Ecology of Games
Editor: Katie Salen, Parsons School of Design
Summary of Volume: Although there has been a considerable amount written on games and young people’s use of them, there has been little work done to establish an overall "ecology" of gaming, game design, and play—in the sense of how all of the various elements, from code to social practices to aesthetics, cohabit and populate the game world. In this volume, we seek to explore the design and behavior of games as systems in which young people participate, as gamers, producers, and learners. Purposefully broad, the volume is intended to complexify a debate around the value of games that has been to date, overly polemic and surprisingly shallow. While many credit game play with fostering new forms of social organization and new ways of thinking and interacting more work needs to be done to situate these forms of learning within a dynamic media ecology that has the participatory nature of gaming at its core. Chapters selected for inclusion collectively address several core themes, reflected in the online public dialogue series, Everywhere Now: Three Dialogues on Kids, Games, and Learning. One theme looks at the kinds of participatory practices games engender for youth, asking in what ways are we seeing youth empowered through their participation in the creation, uptake, and revision of games? A second theme focuses on emergent gaming literacies, or domains of media engagement produced by games and gaming attitudes. Modding and world-building, which form the basis for much of the play of MMOs and virtual worlds, for example, might be one such literacy, while learning how to navigate a complex system of out of game resources, from game guides, FAQs, walkthroughs, and forums, to P2P learning, might represent another. A third theme interrogates pathways and points of entry into gaming. How do games act as points of departure, for example, toward other forms of knowledge, literacy, and social organization? The Ecology of Games aims to bring a complex and informed awareness of the meaning, significance, and practicalities of games in young people’s lives.
Volume Chapter Summaries and Authors:
"Education V. Entertainment: A Cultural History of Learning Games"
Mizuko Ito
This essay draws on ethnographic material from Ito’s dissertation work to consider the cultural politics and recent history of learning games, and to reflect on how this past can inform our current efforts to mobilize games in education. The focus is on describing the systemic and historical contexts in which learning games have been embedded in order to understand sites of conservatism and change. This cultural history illustrates the structural challenges of trying to transform the conditions of childhood learning through the design of new technologies. When working in an area as entrenched as education, it is crucial to consider not only how new technologies offer the promise of change and rupture, but also how they intersect with resilient discourses and social structures.
After first outlining a conceptual framework for analyzing the social and cultural contexts of new technologies, Ito describes three multimedia genres in children’s software: education, entertainment, and authoring. The body of the paper describes how these three genres play out within the production and advertising context, in the design of particular software titles, and at sites of play in the 5thD clubs. She concludes with an analysis of the dynamics that lead to genre hardening in learning games, and consider where there may be opportunities for social and cultural change.
"Game States: Power, Politics, and the Rhetorics of Play"
Ian Bogost
Bogost’s chapter offers an introduction to rhetoric in games. First he looks at the way games and their rules embody cultural values, following the work of Brian Sutton-Smith and looking in particular at a few examples from international sports. Then he discusses the relationship between games and ideology, showing how game play can unpack and expose deeply engrained social, cultural, and political assumptions. Finally he discusses the ways videogames make arguments. Drawing on the history of rhetoric, Bogost introduces a notion he calls _”procedural rhetoric”, the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions.
"Learning and Games"
James Gee
The chapter is essentially about the intersection of game design and good learning as good learning is characterized by contemporary work in the learning sciences. Gee will suggest both that part of what makes even commercial video games good is that they recruit good learning in these terms and that, since games can do this, they open up new avenues for learning content heretofore more associated with schooling or workplaces than with commercial entertainment game play. At the same time, he will stress the need to put learning from games into a wider framework of the sorts of learning (and social) systems that can be built around games.
"Youth Media Literacy vs. Games-based Learning Systems: Reconciling Conflicting Paradigms Within a Youth Development Framework"
Barry Joseph
Joseph’s chapter will be a case study of Global Kids' gaming programs, one funded by Microsoft that worked with teens to develop a casual game about poverty as an obstacle toeducation in Haiti, the second funded by MacArthur in Teen Second Life. It is designed to reflect upon many of the ideas in Gee’s chapter. Joseph describes the challenges of combining two different perspectives on media (media is dangerous; media is empowering) within a youth development model as a vehicle for describing an application of a games-based systems approach.
