What Videogame Making Can Teach Us About Literacy & Learning: Alternative Pathways into Participatory Culture — Kylie Peppler & Yasmin Kafai

new effort concentrating on creating games and what is learned when creating them
divided between modding and making

situate making games for learning within the current debates on the participatory culture (Jenkins et. al., 2006)
- viewing, playing, and producing content are all instrumental to the new participatory culture

challenges:
1. participation gap
2. transparency problem
3. ethics challenge
use these challenges as a framework to view the video games that youth are already producing at the Computer Clubhouse

The Game Design Studio
- storefront location
- Computer Clubhouse
- participants, 10-14 years old, minorities
- available resources
- activities
- theory of constructionism; learning is best done through design activities

media art archive - quantitative analyses
participant observations/case study analysis

Scratch users in their survey
- 40% male, 29% female, 9% group designers (22% unknown)
- more than 10,000 documents stored on server
- 643 Scratch projects over 2 years

top 5 most popular software programs used by these kids
1. scratch
2. microsoft word
3. bryce5
4. kai's supergoo
5. movies/animations

what kinds of things are kids creating with scratch?
a wide variety of things

case study: jorge
15-year old, Latino male from Mexico
excited about Egyptian art and the pyramids
original member of group but attendance sporadic until scratch was introduced
good in school
oldest of five kids
works independently and is described as a "loner"

events:
1. first introduction: Mortal Kombat Chess (January 2005)
2. second project: Metal Slug (January 2006)
maintained some design conventions (key strokes, startup screens, avatars, smooth animation, but also reformulated the genre - noise is absent, music, no antagonists, and no violence; zen-like qualities instead)
3. elaboration: metal slug hell zone X (June 2006)

participation shift in the 3 challenges that gaming addresses
1. participation by English Language Learners, girls, urban youth of color, etc.
2. transparency - what are youth learning about? jorge wrestles with elements of recreating and programming something akin to a professional video game
3. ethics - are youth dealing with issues of copyright? emphasis on repurposing but also on personalizing

what can video game making tell us about learning and literacy?
- rich context for learning programming, arts, and media literacy
- context for learning how to collaborate with others
- context for becoming a member of an affinity group
- context for developing sustained engagement
healthy counterpoint to the culture of consumption

gls2007

Online Gamers & the Development of 21st Century Skills — Lisa Galarneau (digital anthropologist)

has moments where she realizes we're actually living in the future
interest is in spontaneous communities of learning
- ongoing ethnographic research in City of Heroes/City of Villains
- fieldwork in New Zealand, Europe, Asia, and the US
- survey of almost 10,000 games regarding social dynamics, knowledge sharing, skills development, etc. (advertised on the launch page of the game)

the future seldom looks like we expect it to, is often imagined within existing paradigms
favorite example is large, spacious, impressive, grand airports with nowhere to plug in your laptop
we're building our new classrooms on the same paradigms
hints about the future often come from surprising corners
look in pop culture, subculture, early adoption

OECD Five Key Competencies for Life and Learning
- managing self
- relating to others
- thinking
- participating and contributing
- using language symbols and text

how we shift from a content-orientation of learning to this

21st century skills
- emotional intelligence
- soft skills
- enterprise skills
- etc.

her interest is in how do people learn these skills spontaneously
play is to the 21st century what steam was to the 20th century
games have always been primarily social
when it wasn't, it was a technical limitation

characteristics of online games/virtual worlds (MUDs, Moos, MUSHes, MMORPGs, MMOGs, MMOs, MMIs, social worlds like Second Life and There, synthetic worlds and metaverses)
- persistence (the world exists whether you are there or not)
- freedom/open-ended
- characters/avatars
- giulds/clans/teams
- cooperative and competitive play
- economies/virtual property (sometimes)

complex social systems
robust economies

survey of 10,000 online gamers
- hardcore female players play more hours - 52% have 11 or more characters
- female players more likely to leverage social networks for knowledge sharing
- male players more likely to approach strangers for help

- older players more likely to help other players
- age was a perfect bell curve
- younger players more likely to play solo, grief
- some older players use game to relieve grief, fill time during retirement/disability
- some younger players use game to develop social skills

who the heck are these people?
open box question so she got everything from adult porn star to CEO
all different socio-economic levels

