Serious about the games we play

Thursday, June 12, 2008 -

 Constance Steinkuehler (r) confers with Esra Alagoz
 
 Dani Fahser observes a student
 

Constance Steinkuehler receives phone calls from parents eager to get their adolescent sons into Steinkuehler’s after-school game-playing club.  Boys in this program can go online late afternoons and early evenings during the week to play videogames with Steinkuehler and UW-Madison students.

While many parents, educators, and others continue to vilify videogames as distractions that get in the way of schooling, Steinkuehler, an assistant professor of educational communications and technology in UW-Madison’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, believes that well-designed videogames hold tremendous promise for constructively re-engaging with middle and high school boys who’ve lost interest in school.

Such games, she and other scholars contend, can promote literacy skills and foster learning. And they’ve set out to show how that can work.

The boys in the after-school program “don’t like to read and write and they don’t do much of it,” says Steinkuehler. They’ve generally become disaffiliated with school.

“These boys are really taken by games,” she says. They frequent virtual worlds, where they’ve developed expertise and gained a level of confidence that they lack in school.

Steinkuehler and her team (which includes graduate students Esra Alagoz and Dani Fahser, pictured at the right) want to tap into that affinity with gaming to engage the boys in activities that promote literacy practice, as well as a sense of community.  In addition to online play, the boys come to campus once a month for an afternoon of group activities.

Thus far, Steinkuehler has been encouraged. “Kids who tell you they don’t like to read and write are voluntarily picking up a manual and writing in forums,” she says.

She has been particularly surprised at the levels of collaboration and demonstrated leadership as the boys help each other navigate the game.

In addition to building literacy skills, Steinkuehler says the game-playing experience enables participants to interact with diverse people from different walks of life. The boys also have come to see the university gamers as positive role models and mentors.

Still in its pilot phase, the after-school program serves 14 boys from southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, and enjoys support from the boys’ parents and at least some of their teachers. Steinkuehler hopes to double the program capacity next year.

Studying digital media

Steinkuehler belongs to the Games, Learning and Society (GLS) group, a collection of academic researchers, interactive media developers, and government and industry leaders who study how digital media are changing the ways we think, learn, and interact, and what this means for society. The group has received major funding through the MacArthur Foundation’s digital media and learning initiative.

GLS researchers ultimately aim to create learning systems that use digital media and technologies to help students:

• Understand the complex academic language in areas like science and math.
• Think innovatively and creatively.
• Become “tech-savvy” consumers and producers of knowledge with technology.

In addition to Steinkuehler, the core GLS faculty members in UW-Madison School of Education are:

• Kurt Squire, assistant professor of educational communications and technology in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
• Richard Halverson, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis.
• Erica Halverson, assistant professor of learning sciences in the Department of Educational Psychology.

Even though they study activities that many people do for fun, the GLS researchers approach their investigations as serious scholars who recognize that the impact and potential of these technologies extend far beyond simple leisurely pursuits.

The fast-growing use and increasing sophistication of computers and other digital technologies and the games that exploit these emerging media are profoundly changing society, says Squire, a former Montessori and primary school teacher.

“We try to understand games and how they’re produced,” he says. He explains that the group views “games” in a broad context, as “digitally mediated environments.”

As part of their work, GLS researchers have been scrutinizing the kinds of social practices related to these digital environments, he says. “What does it mean to participate in an online community?”

Advances in digital technology make it possible to create increasingly sophisticated simulations, which allow players to become immersed in diverse roles and to try on new identities, says Squire.  So researchers are analyzing popular role-playing games for insights that can be applied for practical and educational purposes.

Richard Halverson, a former teacher and high school principal, has been using digital technology to create online multimedia case studies that access, document, and communicate the complex, practical wisdom of school leaders.

Halverson and his team have begun to develop a series of school leadership games as professional training tools for aspiring and practicing school leaders. These games allow “players” to walk in the principal’s shoes, run a school, and, through game play, learn the skills and qualities of successful school leaders. The first game focuses on teacher evaluation.

Consumers become producers

Digital technology also enables more individuals — once relegated to the role of media consumers — to become producers and disseminators of knowledge, Squire says.  Young people especially have become prolific digital producers, from content for websites to videos for sites like YouTube.com.

Researchers, he says, are asking, “What does this mean for education?”

Erica Halverson is investigating youth filmmaking, with the aim of documenting and describing spaces where youth engage in producing new media. She has a particular interest in films as a means to grapple with issues of identity and self-presentation.

“I’m really passionate about the relationship between how we come to understand ourselves and our stories,” Halverson says.

The bulk of this project involves documenting the filmmaking processes within four organizations that work with youth to make films as a means to teach media literacy, give them a voice, and explore their creativity. The project also involves analyzing the content of more than 300 youth-produced films.

