E-Learning and Digital Media
ISSN 2042-7530

Volume 7 Number 1 2010

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

SPECIAL ISSUE
Game Design Literacy Practices
Guest Editor: ALEX GAMES

Alex Games. Introduction. Game Design Literacy Practices, pages 1‑2 doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.1.1 VIEW FULL TEXT
Ben DeVane, Shree Durga & Kurt Squire. Economists Who Think Like Ecologists: re-framing systems thinking in games for learning, pages 3‑20
Sean C. Duncan. Gamers as Designers: a framework for investigating design in gaming affinity spaces, pages 21‑34
Kylie Peppler, Mark Warschauer & Alicia Diazgranados. Game Critics: exploring the role of critique in game-design literacies, pages 35‑48
Alex Games. Bug or Feature: the role of Gamestar Mechanic’s material dialog on the metacognitive game design strategies of players, pages 49‑66
Elisabeth R. Hayes & James Paul Gee. No Selling the Genie Lamp: a game literacy practice in the Sims, pages 67‑78
Torill Elvira Mortensen. Training, Sharing or Cheating? Gamer Strategies to Get a Digital Upper Hand, pages 79‑89
Caroline Pelletier, Andrew Burn & David Buckingham. Game Design as Textual Poaching: media literacy, creativity and game-making, pages 90‑107
Alice J. Daer. This is How We Do it: a glimpse at Gamelab’s design process, pages 108‑119

BOOK REVIEWS
Cybersounds: essays on virtual music culture (Michael D. Ayers, Ed.), reviewed by Erik Jacobson, pages 120‑122
Telecollaborative Language Learning: a guidebook to moderating intercultural collaboration online (Melinda Dooly, Ed.), reviewed by Caitlin Curran, pages 122‑126 doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.1.120 VIEW FULL TEXT

‘Economists Who Think Like Ecologists’: reframing systems thinking in games for learning

BEN DeVANE, SHREE DURGA & KURT SQUIRE University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.1.3

Over the past several years, educators have been exploring the potential of immersive interactive simulations, or video games for education, finding that games can support the development of disciplinary knowledge, systemic thinking, the production of complex multimodal digital artifacts, and participation in affinity spaces or sites of collective intelligence. Examining verbal interaction data from a game-based after-school program, the authors offer evidence that expert players of learning video games: (a) think relationally and strategically about elements of the game system; (b) draw on their experiences in similar activity domains when approaching systemic problems; (c) consider systemic properties as they are tied to action; and (d) think and act in markedly social ways while engaged in systems-oriented reasoning. Using discourse analysis, the authors examine the talk and game play of two participants to understand how they think about the relationships between elements of the game system. From these exchanges a kind of play emerges which contains the kinds of systemic thinking that educators might hope to find in twenty-first-century classrooms. There was evidence from students’ reasoning that the situated systems thinking in which they engage contains the reasoning and problem-solving strategies for complex economic, political and geographic systems that twenty-first-century classrooms might value.

Gamers as Designers: a framework for investigating design in gaming affinity spaces

SEAN C. DUNCAN School of Education, Health, and Society and Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, Miami University of Ohio, Oxford, USA

doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.1.21

This article addresses recent approaches to uncovering and theorizing the design activities that occur in online gaming affinity spaces. Examples are presented of productive d/Discourse present within online forums around three video game series, video games, or game platforms, and key design practices engaged upon by gamers in these spaces. It is argued that these activities are, in part, consequences of the affordances and constraints of the games under discussion. Repurposing the ‘narratology vs. ludology’ debates, a taxonomy is presented which addresses how designed aspects of the games may shape both narrative and ludic (game-mechanic) forms of design. Finally, the forms of these design activities are contrasted with predominant approaches present within formal learning environments.

Game Critics: exploring the role of critique in game-design literacies

KYLIE PEPPLER Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
MARK WARSCHAUER University of California, Irvine, USA
ALICIA DIAZGRANADOS Los Angeles Unified School District, USA

doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.1.35

Digital games have become a major part of the twenty-first-century learning environment, but little attention has been paid to understanding what young learners already know about games and how this understanding can be used as a bridge to academic literacy. In this study, the authors analyze second-grade students’ efforts at critiquing digital games. Students collectively developed and applied their own standards for evaluating three computer-based games, coming up with criteria similar to those used by professional game designers. Students defended their evaluations using logic and reasoning, thus practicing important thinking and argumentation skills that are often overlooked at the elementary school level. In class discussions of their evaluations, they were exposed to the kinds of specialized language required for the development of academic language proficiency, and, in writing about their critiques, they produced longer and more sophisticated texts than those they wrote for other assignments.