Christopher Dede's critical skills
- thrive on chaos
- comfort with diversity
- manage information

Project New Media Literacy (MIT)
- play
- performance
- etc.

mashed up: thriving on chaos, managing self, relating to others, language, symbols, text, multi-tasking, negotiation, networking, distributed cognition, performance, play, collective intelligence, etc. (City of Heroes raid as example of working together, reading data on screen, etc.)

comfort with diversity, participatory/contributing, performance, negotiation, networking, etc. (City of Heroes example of player who didn't speak English)

managing information, thinking, participating/contributing, using language, symbols, etc. (World of Warcraft as example)

player perceptions of improvements to real life skills:
- patience/helpful attitude
- communication/social skills
- teamwork/cooperation
- sense of humor
- dealing with conflict
- self-control
- etc.

quote from a guy who thought he was a good communicator until 54 people in a guild ignored him for bad behavior so he took some classes to improve his communication

how might online games do for learning?
- will online games/virtual worlds will become mainstream activities and they're something we just do for personal enrichment and development
- will our school systems better acknowledge work done in these spaces?

slides will be at http://www.socialstudygames.com/
---

Science Literacy in Virtual Worlds — Constance Steinkuehler

MacArthur grant to study World of Warcraft (50%+ of the market so a huge influence)
2+ year ethnographic study on Lineage I and II
- distributed cognition
- collaborative problem-solving
- literacy practices
- computational literacy
- meaning & values
- scientific reasoning
- etc.

for the last year, looking at 5 core literacy practices - pop cosmopolitanism
- collaborative problem-solving
digital literacy practices
- scientific habits of mind
- computational literacy artifacts
- mechanisms for learning

science - "an accumulation of facts is no more science than a heap of stones is a house," Poincare, 1905
not just accumulation of knowledge, but also processes

AAAS standards for scientific habits of mind as inspiration for their project
502 benchmarks, which were the foundation for national science standards and in turn state science standards

were people doing some forms of scientific reasoning in MMOs?
started with the forums to document this kind of work
the days of plausability for what games could, would, might do are waning, so carefully documenting what and how they are learning now

pulled out 1 of 21 forums for WoW for their full investigation
lots and lots of text devoted to games and fandom communities
analyzed roughly 2000 posts over 85 threads

analytic framework drawn from AAAS standards and then supplemented
- scientific discursive practices (argument and debate around a science literacy)
- model-based reasoning
- tacit epistemology (what kind of stance were they taking towards knowledge?)

from data (focused on proportions):
- is the talk productive? 86% of the discussion on game-related forums is "social knowledge construction" (question, answer, discussion, alternative proposed, debate, resolution - basically problem-solving; she doesn't get that high a number in her classes)
- scientific discursive practices; of the 86%:
- 37% build on others' ideas
- 37% use of counterarguments (debating ideas)
- 28% using data/evidence to support their claims
- 12% alternative explanations of data
- 7% reference outside resources
- model-based reasoning was 10%, half of which are evaluating their models, regardless of how predictive they are
- mathematical computation; mathematize their data to compute numbers for understanding (4%)

showed prototypical post doing all of these things
social knowledge construction --> model-based reasoning --> references outside resources --> model testing/prediction
- amazing mathematical model to support his theory

tacit epistemologies (27% was not codable)
- evaluative = 65% ("I see your point, but I wonder if...," debate is a good thing to develop better theories)
- absolutist = 30% ("whose mom believes that...," there is a truth)
- relativist = 5% ("it's all just opinion anyway," equally fine)

compare to Kuhn's work (1991)
- absolutist = 50%
- relativist = 35%
- evaluative = 15%

chicken-egg problem - were these gamers already disposed towards evaluative or do games move you in this direction (probably somewhere in between)

....compared to schools?
1 in 5 Americans is scientifically literate (Miller, 2004)

standard inquiry activities engender epistemological beliefs contrary to science (Chinn & Malhotra, 2002)
- eg, run the experiment over and over until you get the teacher's answer, which isn't actually science

games as gateway drug
starting to set up small after-school groups
putting pop culture as a drug into scientific reasoning
---

