Why Do We Keep Going Back to School?

By Moises Taveras | August 26, 2025 | 3:00pm

Video Games Features Back-to-School

Do you ever stop and consider how frequently games take us back to school? Some of the biggest and most influential titles of our time take place within educational institutions. Series like Persona have crafted their very identities and mechanics around school, while many others, like the first Life is Strange game, feature them as crucial backdrops for tales of self-discovery. Over my lifetime, and I’m sure many others can relate, I’ve played a number of games about schools that run the spectrum of genres—games like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Doki Doki Literature Club, and Final Fantasy VIII. Many more that I have and haven’t played, like Bloodborne, Detention, and 1000xResist, as well as upcoming titles like Demonschool, prominently feature some kind of school, college, or academic institution, and often serve as ruminations on their importance in the development of societies and the people they are meant to nurture.

Hell, Bully is set at a boarding school, and even Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has a school level featuring a sick cameo from Benjamin Franklin. No matter where you look, it’s hard to escape the specter of academia in gaming, which got me thinking: Why have schools recurred in games so frequently? They certainly aren’t the most popular setting given their restrictions, as well as the industry’s tendency to produce games antithetical to their trappings, like open-world RPGs often set in post-apocalyptic environments.

Building blocks

The first reason that comes to mind, and I’ve already stressed it a bit, is the importance of schools. As a people, we spend a lot of time in school. We’re talking months out of every year, and basically every year from age five to adulthood. That’s a lot of time spent in school learning valuable skills and less than valuable fun facts, shaping attitudes and worldviews, and picking up good (and maybe even some bad) habits. It’s an important and lengthy chunk of time in the average lifespan, and that makes it exceptional fodder for storytellers.

This feels obvious. Schools bring people of all different walks of life into close proximity with one another. These are the early battlegrounds of our lives, and you’re as likely to walk away with kin as you are to emerge with a foe or two. As a storytelling tool or framing device, schools are fraught with interpersonal drama and tension (like “My friends and I are drifting apart in high school” or “I’m risking being left back if I don’t get my grades together”) that are like narrative gold nuggets and often dovetail quite neatly. Given how much time is spent in schools, and the crucial time in a person’s life occupied by it—hello, puberty—schools also present a neat framework for growth, both in a metaphoric and literal sense.

Perhaps you can already tell, but these kinds of building blocks can make for a kind of shortcut for a compelling game. 1000xResist, a stunning narrative game from 2024, makes great use of high school drama to inform the motivating factors of one of its several protagonists, Iris, who watches the collapse of the world from within the halls of her high school and has the fate of the world foisted on her shoulders at the same time that she is dealing with the woes of being a temperamental and angst-ridden teenager. Titles like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which follows students being trained at a military academy, have crafted whole systems from the elements a school setting provides, like the ability to track growing relationships with character via social links, sidequests that enable the player to progress these bonds, activities that allow players to sharpen stats like studying or undertaking specific coursework, and of course, the kinds of levels and skills that exist in just about every RPG ever made and are rewarded through the completion of quests, combat, and exploration.

Schools are also fun and creative environments inherently linked to play. What school doesn’t have some kind of playground or sports field? And even outside officially designated times, students will find ways to entertain themselves—like the young protagonists of Bully flouting the rules and making their own fun.

And even though school is almost as universal of an experience as humanity has, it’s still also deeply, irrevocably personal. School is often where one finds themselves and their passions, and the experiences had there—not to mention the courses you take within those halls-–are meant to nurture the mind as much as the soul, and prepare one to do any number of things in the world. You’re as likely to come out a scientist as you are a musician or a delinquent.

But even these justifications merely scratch the surface of gaming’s constant forays into the land of desks, lectures, and textbooks and present a lone perspective on my earlier query.

Opening doors

Given the lengthy time one often spends in school, and the great swath of experiences one typically has throughout—a first brush with love, a first encounter with heartbreak, changing friendship dynamics, the pressure of literally growing, and endless embarrassing moments—it’s of little surprise that the idea of school lingers with us for a time to come.