Bug or Feature: the role of Gamestar Mechanic’s material dialog on the metacognitive game design strategies of players

ALEX GAMES Michigan State University, USA

doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.1.49

This article examines the language and literacy practices of middle-school children as they worked toward constructing their own computer games using Gamestar Mechanic, a game intended to teach them key ways of thinking and communicating germane to the discourse of game designers. It examines the changes that took place in what previous work with this game has called their material dialog, a sequence of interactions with components made available by the game to make their own games. Using discourse analysis, it examines participants’ conversation and think-aloud interview data to track the changes in their design and thinking strategies over time. Findings suggest that growing familiarity with the tools and components provided by the game allowed them to develop sophisticated understandings of the grammatical relationships between game elements that helped them develop a systemic perspective of their games. In doing so, this view allowed them to move from seeing game features that deviated from their intended designs as ‘bugs’, to viewing them rather as opportunities to create features that would enrich the play experience for others. Implications of these findings for children’s learning in the academic and work disciplines of the twenty-first century are discussed.

No Selling the Genie Lamp: a game literacy practice in The Sims

ELISABETH R. HAYES & JAMES PAUL GEE Arizona State University, USA

doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.1.67

Drawing on the New Literacy Studies, the authors argue that game literacy takes multiple forms and is embedded in different practices associated with particular games and gaming communities. They examine one specific game literacy practice that involves players of The Sims creating challenges for other players, and they identify how playing and creating these challenges engages players as designers, modders, coach/mentors, teachers, and orchestrators of particular forms of discourse. The forms of writing that the players engage in, both in online game forums and in their stories about their Sims, is a new print literacy practice, as well as an integral part of a specific game literacy practice. The authors’ analysis suggests that the ability to engage in ‘soft modding’ may be a crucial, though undervalued, aspect of game literacy in this context, and also illustrates how game literacies can be integrally tied to and, in turn, transform print literacies.

Training, Sharing or Cheating? Gamer Strategies to Get a Digital Upper Hand

TORILL ELVIRA MORTENSEN Volda College, Norway

doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.1.79

Digital game-players devote a large amount of their time to discovering rules hidden in the code and discoverable through empirical study, experiments, and developing or rediscovering the mathematical formulae governing the code. They do this through their own independent play as they test areas, gear and abilities, through data mining using ‘add-ons’, and through joint efforts outside of the game where they analyse and discuss the results from different gaming situations and create theories on how their game world works. This article shows how gamers are attracted to solving of the code puzzle and share their efforts in sites dedicated to efficient gaming, and also discusses the activity gamers call ‘theory crafting’ – ‘rule mining’ –, in the light of gaming as a learning strategy.

Game Design as Textual Poaching: media literacy, creativity and game-making

CAROLINE PELLETIER, ANDREW BURN & DAVID BUCKINGHAM Institute of Education, University of London, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.1.90

This article addresses practices of textual appropriation in computer games made by young people. By focusing on how young people’s production work makes reference to popular media texts, it examines the basis on which such work claims to be legible as a game text: how it claims to be literate in the context of an after-school game-making club. The analysis builds on studies of ‘identity work’ at play in children’s discussions of popular media, but develops this by looking at practices of media production rather than consumption. To realise this move, the article draw on methods of textual analysis developed for the study of multimodal, interactive texts. The article contributes to debates about the nature of creativity and how this can be taught and learned, particularly with respect to media education. It draws on an account of creativity developed by Vygotsky, in which creativity is described in terms of the transformation of cultural resources using semiotic tools, including concepts. This account allows the positioning moves realised by young people’s game texts in terms of creative literacy practices to be traced, whilst avoiding notions of creativity which are either reductively skill based or unhelpfully celebratory.

This is How We Do It: a glimpse at Gamelab’s design process

ALICE J. DAER Arizona State University, USA

doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.1.108

This article explicates the ways that developers working at an independent game company in New York City organized their development process around a deep concern for how players make meaning from their games. Two designers’ descriptions of their processes are used to illustrate the company’s commitment to developing games that invite participation, discussion, and ongoing iteration. It is argued that Gamelab’s design philosophy is an excellent instantiation of deliberative rhetorical practices and progressive ‘reflection-in-action’ schemas.

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