Cultural Capital & Community Development in the Pursuit of Dragon Slaying — David White

presence, embodiment, "emotional bandwidth", informal learning spaces as interests
saw World of Warcraft and noticed many of these things
can't run his university classes in WoW, so trying to take out what's good and use it
showed a 2-minute video of community in WoW

network vs. community
- engage with a network
- structured?
- utilitarian?
- intitutional?
- social?
- egalitarian?
- belong to a community
- trust?
- kudos?
- responsibility?
--> need community to learn

Lobotomy Guild
- practical (collaborative)
- social

cultural capital: forms of knowledge; skill; education; any advantages a person has which give them a higher status in society

social capital: resources based on group membership, relationships, etc.

WoW is great for allowing the exchange of capital
could *see* that capital, explicit capital

Wenger: Communities of Practice
negotiation of meaning
- joint enterprise
- mutual engagement
- shared repertoire

guilds are a community of practice

nexus of multimembership
we are all members of multiple communities of practice

showed a video about "organization" and "social" in WoW

ecology of tools/services (Wenger: Communities of Practice)
community location for player was not just within WoW but also a Yahoo group, Facebook group, and more
social attachment to community goes beyond the game itself

Rhizome model (ginger model) - tendrils in different directions and at different levels but can swell at the right moment
- as opposed to scaffolds
how does this relate to elearning and taking out of WoW what's good?
how much structure should we put in place? especially if you don't want to kill community?

can't do his classes in WoW, so he is trying to implement these things in Second Life
10 musings on the encouragement of communities in MUVEs - google: dave 10 musings and you'll find his blog post

thoughts:
3 P's (important for elearning?):
- presence
- persistence
- peers

community
- seed?
- population
- joint enterprise
- mutual engagement
- shared repertoire

institution as rhizome facilitator
- students show up at a course and there is a lot of scaffolding to get them started; they proceed to spend the semester dismantling it
interweaving socialising and learning. the structured and the free (breadth of activity)
- we're not so good at providing places where people can socialize online in the distance elearning experience
---

Doug Thomas, respondent

"learning immersion"
learning about a lot of stuff allows you to emerge into a profession and become something (learn how to be that once you're in it)
in game environments, there's an inversion taking place
how many people read the manual for a web browser? you don't. you learn by doing and you go look it up when you get stuck
you learn by being a web surfer, so you learn by doing/being

have to be careful that we're not talking about transition competencies
when you read the new competencies, they're not based on individual achievement, which is what our education system *is* based on
what if one of the competencies of the 21st century is who to cheat off of?
what if we think of knowledge as continuously in-flux? value transparency and process?
becoming an increasingly large part of society to manage who is tracking you

when we stop learning in a game, we either quit and go to a new game or we start trying to create a new game within the game
- that's kind of what forums are about
what is it about science and gaming that connect?
isomorphism? that gamers are in some ways transgressive in the same ways that science is
neither cares about the status quo
clue in to something organic
drug of learning - as Jim Gee noted, that's what we're addicted to

classrooms are all about preserving the status quo

the big sword in WoW allows you to do certain things but also allows you to open up opportunities for the whole group
radical interdependency
now the guild can do things it couldn't before because you have that sword
competence replaces expertise
what does that mean for the structure of knowledge and learning
what does it mean that everyone has to do their job rather than excel at knowing?

fundamental way knowledge is changing
traditionally taught as something commodified
what games teach you is that this is never the case
knowledge is not a "what" but a when, where, and how

gls2007

Fantasy Baseball: The Case for Competitive Fandom— Erica Halverson & Rich Halverson

talked about how players used to have to wait for the Thursday issue of USA Today and then transcribe and add up the statistics themselves
showed how his son learned how sample size affects statistics and decisions based on them

competitive fandom = fan culture + competitive gaming
fan culture as discussed by Jenkins, Ito, etc.
- two planes of interaction - primary activity and fan activity (fictional like Star Wars or Harry Potter or real like baseball)
- participation - from consumptive to productive
- transmedia participation - from simple to complex (reading Kurt Schilling's blog, reading books, etc.)

