This presentation advocates for forging community connections in order to teach video game design and gameplay literacies at all educational levels. It is a how-to and a why-to for establishing, expanding, and strengthening communal ties between various educational institutions and organizations, both in-person and online, for connected gaming education.
Connected gaming, explain Kafai and Burke (2016), “sees learning to play and make games as part of a larger gaming ecology in which the traditional roles of game player and game designer are no longer treated as distinct entities but rather as overlapping, mutually informing processes for learning” (p. 5, emphasis added). The subtitle of their eponymous book, Connected Gaming: What Making Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, clearly harkens to Gee’s (2007) pivotal What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy—but with an emphasis on the educational imperative to teach students to make video games, not merely play them. Their constructionist approach is a departure from the dominance of instructionist models of serious games, in which students play games that impart curricular material, academic content, or skills training (Cannon-Bowers and Bowers, 2009). Kafai and Burke craft a more comprehensive stance on serious games that “gives young learners a greater hand in the design and production of video games” (p. 12-13). However, they emphasize that connected gaming represents a shift from individualistic learning to a community of practice that necessitates sharing, collaboration, communal learning, and mutual support.
I draw on Kafai and Burke’s (2016) arguments to advance the position from my previous OLC: Accelerate presentation (Jennings, 2017), in which I critiqued many instructionist approaches to games-based learning—such as serious games and gamification—for establishing authoritarian relations of power. I posited a framework of playful disobedience, in which students learn gameplay as a significant form of media literacy that resists adherence to systemic, rule-bound constraints. Cultivating students’ game creation skillsets, I believe, is a crucial component to this strategy. Doing so can contribute to the refinement of students’ gaming literacies; encourage their tweaking, modifying, or destroying rule sets and systems; and generate expressive, appropriative playstyles in video games by teaching students the fundamentals of how video games work. With its communal outlook, connected gaming empowers educators and students to challenge and dismantle authoritarian knowledge hierarchies.
Building on these theories, the purpose of this presentation is to advocate for the benefits and importance of forging community connections in order to teach video game design and gameplay literacies at all educational levels. It is a how-to and a why-to for establishing, expanding, and strengthening communal ties between various educational institutions, organizations, non-profits, and other groups, both in-person and online, for connected gaming education. Moreover, it outlines persistent institutional barriers—especially in higher education—to forming these connections. I provide suggestions for overcoming these barriers, arriving at a call to change the institutional cultures of the academy in favor of greater community and public engagement.
The presentation is largely motivated by and organized around the experiences I have had during the past year while working with a local, diversity-oriented non-profit organization that operates according to the conviction that everyone can create video games. As such, I retell numerous anecdotes to describe the successes, failures, and lessons learned as an academic working together with and as a part of a local community organization. Through these stories, I emphasize why I believe it is vital and invaluable for educators and educational institutions to seek out and nurture such relationships. In this presentation, I will share how to do so. Although my position in higher education drives this presentation, its takeaways are also open to and appropriate for administrators, instructional support, K-12 educators, students, and so on.
But first—why even pursue a model of connected gaming education that foregrounds and relies on community connections and collaborations outside of the academy? The reasons are plentiful and profound, including the significance of community connectedness as valuable in and of itself. Community connections for gaming education support collaborative opportunities for a range of participants, including: university faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, industry professionals, local independent game developers, K-12 teachers and students, parents, after-school programs, community members and leaders, as well as administrators and staff. In settings such as on-campus or online game jams—in which participants have a designated amount of time in which to create a playable game—all of these actors may come together and collaborate at once, learning from and sharing with one another. These and other game creation-based activities facilitate the sharing of skills, knowledges, and resources across organizations, fields, and generations. They can also compensate for restrictions that individuals and institutions may face in their access to game-creation and game-playing capabilities.
In a similar vein, connected-gaming-through-connected-communities can reach underrepresented and underserved communities, providing opportunities for gaming education that may not otherwise be readily available. These community alliances can directly pursue social justice goals in ways that can be more inclusively and flexibly achieved within community initiatives, rather than by universities alone. I use an example in which a university hosted an event for an organization that addresses the educational needs of youth of color; middle school students came to the campus for instruction in areas of engineering, math, and game design. For the game design workshop, I bridged my roles as academic and community organizer, joining fellow members of the local gaming non-profit to lead a tutorial on game design, using a free game development software. Together, we were able to intervene in a critical area of social justice concern: the marginalization of youth of color in gaming.
For scholars, these collaborations are also essential opportunities to take research outside of the academy, to engage with the public in local and online spaces. In recent years, there have been growing calls for academics to make their scholarship more publicly accessible, relevant, and actionable outside of higher education institutions. Community collaborations are avenues for increased engagement: they are opportunities to directly shape game design praxis with theory, to expand gaming literacies, as well as to openly share knowledges and research results with various publics. However, despite the escalating urgency in demands for more public engagement, universities still have few ways of rewarding sustained public engagement (Perry, 2014). Community outreach is still not consistently and broadly valued in hiring and tenure decisions. Indeed, the lack of incentive, reward, and recognition for community engagement is one of many hindrances facing academics that may wish to embrace these strategies for community-connected gaming education.
I address these and other barriers facing a connected community approach to teaching video games, such as institutional bureaucracies and red tape; skepticism and reluctance from institutional entities to work with non-university organizations and community members; hesitancy to share expensive resources; educator overwork; and the potential difficulties of identifying possible collaborators. In light of these obstacles—which exist simultaneously with the need to disseminate research and skillsets outside of higher education—I urge for changes in universities that will support community ties and allow them to flourish.
Finally, I will address the prospects for community connections at-a-distance. Although I am currently involved with an organization that is local to me, I will be moving to a different state in the time between this submission and the Accelerate conference. Despite my move, I will continue to work with the non-profit from afar, endeavoring to forge connections between it and my new locality. By the time of the conference, I will undoubtedly have new stories to tell about the successes and failures of these efforts.
Rather than a conventional question-and-answer period at the end of the session, I will instead allot time for open discussion between the presentation’s segments. With this active engagement methodology, I will invite attendees to pose questions, express concerns, or share their own ideas and experiences. I will also prompt discussion over the session’s Twitter hashtag, and will check and periodically engage with this backchannel conversation. The informal structure will allow for interactivity, flexibility of content, and increased inclusion of online participants.
As a final summary and takeaway: Even if you don’t know how to make or play videogames, you can still act as a community organizer to expand gaming literacies—and doing so gives you the opportunity to learn more about video games, too.
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: St. Martin’s Press.
Jennings, S. C. 2017. Playful disobedience: Anti-authoritarian literacies and strategies for games-based learning. Presentation at OLC: Accelerate, Orlando, FL.
Kafai, Y. B. & Q. Burke. 2016. Connected gaming: What making video games can teach us about learning and literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Perry, D. M. 2014. ‘But does it count?’ We have a problem with how we define and value the many ways in which faculty members engage with the public. The chronicle of higher education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/But-Does-It-Count-/147199.