Halverson’s current work is rooted in her interest in theater, which she studied at Northwestern University.

“What I loved about the theater was the telling of stories,” she says.

She co-founded the Barrel of Monkeys troupe in Chicago to teach creative writing and drama to underserved children.  The troupe uses stories written by the children to construct and perform shows.

That experience spurred Halverson’s curiosity about the underlying educational processes.  To gain a deeper understanding of how children learn, she began studying the design of learning environments.

That piqued her interest in issues of identity and adolescence, how teens understood and were able to communicate stories of their lives.  For her doctoral dissertation, she spent two years examining how the About Face Youth Theatre worked with youth who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or questioning in telling their stories and then adapting those stories into scenes for public performance.

Another strand of research, meanwhile, grew out of personal interest.  A self-described fanatic when it comes to fantasy baseball, Halverson and her husband, Richard, recognized some sophisticated things going on within the game.

“We felt that nobody was looking at that type of gaming,” says Erica Halverson, so the couple took up the study of “competitive fandom,” described as a specialized sort of game play that exists within the social network of a fan community.

The Halversons point out that fantasy baseball and other fantasy sports now attract millions of players, young and old, from diverse educational and social backgrounds.

They documented how fantasy baseball players today use sophisticated online tools to strategize and acquire knowledge about baseball players and teams.  Their examination includes documenting official rules and unofficial practices that structure game play; how players learn game play and develop expertise; and how individual fantasy league communities grow over time.

Serious efforts in game play

Constance Steinkuehler followed her scholarly inquisitiveness into the realm of online gaming communities.  As a graduate student involved in designing online learning environments, Steinkuehler became curious about what was occurring naturally in the world of online game-play.

Few, if any, researchers had looked at how learning environments developed “in the wild,” so she decided to explore this uncharted academic territory.  She discovered a surprising level of serious discussion and problem-solving occurring, especially in the forums associated with but outside of the game itself.

“What’s going on in play spaces was ten years ahead of what we’re doing in education,” she says. “Why do people do so much intellectual work in their play space?”

In her ethnographic examination of massive multiplayer online games, Steinkuehler documented such key literacy practices as collaborative problem solving, science literacy (e.g., hypothesis testing and evidence-based argumentation), and computational literacy. She observed how players developed into leadership roles and the complex ways that gamers mentor one another.

“I’m very intrigued by social interaction,” says Steinkuehler. She began looking at how these virtual worlds are developing into new forms of civic engagement, which she calls “pop cosmopolitanism.”

Even though the games she examined involved players from a wide spectrum of ages, Steinkuehler began to see implications for the education of younger learners, especially adolescents.

She acknowledges extensive concerns — reflected in the research, scholarly literature, and intervention efforts — about getting girls more engaged with technology, but has become more alarmed at what’s happening to boys, especially as they reach middle school age.

“I couldn’t believe how poorly boys were faring in school,” she says. “I think we’re having a real crisis with boys, who seem to be adrift.” She points to the growing numbers being diagnosed with attention-deficit disorders.

“How do you get them re-engaged?”

Steinkuehler’s approach to this problem involves creating opportunities for learning in contexts that engage the boys’ natural inquisitiveness — in the form of the after-school gaming program. 

“In some ways, it’s a very old, Dewey idea,” she says.

In the future, she wants to examine online game spaces popular among younger players, to document what types of learning are taking place.  In her previous studies, she observed adults mentoring younger players, which, she suspects, may be missing in games where adults are absent.

If the quality of play is lacking, she asks, how can we make it better? How do we address legitimate concerns about the interaction of adults and children online without sequestering kids from positive adult role models?

Developing a new field

Connecting the practices and promise of digital technology to what occurs in regular classrooms remains a tall order.

“Currently, there are mismatches between what’s going on in school and what’s happening out of school,” Squire says.

Many educators remain reluctant to embrace the same technology that children use outside of school, which affects how the GLS members approach their work. 

“We tend to start outside of school and slowly work our way in,” Squire says.

Meanwhile, the GLS group has been successful at bringing together a variety of constituents to focus on these issues.  In 2005, the group invited games theorists, educators, government leaders, designers, and researchers to its first Games, Learning and Society conference.

“Our goal was to start a conversation about the potential and importance of games and game culture for contemporary society and learning,” says Steinkuehler.

The conference has become an annual event. With attendance capped at 325, the gathering has sold out every year.

Those who attended the first conference came mostly out of curiosity, according to Squire. Over the years, he has observed the field emerging and maturing, with more and better-developed proposals and increasingly sophisticated discussions.

Because of the fast-changing nature of this area, the GLS group itself strives to remain as flexible and informal as possible.

“I don’t know where we’ll be in five years,” says Squire, except that it will be different than where we are today.

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