then have the competitive gaming side
- artificiality - games are separate from the real world
- knowledge of rule systems that define the game space
- pursuing new strategies and tactics to achieve quantifiable outcomes (win-states)

fantasy baseball is the prototypical instance of competitive gaming across different types of content

fantasy baseball originated in board game play
then moved to using Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets
now Yahoo and other sites run leagues

NY Times, June 3, 2007 - playing fantasy baseball moves you "one step closer to becoming a postmodern baseball fan"

research process:
- interviews
- surveys
- observations

competitive fandom matrix
two dimensions: competitive gaming and fan culture

showed a couple of use cases, differing perspectives and levels of fandom, loyalties

some players strategize which players they will use

3 activities:
- fantasy activity (feeds into fan activity; does it feed into the primary activity? the WIIP statistic is now displayed at Fenway Park)
- fan activity (feeds into fantasy activity)
- primary activity (feeds the fan activity and the fantasy activity)

this is one path to complex content
not all fantasy games reach the level of competitive fandom within the matrix (eg, Fantasy Congress)
---
Fans, Learning, and Literacy — Rebecca Black

fandom & identity are significant in kids' lives
rather than just reading about their favorite stars, though, and just being consumers, are engaging in participatory culture and active participation
- low barriers to expression and civic engagement
- strong support for creating and sharing
- informal mentorship
- contributions are meaningful
- affiliation and social connection
(Jenkins and MIT team paper)
used Blizzard and World of Warcraft as an example

http://fanfiction.net
298,724 fan fiction stories about Harry Potter, written primarily by kids, often those learning English or struggling to write
she used to have to beg her students to write fiction
fanfiction site:
- writing, reading, peer-review
- peer-mentoring
- many options for participation
- collaborative writing
- meta-talk about practices (how to effectively do a search for your fan fiction)
- language and technology for authentic purposes
- meaningful contributions
(motivated while developing new skills)
has more than one million stories about books, music, movies, wrestling, comics, web games, video games, and more
showed an example that incorporates genre, vocabulary, pragmatic, and syntactic learning, with more than 6,000 reviews of the person's work (English as Second Language writer trying to improve her writing)
has written here for 3 years
early writing:
- stories related to popularity, peer pressure, first love, academics
- concerts, sleepovers, parties, classrooms as settings
- trying to integrate herself into anime, fanfiction, culture
- written in English; identified self as English learner as a way to ward off harsh criticism
- novice technology user
later writing (3 years later):
- history, family structures, arranged marriage, war as topics/themes
- China, Japan, historical settings
- Asian youth culture
- written in Mandarin, Japanese, and English; identified herself as an author
- savvy-technology user

she broadened her knowledge through sharing and talking with others on the fanfiction site
there is a lot of sharing of knowledge on the site
genre-specific language

"adaequatio intellectus nostri cum re" example - some call Latin a dead language; used to be the universal language, but no longer true; point - some academic concepts and ideas might be better presented in other formats (not just print-based literacy)
"conformity of our minds to the fact"
---
How Wikipedia Is Like a Multiplayer Game — Elonka Dunin
game developer, author, and cryptologist

is a top-200 contributor on Wikipedia (32,000 edits)
created/expanded -250 articles
doesn't actual edit articles about games because it goes agains the culture of Wikipedia
site is often what people are checking for "up t other minute" news
750,000 visits to the VA Tech article within 48 hours
mentioned the Chris Benoit case (wrestler)

showed a lot of statistics about Wikipedia
sees the Wikipedia community (which is still very young) making some of the same mistakes made by young MMORPG communities

article decisions are made by consensus, not by an authority figure

Wikipedia as MMORPG
- players = editors
- rooms = articles
- gamemasters = administrators
- experience points = edits
- awards = barnstars
- guilds = WikiProjects
- griefers = vandals
- combat = vandal-fighting, POV warriors
- pubs = talk pages
- newbie-killing = WP:BITE
- stats = edit distribution
have high score lists
highest goal you can achieve is to get a "Featured Article"
have professions/classes
- inclusionists
- delusionists
- vandal-fighters
- etc.

bad guys
- trolls
- POV warriors
- vandals
- sockpuppets
- edit warriors (3RR)
- WP:OWNers
vandals - like a game of whack-a-mole
quests - promoting articles, getting featured articles, finding free-use images

gls2007

(More from the 2007 Games, Society, and Learning Conference)