"In Game, In Room, In World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids’ Lives"
Reed Stevens, Tom Satwicz, Laurie McCarthy
In this chapter the goal is not to provide causal explanations of transfer between video game play and other life activities but rather to provide a set of careful descriptions of how ‘in game’ activity is tangled up with activity ‘in room’ and in the wider worlds of activity that young people inhabit. The chapter argues that ‘in game’, ‘in room’ and ‘in world’ are more permeable and blurred than a separate worlds view would suggest. The research described in this chapter is ethnographic, based on a six month-long study of young people in different families playing video games in their homes using their own games and game systems. Reed/Satwicz/McCarthy video- recorded young people playing video games and interviewed them later when the team had questions that our analyses of the recordings could not answer. In this chapter, they report not only what they found in this study but also some of the challenges faced in the study itself.
"Possibility Spaces: The Design of Learning Environments for the Interactive Age"
Kurt Squire
This paper offers a theoretical model for video game-based learning environments as designed experiences. To be more specific, it suggests how one particular type of video game – open-ended simulation, or “sandbox” games operate and how we might develop learning environments around them. It seeks to link research and theory on how games operate(taking the Civilization series and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as its starting points) and then seeks to build theories of game-based learning environments on them.
"E is for Everyone: The case for game accessibility and inclusive design methods"
Amit Pitaru
Pitaru’s chapter examines the accessibility of today’s games, or rather the lack of. Even common medical conditions such as arthritis, repetitive stress injuries and diminished vision may prevent individuals from playing today’s top software titles, not to speak of the barriers that these titles pose to the blind, deaf and immobile. The clearest and most disheartening manifestation can be found when examining the special-needs sector. There we find children that cannot partake in their most coveted play activities, due to inconsiderate (and therefore inflexible) game design. Pitaru chose this sector to both define the problem and explore its solutions. Written from the perspective of a designer, he first describes the lack-of-play and its residual impact as perceived in a school that caters to over 200 children with special needs. In attempt to create the ‘ultimate-accessible’ game, he demonstrates how games can be designed to be intrinsically accessible while retaining their original playability. Lastly, he shows how normalization-of-play may improve upon the social, educational and therapeutic aspects of the children’s daily lives. Tying this fringe-case with the grander ecology of games, Pitaru discusses how better accessibility may encourage more of us to enjoy games – may we be playing them as gamers, students or patients.
"Game Over: Learning Race in Gaming Space"
Anna Everett and S. Craig Watkins
One of the major aims of this chapter is to illuminate the complex role race plays in the evolving ecology of games. Everett and Watkins are interested in the design of games as well as the game play experience and how each represents particular forms of learning and knowledge. Their work concentrates on the racial stakes in gaming culture and is bifurcated along two lines of inquiry. First, they examine the nascent critical literature that center on race and games, and other discursive frameworks that will help to elucidate their own findings as they pertain tospecific game texts’, racial representations, and narrative appeals. Second, they analyze a few popular game titles, as case studies of sorts, to examine how games such as the Grand Theft Auto franchise, the Electronic Arts (EA) sports game franchises, and the Sims reproduce certain ideas about racial otherness and difference. The chapter will also examine how design and game play challenge accepted notions and expectations of race and difference.
"Participatory Culture: Creativity and Education at the Intersection of Games and the Internet"
Cory Ondrejka
While virtual worlds share common technologies and audiences with games, they possess many unique characteristics. Particularly when compared to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual worlds create very different learning and teaching opportunities through markets, creation, and connections to the real world, and lack of overt game goals. This chapter aims to expose a wide audience to the breadth and depth of learning occurring within Second Life. From in-world classes in the scripting language to mixed-reality conferences about the future of broadcasting, a tremendous variety of both amateurs and experts are leveraging SL as a platform for education. In one sense, this isn't new since every technology is co-opted by communities for communication, but SL is different because every aspect of it was designed to encourage this co-opting, this remixing of the virtual and the real.
"The Success of I Love I Love Bees: Study in Massively Collaborative Puzzle Gaming"
Jane McGonigal
This essay describes the design and successful deployment of a series of massively collaborative game missions in I Love Bees, the alternate reality game. Alternate reality games, or ARGs, are massively multiplayer puzzle adventures that combine online interactive content with real-world game events. McGonigal proposes, "stimulating ambiguity" as the central design philosophy of ARGs. She explores how ambiguous game content stimulates massively- collaborative game play that allows for a greater share of leadership and meaningful participation in large-scale player groups. She also outlines how the open-ended puzzles of ARGs inspire multiple, creative interpretations that allow for diverse problem-solving strategies to flourish in a single player community. The essay is grounded in a close reading of player-produced content: their interpretations of the core puzzle of the I Love Bees game: a series of several hundred GPS coordinates, dates, and times that were listed on the central game website.
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