AERA Wednesday: Symposium: Video Games and Digital Literacies

Division C-Learning and Instruction

Section 1 - Literacy and Language Arts

Scheduled Time: Wed, Apr 13 - 12:25pm - 1:55pm Building/Room: Hilton
Montreal Bonaventure / Montreal Ballroom, Section Lachine

Scheduled in: Symposium: Video Games and Digital Literacies

Abstract: Digital games have emerged over the past two decades
as a dominant entertainment medium, rivaling, surpassing, and encompassing
other media and functioning as key players in the contemporary media environment
(Gee, 2003; Jenkins, in press; Tobin, 2004). New digital technologies offer
wholly new ways of expressing ideas, demanding new ways of reading and writing.
We are only beginning to understand the dynamics of how games as semiotic spaces,
and how players make meanings in game spaces. But already, it seems clear that
the opportunities games provide for their players to inhabit, participate in,
and importantly co-construct virtual worlds is potentially transformative.
As games become used for political, social, and educational purposes, it is
critical that we unpack how they are constructed to embody and express ideas
and how players interpret them.  This symposium features literacy and
game scholars from a variety of disciplines examining digital games and their
players. These sessions attempt to cover a wide spectrum of media literacy,
encompassing both players and designers in developing models of literacy. Considering
literacy as ways of being (Brandt & Clinton, 2001), these presentations
also offer implicit critiques on school-derived notions of literacy, suggesting
tensions between identities students form outside of school, and those that
are offered to them inside of school.

Educating the Fighter: Seeing, Feeling, Being and Buttonmashing. by
Kurt D. Squire, Daniel Norton

• difficulty of task skill required (Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory)


• Viewtiful Joe"


• 40 hours of gameplay


• textual analysis of structure and functions, notes on gameplay, etc.


• 13 skllls (affordances)


• level 1 introduce skill use


• examination of timescales (Lemke 1996) in games


• Flow paradox: if games are about flow, how do we get players to stop and
  reflect on action?


• active problem solving


• rhythmic learning


• YOU are the super-hero


• failure is amusing, light-hearted.

Tony Hawk Underground: Situated Language in the Context of Socially
Situated Identities by Elisabeth R. Hayes

• what does virtual skateboarding have to do with literacy learning?


• we subordinate the body to the mind


• learning requires acquisition of specialist language


• learning requires tying specialist language to our experiences


• (tell Betty abnout keeping her presentation display to 800x600 resolution)


• language as tool; grammar of action (organized in paradigatic, non-linear
  way)


• draw conclusions on other digitally-based design paradigms

The Literacy of Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming Versus National
Standards by Constance A. Steinkuehler

• marriages in games (how soon before they have births?)


• in-game space but also out-of-game space (fan sites, etc)


• fear of technology vs. uptopian place


• fear of youth culture (Dmitri Williams)


• fear of "what" they are doing, rather than "whether" they
  are doing?


• transfer and models of cognition


• Transfer for some is: what do kids learn in games that transfers to what
  *I* value?

Video Game Designers as Multiliteracy Pedagogues: A Discourse Analysis
of the Designing Process by Alice Robison

• what video game designers can teach us?


• New London Groups" Pedagogy of Multiple Literacies"


• Flower and Hayes (1980 cognitive process-based model of writing"


• weird English: the language happens, the game happens, and then we figure
  out the rules


• give players ways to outsmart me (clever students)


• generate stories between players -- shared experiences, recalled.


• stay on task


• nothing happens in the space without interaction

Learning, Literacy, and Good Video Games by James Paul Gee

• features that constitute a social space in a game (points of Affinity
  Groups) (similar to CoPs))


• Learning in Games (cutting edge features of learning)
  
  
  
  1. produce
  
  
  2. customize
  
  
  3. identity
  
  
  4. interact
  
  
  5. well-ordered problems
  
  
  6. pleasantly frustrating (tease factor)
  
  
  7. challenge and consolidation (cycle of expertise -- who?)
  
  
  8. "On demand" and "just in time"
  
  
  9. Do, not just talk
  
  
  10. system thinking
  
  
  11. encourage risk
  
  
  12. Explore, think laterally, rethink goals
  
  
  
  


• Andy disessa's Changing Minds has all Jims points, but from a
  Science Ed space


• Gameplay is a Rorschach test for your learning style.


• Read Will Wright's writing


• Read Ralph Koster's Theory of Fun (again)