Using Videogames as a Strategy for Teaching Complex Concepts — Robert Brown

showed a trailer for their Econ201 game - pretty cool because it's all narrative
a college credit course about "principles of microeconomics"
a complete replacement for the undergraduate economics course or can be taken in conjunction with the lecture
the game runs 24/7, students can play it anytime, anywhere
students can play the game for the semester rather than attend the course

multiple levels of quests
all of the assessments are done within the game itself
can see how many of your classmates are engaged in the game at the same time you are
tools in the game - calculators, etc.
in-chat game
you have a "bot" in the game that can access the "earth archives"

the only assumption designers make is that the student can use a mouse
move students through the storyline and into economic problems
spaceship crashes on future earth with no humans
first problem is have injured crew who are sick and need medicine
ethical dilemma - who do you save?
must apply principles immediately

had faculty support across the board (!)

multiple scenarios (find food & water - vegetarian or hunt rabbits?)
must decide which resources they are acquiring so that they can go up the mountain to search for other survivors

students across the board need to take this course because it has a broad base of majors (broad range of ages, too)

there are a few places where all they can do is push "next" but still figuring out how to deliver basic content students need
- hoping to work on these pieces
show students how to graph

"in quest quizzes"
final quiz is gameplay
professor always knows where the student is in the game throughout the semester, can always check current assessment
have narrative scenes at various points that lead into new quests or scenarios

when shooting rabbits, teaching the law of diminishing returns
does offer some actual gameplay (showed shooting targets)
they plot results on a graph (see the point where weapons can't shoot any faster so just can't do anything more)
should you now pursue berries instead?

students learn that technology affects production
storing all of the results on the server
at the end there's a dream sequence of the main character that is a mini-quiz ("gepardy")
immediate feedback if they got the question right or wrong
get a final score after the final quiz - can only take it once
can re-take other quizzes until they pass

"mockumentaries" within the game - showed a funny, fake video from the "earth archives" that was a take-off on Martha Stewart

have run the game for 3 semesters, run 300 students through it
seeing that they do as well, if not slightly better, than the lecture course
only one section of the online course, versus multiple sections of the lecture

using multiple choice for assessment because easier to program and assess
---
Serious Games by Serious Instructional Designers — Jaime Henderson & Valerie Hainley
from imedia.it in Houston

company has moved to more game-style learning
"serious games" - games used for training, simulation, or education
for them, especially for the military, it's all web-based so you don't have to install anything
run on PC or video game consoles
- rules guide the learner (content becomes the rules)
- positive outcomes (desired goal)
- negative outcomes (failure to accomplish goal)
it's difficult for instructional designers to create something that makes people fail but it's not fun if you're always succeeding

elements of good serious games
- story
- goal
- challenge
- meaningful action
- appropriate feedback

"Tactical Questioning" game for the Army
you are a soldier deployed to the Middle East
your goal is to apply tactical questioning techniques while conducting operations
the challenge is to ask questions to gather critical information
meaningful actions are life-like tasks
feedback is through menus, mood meter, AAR
previous training was via Powerpoint slides, getting poked when they fell asleep

worked with a Flash developer in the Army who had been in Iraq, was just back one year so still fresh in his mind and he could help shape the scenarios
weren't advanced enough to use artificial intelligence, so just used list of questions

designing serious games
- understand video/computer games
- change thinking about instruction
- align instructional strategy with engagement strategy
- design for learning experiences
- design for failure
- adapt design practices

showed how definitions of instruction are very similar to those for games (achieving goals)

change thinking about instruction:
- move away from basic presentation of facts, including in the minds of the client
- move toward more immersive environments
- learning in context

balance between instructional strategy (the method used to achieve learning objective - how best to sequence, organize, and deliver the material) and engagement strategy (the method used to hold the learner's attention)

really trying to design for learning experiences
design for failure
- give players multiple paths
- provide consequences, both positive and negative
- allow player to make wrong choices (show what happens if they don't do their job)

sometimes the soldiers do it wrong intentionally because they want to see something blow up

learned how important it is to work together with the production team and programmers because otherwise it won't work
---
Educational Game Design: Confidential — Meagan Rothschild & Javier Elizondo

