This Week Endless Mode Goes Back to School

By Garrett Martin | August 25, 2025 | 3:01pm

Video Games Features Back-to-School

This Week Endless Mode Goes Back to School

Do you know those dreams where you’re woefully unprepared at school? Maybe you just didn’t study or finish your homework, or maybe it’s the classic nightmare of showing up at school without any clothes on. If you’re still in school, you might be shocked to learn that those dreams don’t necessarily end once you leave. They can, and will, recur even as an adult. That’s how fundamental school and education is to the human experience: some of what you learn at school will stick with you for the rest of your life, while pretty much every scar or psychic wound you pick up there will never fully go away. School sets you up for life but can also hold you back, and in one way or another will color almost everything that comes after it. So when it came time for Endless Mode to launch its first theme week school was kind of a gimme—like those tests where you get 10 or 20 points just for spelling your name right.

Welcome to Endless Mode’s first monthly theme week. Every day this week we’ll be investigating the relationship between education and play, school and games, learning and recreation—between the serious business of getting smarter and the even more serious business of having fun. We’ll explore games about school, schools about games, games you play at school to learn, games you play at school for fun, and games you play at school because some guy with a whistle and tight shorts makes you. Whether it’s video games, board games, tabletop RPGs, card games, or sports, play and education have always been closely connected—and today you can even go to college to learn how to study and make games. Endless Mode will be diving into all of this and more this week, with sidebars on the deep history anime has with school settings, and how theme park design isn’t just something you can study at school but major in, as well.

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This week you can expect to read about the very first computer game made for education. You’ll learn about the many programs following Mavis Beacon’s lead and teaching today’s students how to type. We’ll talk to various teachers and professors about how board games can help in the classroom, and look into what you need to know about college game design programs. Our writers will also analyze how specific series like Persona, Battle Royale and Kingdom Hearts depict different aspects of the educational system. And since I edit this website and can’t shut up about theme parks, we’ll also reflect on EPCOT’s long-abandoned original mission of edutainment.

Why this week, specifically? When I was a kid the school year always started on the fourth Monday of August. From Kindergarten to 12th grade, in both Florida and Georgia, it was the same: the summer died when the last full week of August came around. I’d see on TV or in comic strips—really, mostly in comic strips—that schools up north usually waited until the day after Labor Day, which makes sense; the way I knew meant we always had a day off after only one or two weeks. Somehow things have gotten weird today, though. The schools in Georgia almost always return at the end of July now, practically a full month earlier than I ever knew. Now they get a full week off in the fall, in addition to the traditional two weeks for Christmas and week for Spring Break, and might even get a one-week “Winter Break” in early February, too. They give up days in the summer to get some back throughout the year, and as baffling as it is to see kids in backpacks on street corners waiting on school buses when it’s still July, the new system is probably better. Hell, given the Georgia heat and humidity, and the fact that almost nobody farms anymore, it makes sense to keep kids inside those air conditioned schools when it’s hot and miserable out. Maybe the school year should end in March and reconvene in June?

That schedule might be a lot better, but I am perpetually weighed down by the past. If Endless Mode is going to do a Back to School week—and, yes, as I’ve said, we are doing that, right now even—it’s going to be when most of us would have gone back to school in our youth—when I would have gone back to school in my youth. It’s going to be now, this week, starting on the fourth Monday of August: today.

So join Endless Mode as we go back to school for one last week, after what’s been the most important summer of this site’s young life.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.