Many prevailing approaches to games-based learning establish authoritarian relationships of power, positioning students as obedient subjects of predetermined meanings. In this session, learn alternative approaches to games-based learning that foreground play as an experiential, appropriative activity and critical media literacy that resists authoritarian modes of knowledge production.
My session pursues three goals: First, it characterizes prevailing approaches to games-based learning as authoritarian, as they frequently position students as obedient subjects of predetermined meanings. Second, I highlight alternative approaches to games-based learning that foreground the teaching of play as a crucial form of media literacy that resists authoritarian modes of communication. And third, I provide educators with takeaway strategies that they may use to shift games-based learning away from authoritarian systems of meaning making and towards the empowerment of students as critical players.
In recent years, video games have scattered and taken root across countless facets of 21st century American life, climbing to prominence as momentous cultural artifacts. It is no wonder, then, that Jenkins et al. (2009) include play among core new media literacies—“cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape” (p. xiii)—that require increased educational attention. Of course, video games are no strangers to educational settings. Video games and education have established particularly close associations, with video games becoming common educational technologies.
In fact, as educators have recognized and sought to harness the powerful learning potentials of video games (Gee, 2007), games-based learning has branched into a number of forms, both digital and analog. These may include the use of commercial games in classrooms; the design of serious games, video games that serve non-entertainment purposes, to impart training and curricular material to students (Cannon-Bowers and Bowers, 2009); the implementation of gamification, which introduces gaming elements to non-game situations (Landers, 2015); and the use of online multiplayer games and virtual worlds as social learning environments (Losh, 2014). Educational research to support these endeavors has exploded within the last two decades, with academic journals, books, and conferences emerging to identify best practices and to produce effective pedagogical approaches.
However, as Selwyn (2014) has observed, “the use of digital games in education has managed to avoid sustained criticism” (p. 96). Studies of games-based learning have tended to frame their subject matter positively and in terms of enhancing effectiveness; consequently, they typically cast failures as the responsibility of designs and designers, rather than as reflecting flaws in the prevailing principles of games-based learning. Thus, although there have been objections to games-based learning, the issues of its implementation remain significantly unexplored.
Among the critiques of games-based learning is the notion that, in order to succeed at a game, players must “surrender themselves to the demands and expectations of that game” (Selwyn, 2014, p. 97). They must act according to what the system’s rules, mechanics, and goals train them to do—in other words, players must obey the game. As such, games-based learning “is entwined with issues of power and control” (Selwyn, 2014, p. 98).
Further problematizing this situation is the fact that dominant ideologies undergird many video games—both commercial and educational—regardless of whether or not developers and educators have intentionally designed those values into their games. For example, the “game elements” that educators frequently employ to gamify their classrooms include points, levels, badges, and leaderboards. The overwhelming recurrence of these mechanics reinforces neoliberal subjectivities of competition between student-players, while reducing education to a quantifiable commodity. Yet, even those theories of game design that seek to intentionally incorporate subversive and critical political values exhibit beliefs that, with the most effective design approach, designers can seamlessly impart their intended meanings to their players. Indeed, research on games-based learning has had a tendency to focus on the most efficient ways of using games or gamified settings to transfer desired information to students and to alter student attitudes.
However, even as they acknowledge the fact that games necessitate activity and foster engagement—which they frequently frame in terms of player agency—these approaches often appear to lose sight of play as the activity in which students are engaged. Literature supporting games-based learning therefore reflects an issue in game studies scholarship more generally: a neglect of play as an appropriative activity. As Sicart (2011) observes, dominant theories in game studies restrict the meanings of games to those that designers intend and determine; they assume that players simply accept those meanings by activating a game’s rule systems. Building on these criticisms, I posit that many current approaches to games-based learning establish authoritarian relationships of power, positioning students as obedient recipients of the instructor-designer’s imposed meanings, values, and ideas.
