make such engagement educationally meaningful, including fan expertise, fictional world knowledge, affect, and identity. I use the Pokémon Fossil Museum at Chicago's Field Museum as a generative case, informed by a reflective visit rather than a study of visitor outcomes. Four lenses-transmedia learning, worldbuilding and procedural systems, affect and reflective nostalgia, and epistemic role-taking-make visible how the exhibit organized movement between Pokémon and paleontology. Its design maintained clear boundaries between fictional and scientific claims, paired imagined organisms with real fossils, surfaced tensions such as Pokémon "evolution" versus biological evolution, and invited visitors into paleontological practices. From this case, I propose six iterative design moves for game-informed biology education: orient, differentiate, bridge, disrupt, enact, and extend. I also propose a learner pathway for translating cultural recognition into biological reasoning through comparison, explanation, evidence evaluation, critique, and application. Engagement is an entry point, not the endpoint. By studying how knowledge developed through play can be reorganized through disciplinary evidence and practice, BER can better understand authentic engagement in biology learning, including contexts beyond games or Pokémon.