Games set at schools don’t just offer the space for the player and their character to grow. They’re just as much examinations of school as one of the defining structures in our society and the outsized impact it has on our lives. Though 1000xResist follows Iris in the game’s past, and traces the Earth’s collapse, one of the game’s other significant threads follows a post-collapse society of Iris clones organized into a hierarchy that doesn’t feel unlike a school. Long after humanity has been eradicated and an alien race known as the Occupants claim the world for themselves, Iris, who ascends to become a deity-like figure, arranges the remnants of the world… like a school? There’s something to that.

The leader of the enclave is called Principal, and other prominent figures like Knower, Fixer, Healer, and, yes, even Bang Bang Fire fit pretty neatly into archetypes and roles that fit within, you guessed it, a school. But moreover, this base full of Iris clones is divided into classes and each one of them is effectively reared to inherit those very monikers and fit into a designated role, often by the suppression of information and by feeding its students lies.

In other games, like Bloodborne and Detention, schools are transformative sites of disaster. In the former, the College of Byrgenwerth is the crucial site of a schism in a group of academics that eventually leads to the formation of an entirely different school, one that eventually leads to the downfall of Yharnam, Bloodborne’s setting. In Detention, the main characters suffer through the halls of a haunted school against the backdrop of a real world period of political violence and suppression of the Taiwanese people known as the White Terror. In either case, the school and its function is just as transformed, perhaps even warped, as the people who absorb its teachings and carry them into the world, stressing the critical ways in which the world revolves around and even hinges upon the good work of these institutions.

“Would you like to try again?”

Who hasn’t felt the familiar pang of nostalgia as they glimpse at a picture that recalls the familiar scent of a place? Or as they listen to a song that reminds them of a significant day or person. A look through dust-covered boxes littered with the paraphernalia that eventually gives shape to a hazy childhood memory. For many who play and make games, school settings are as potent a window into the past as a flip through an old yearbook.

For many players, a school setting in a video game may appear like a perfect vehicle through which they can wrestle with their own nostalgia. After all, gaming audiences are a particularly wistful bunch, often clamoring for remakes of their favorite games from childhood. And while childhood experiences naturally vary from person to person, games at least offer a unique angle on the trip down memory lane: If you’re going to relive it, why not optimize and make the best of it? Take the chance to do it all over and win at school (and life) in a way that might’ve been impossible when you first lived through it?

I know for me at least that this particular view is an especially appealing one. Playing Persona 5 just a few years after leaving high school hit me like a truck. I can still recall playing it in the dorm of my high school friends, who I was desperately reconnecting with after some time and distance apart, and just pining for the days when we all shared the same hallways and classrooms for days on end. Despite the game’s larger than life conflict, what with all the stealing hearts and eventually killing a god, I most relished getting the chance to be the perfect student and friend.

A game like Persona stresses the idea of perfectly executing a year in the life of a high school teenager—the idea that one can max out all of their characteristics by finely tuning how they approach their relationships, hobbies, studies, and more. It isn’t alone either. The first Life is Strange, a game that seems to explicitly and messily wrestle with nostalgia, features a protagonist who manipulates time to avoid the consequences of the tough choices that come with the nature of being young and dumb during your high school years. Games like it and The Sims, which turn players into God, grant an unrealistic degree of control over things that are often difficult to get a handle on, making them far more domestic, but nonetheless powerful, fantasies in games. They make life look simpler and more attractive than the real deal, and who doesn’t need an escape into a perfect world like that? As someone who’s grown into an adult at seemingly the worst possible time in recent history, I would do just about anything to go back to simpler days, even if it’s through a 100-hour RPG or a 20-hour narrative adventure game.

What’s it all for?

Academics and school play such a huge part in our lives, and you could spend a lifetime unpacking the various ways art has interpreted it—and the ways it’s impacted you as a person. No one school is a monolith, though, and the nature and concept of school changes greatly from culture to culture; I’m highlighting a somewhat random variety of games that feature schools because they feel equally valid in their depictions of it, even if they do run quite the gamut.

If this piece, which I’ve agonized over, feels like the most cursory glance at the relationship that games (and by extension, we as players) have to learning institutions, well, that’s by design. Education isn’t one thing, and learning doesn’t stop the second you leave school. By continually returning to it and reinterpreting this foundational experience, exploring its nuances and our own relationships to it, as well as wrestling with its roles in our lives, we can more fully know ourselves and our place in society—and games can only deepen our understanding of its critical place in the making (and unmaking) of the world.

Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.