Conceptual Play Spaces

Introduction

It is our belief that video games pedagogies and technologies bear considerable potential for transforming learning even in the context of schools. Though many academics have little first-hand experience with them (Frasca, 2002), two generations of adults have grown up with video games, and a multi-billion dollar industry has developed alongside these players (Herz, 1997; Jones, 2003). Indeed, considering how much time youth spend with video games (Jones, 2003; Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005) coupled with research revealing the richness of the learning interactions and social networks that video games inspire (Gee, 2003; Shaffer, 2006; Squire, 2006), educators should be keen to command such a force. Game play has the potential to immerse the player in a rich network of interactions and unfolding story lines through which she solves problems and reflects on the workings of the design of the game world, and the design of both real and imagined social relationships and identities in the game- and non-game worlds.

According to Gee (2003), video games support a form of empathetic embodiment for a complex system, something that school curriculum should aspire to but has difficulty in achieving. Empathetic embodiment is a process of being immersed (experiencing a sense of “presence”) within a virtual environment through which one comes to develop an understanding of or appreciation for one or more particular aspects (narratively, interactively, perceptually, and/or socially) of the context (Heeter, 1992). This sort of projective identification with an individual, a group, or even a system occurs in games as the player comes to identify with their game character and the larger system within which their character interacts.

Further, video game play and particularly multi-player gaming usually takes place as part of discourse communities that elicit complex cognitive and communicative practices, much the way participation in scientific communities has been shown to produce complex cognitive processes (Squire, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2006).

At one level, curriculum developers and instructional designers can only marvel at the diverse ways these games support complex learning, thinking, and social practices. Multi-player role-playing games (MMOs) afford rich opportunities for achievement, communication, collaboration, fantasy engagement, problem solving, character development, hypothesis generation, and reflexivity, with the potential to enlist membership and identity in ways that occur only in the most advanced curricular designs. However, even if one did want to integrate the technologies and methodologies of video games into K-12 curriculum design, there is little understanding of the principles and tensions regarding how to develop a play space that shares common design features with these kinds of games while falling within societal norms and school-sanctioned behaviors. Doing so is a challenge, but one that we believe is possible, worthwhile, and necessary. In designing games for academic learning, it is easy to create a distinction between play and learning, setting up the game structure so that it is separate from the content to be learned. The goal of this manuscript is to offer a theoretical and design framework that facilitates academically meaningful collaborative play.