In his theory of gamified learning, Landers (2015) outlines the proposition that “game characteristics influence changes in behavior/attitudes” (p. 10). It is this notion that pulses at the core of games-based learning. However, if educators agree that games have these influential qualities, then methods of games-based learning carry weighty responsibilities for instructors wishing to implement them in classrooms. Therefore, I wish to prompt a careful interrogation of the goals of games-based learning for those educators wishing to implement game systems in their classrooms. Into what subject positions do educational games and gamified classrooms place students? How can educators and students use games-based learning to challenge authoritarian modes of knowledge production? By posing these questions, I wish to redirect games-based learning towards cultivating students as active, critical players and to emphasize play as critical media literacy.
How, then, can educators teach play? I advance an alternative approach to games-based learning that foregrounds play as an experiential and appropriative activity—an activity that situates players as agentic subjects, empowering them by highlighting their awareness of their abilities to take action and make meaning. Based on my research on player subjectivity (Jennings, 2015; Jennings, 2017), I suggest strategies of games-based learning that build students’ lexicons of play. In this session, I develop these strategies within a concept of playful disobedience: rather than surrendering themselves to the rules of a game, students learn to interpret game systems and their positions as agents within them. Agency in this context becomes, as Voorhees (2014) defines, “the ability to create meaning in a situation not of one’s own making.”
To illustrate this approach and classroom activities to support it, I will share lessons I learned from co-teaching a course that integrated theories of play into the praxis of game design—in short, an attempt to teach play to game design students. Examining the successes and failures of this experimental course, I note trends that emerged. For instance, one of the most valuable tools that we found for teaching play was an activity that my co-instructors and I termed “play show-and-tells.” We assigned students an approximately one-hour presentation on a play experience of their choice, using a format of their choice. The results were conversational sessions that often involved collaborative knowledge construction from both classmates and instructors. In this way, play became a shared, social activity, in which numerous voices from varying subjectivities chimed in to construct rich—and sometimes divergent—perspectives on particular games.
I base my session’s active engagement methodology on this activity: I will invite the audience to participate in a brief play show-and-tell session. At the beginning of the session, I will ask participants to consider play experiences that have been especially meaningful for them. I will then invite them to post anecdotes of their experiences in a shared GoogleDoc and the session’s Twitter hashtag over the course of the presentation. The document will include questions to prompt further self-reflection, such as why those particular experiences were meaningful to the participant. I will reserve time at the end of the session to publicly review the GoogleDoc and the hashtag, and to open the floor for willing participants to share their experiences. By involving the audience in this way, I will enable session participants to experience firsthand that play cannot be treated as an authoritarian imposition of meaning, but must be reconsidered as a literacy that is increasingly crucial for critical thinkers navigating 21st century media landscapes.
References
Cannon-Bowers, J. & Bowers, C. 2009. Preface. In J. Cannon-Bowers & C. Bowers (Eds.), Serious game design and development: Technologies for training and learning, pp. xvii-xxi. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Gee, J. P. 2007. What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Weigel, M. Clinton, K. & Robinson, A. J. 2009. Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jennings, S. C. 2015. Passion as method: Subjectivity in video games criticism. Journal of games criticism 2(1). Retrieved from http://gamescriticism.org/articles/jennings-2-1/.
Jennings, S. C. 2017. Re-casting the magic circle. Presentation at Theorizing the Web, New York, NY. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0xHvrUe1DY.
Landers, R. N. 2015. Developing a theory of gamified learning: Linking serious games and gamification of learning. Simulation and Gaming 45(6), pp. 1-17.
Losh, E. 2014. The war on learning: Gaining ground in the digital university. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Selwyn, N. 2014. Distrusting educational technology. New York, NY: Routledge.
Sicart, M. 2011. Against procedurality. Game Studies 11(3). Retrieved from http://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/sicart_ap?utm_source=tech.mazavr.tk....
Voorhees, G. 2014. Play and possibility in the rhetoric of the war on terror: The structure of agency in Halo 2. Game Studies 14(1). Retrieved from http://gamestudies.org/1401/articles/gvoorhees.