Doing Things With Video Games

• Following the ‘media ecology’ mode of looking at games in Bogost’s text (intro), and using the frames and models provided in Doing Things with Videogames, closely analyze a video/digital game, a game series, or set of closely-related games (genre) to explore what the game does, and how it does what it does. You may also speculate (using Bogost’s framework, or your own) on what and how players might be ‘learning’, explicitly or incidentally, through game play – and ‘learning’, here, in the broadest sense of the word, including critical literacy and/or uncritical consumption of dominant norms.

• Consider key lenses from the text like interactive processes, ‘procedural’ mechanics, procedural rhetoric, game ‘ideology’, incidental learning, aesthetics, and formal properties associated with player roles, identities, ranges of action/behaviour, representation and social uses and contexts, etc).

Part of my goals from this course include looking at current games that are used in an educational context to help students with their learning, especially in mathematics. Because many of these games are so terribly designed with respect to student engagement and achievement, I do not want to choose any of these games to explore within Bogost’s frames and models. I think with the evolution of educational gaming, these frames and models can become more intentional and more effective at bridging the gap between what games afford and what learning outcomes are expected. 

What is the player learning? Lankshear and Noble discuss the nature of discourses, which are socially recognized ways of using language (reading, writing, speaking, listening), gestures and other semiotics (images, sounds, graphics, signs, codes), as well as ways of thinking, believing, feeling, valuing, acting/doing and interacting in relation to people and things, such that we can be identified and recognized as being a member of a socially meaningful group, or as playing a socially meaningful role. Video games allow a player to become immersed in a community that agrees to the boundaries of that game. Players learn to adhere to those boundaries (characters, settings, narrative, conflicts), vocabulary (language, symbols, codes), and processes as they grow in their immersion to the discourse. The player learns how to judge themselves to become situated in systems, similar to students’ discernment for immersion into the school system. 

Related to Nolan & McBride’s Rhetorics of Play, players learn how to progress through levelled skill-based challenges from practice to mastery; players, through comparing with other players or a high score, understand hierarchical power inscribed by the game; and players learn about and claim their identity as they attribute value to their performance. Players also learn about the other rhetorics of fate, frivolity, self, and imagination when engaging in commercial gaming; however, a school program that does not embrace these rhetorics within its explicit and hidden curricula is dissonant with what players expect in a game. What can educators and resource developers learn from commercial game designers to allow for these rhetorics to become more explicit? In what ways can Marvel Puzzle Quest and Royal Match’s engaging gameplays be used to foster opportunities for learning?