JUMP project

most of the people that got the grant to create the game were gone by the time they started work on it

basic rules:
- a mobile technology device
- that supports content area vocabulary learning
- targets 4th grade struggling readers (they can read but don't understand what they're reading)
- and can be used in a SES setting

started out with PDAs as deployment target but realized they were too expensive and didn't have any life in the backpack of a 4th grader
PDA manufacturers didn't care either, because moving into phones
so did first version in Flash

the quest: make a game v2, also titled "get a partner"
got a foundation with game designers, writers, etc. but it took 8 months to write a contract

the quest: design the game
clash of cultures
Prel - no games, no shorts, no beer, no staying past midnight
Aloha Island - games, shorts, beer, staying past midnight
design as a moving target
educators - love it, cause "we're reflective" and it's "a process" (a cycle)
designers - accept it cause "it can always be better"
producers - HATE IT because they are responsible for the timeline, deadlines, and the end date

documentation:
the old way - writing to multiple role groups (educators, designers, artists, programmers, etc.)
- scope and sequence, etc. but nobody read it
the new way - "concise and practical plan for building the game"
- gdd, tdd, and some other letters (game design document, technical design document)
when you merge the old way with the new way, though, they ended up with the really big "book of stupid" - 150 pages for the core game design book, and that's just one piece
everything started collapsing and became sma syndrome (save my ass)

the level boss: evaluation
need to ask "why do you need that?" a lot
lots of redundancy in the game
make them work for you

the game boss: education
the real boss: the department of education
---
Games & Schools — A Marriage Made in Heaven or Hell? — Angela McFarlane

FutureLab is a loose partnership of universities
http://www.futurelab.org.uk/

teaching with games: games in formal education
Electronic Arts-funded
few systematic studies of COTS games in the classroom
EA interested in the "path in the snow" (new market in education?)

MORI poll of teachers asking about use of games
- 31% of teachers have used COTS games in their teaching (probed this and found it was accurate, not mistaking other things for COTS)
- 59% would consider using them in the future
- players learn "higher-order thinking skills" (63%) and specific content knowledge (62%)
- similar proportion think games teach stereotypical views (62%) and anti-social behaviour (71%) (can use these as a jumping off point to challenge students; teachers found The Sims particularly good for discussing bullying and social behaviours)
- nearly half (49%) lack access to appropriate equipment
- *lack of evidence and examples* cited as barriers

used The Sims 2, Knights of Honor, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3
standard secondary schools in the U.K.
the sheer practicality of getting kids in front of PC games is a huge challenge (hardware, resources, etc.)

practical findings
- schools aren't homes or offices
- implications for licensing and distribution; doing it legally is difficult
cultural findings
- (perceived) curricular limitations; have to invest hours and hours of time in a game to discover if you can use it, as opposed to flipping through a book
- gaming literacy
- teachers
- setting work around a game requires in-depth knowledge of the game
- teachers found this part the hardest
- students
- not everyone under 25 plays games
- those that do don't play every game
- huge variation in useful game literacy; they don't all play well, and they think they're better than they are; can sit for hours playing a game and not learn anything
- teachers recognized students' skill
- students used to build resources, design levels, tutor peers... (need good social learning skills for that to work, though)
- problem is, teachers might be wrong
curricular limitations
- national curriculum
- perceived limitation (actually, not such a problem)
- competency curriculum

what does a teacher have to know?
- not enough just to know the game
- not enough just to give students credit for knowing the game (or take their word for it)
the teachers who were good teachers did best; it wasn't just "being a gamer"
they had to trust the kids

learning socially through mobile gaming?
partnership with soda
Newtoon
experiment in social gaming
- web-based Java application where you can build puzzles that behave according to the rules of mechanics
you can then pin them to your friends' mobile phones and they can try to solve them

research themes
- games authoring
- collaborative practice
- using mobile phones for learning
- changes in KS3 Science curriculum: how science works

will kids learn physics?
will it be the kids who wouldn't already have been prone to learning physics?
are we really going to see more kids learning Newtonian physics after this?
will they be able to use any of that understanding when they go into a different context?
don't know yet

a "play-create-edit experience"
learning is a process of creation, not consumption
as educators, should be giving people good tools to learn how to think and to create

gls2007