In Chapter 3, I established a definition for games literacy and, more specifically, what it means to understand games. However, I haven't established what the challenges are in achieving a deeper understanding of games. In this chapter I will explore two of the questions I posed earlier: (Q1) What are the challenges of learning about games?, and: (Q2) How can we characterize a naïve understanding of games? By looking at the difficulties involved in learning about games, we can gain insight into some of the needs of novice students and into how the medium of the videogame affects its study.

Methods and Data Analysis

In order to explore the challenges of learning and teaching game studies, I performed in-depth interviews with professors and instructors who teach game studies courses. In this study, I used qualitative methods to explore the diverse ways in which game studies courses are taught at the university undergraduate and graduate levels.

I take an inductive approach based on general research questions informed by game studies literature as well as some initial hypotheses. In addition to asking for details about the courses instructors teach and the challenges faced by students, my interview protocol includes open-ended questions about what changes they would make to courses, what they expect students to get out of the courses they've taught, what skills and knowledge students are expected to have to be successful in the class, and what role their prior experience with games plays in their success in the class. Instructors with extensive teaching experience are invited to comment on their experiences in general, as well as refer to specific courses they have taught recently. Interviews are semi-structured to ensure that all participants are asked certain questions yet still allow participants to raise other issues they feel are relevant to the research. The protocol includes questions such as these:

” Tell me about the assignments and class activities you had the students engage in.

” What do students have the most difficulty accomplishing?

” What can you say about the role of students' prior knowledge of games in the context of your class?

As recommended for qualitative research (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), I employ theoretical sampling in which cases are chosen based on theoretical (developed a priori) categories to provide polar types, rather than for statistical generalizability to a larger population (see Table 3) (Eisenhardt, 1989). I looked to interview instructors and professors from a variety of institutions of higher learning and who had some degree of experience with research in game studies. I also sought diversity in teaching experience, from those who had taught a game studies course only once to those who had taught multiple courses. Other categories covered the types and sizes of courses taught, ranging from large introductory undergraduate lecture-style courses to small advanced graduate discussion-based seminars.

Additionally, I made no attempt to provide definitions of what a "game studies course" was. When asked "Tell me about one or more game studies courses you have taught", interviewees were free to use their own understanding of the field and thus talk about courses that they feel are relevant to game studies. This helps ensure a broader range of courses, which was one of the desired goals. In the next section, I provide a sample of representative courses taught, together with their learning objectives.

Table 3: Categories and criteria for participant selection

Category Criteria

Instructor

Course Type

Course Style

Class Size

Students

Table 4: Participant pseudonyms and class details

Instructor

Alvin

Bert

Charlie

Diane

Edward

Faye

George

Harold

Iris

Judy

Kirk

Lance

Novice Instructor

X

X

X

Experienced Instructor

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Novice Game Researcher

X

X

X

Experienced Game Researcher

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Course Type

Introductory Course

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Advanced Course

X

X

X

X

X

X

Required Course

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Optional Course

X

X

X

X

X

Course Styles

Lecture

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Discussion

X

X

X

X

X

X

Practicum

X

X

X

Mixed

X

X

Class Size

Large (more than 30 students)

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Regular (less than 30 students)

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Students

Graduate

X

X

X

X

X

X

Undergraduate

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Mixed

X

Homogeneous Academic Bkgd.

X

X

X

X

X

Heterogeneous Academic Bkgd.

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

I conducted twelve interviews between August and December of 2006. Interviewees represented a total of ten institutions of higher learning from eight countries. Many interviewees reported on multiple classes. Interviews were conducted in person and by telephone, averaging 62 minutes and ranging from 35 to 74 minutes in length. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Data analysis was conducted using an iterative process, in which data from one interviewee were confirmed or contradicted by data from others, allowing me to refine theoretical categories, propositions, and conclusions as they emerged from the data (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). All interviewee names have been changed for privacy (See Table 4).

General Learning Objectives of Games Classes

Each instructor had experience with a wide variety of game courses, each with their own educational objectives and curricula. Many instructors had taught more than one course, often on more than one occasion. The following sample of representative courses, each with a brief description and outline of the main learning objectives, provides a sense of the variety of game courses being taught. The descriptions and titles of the courses have been edited for privacy reasons. Some descriptions have also been edited from multiple similar courses taught by different instructors. All of the courses described have been taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and in varying class sizes. In addition to the descriptions, I also list the contexts for understanding games (see Chapter 3) that are the main focus in each of the courses.

Game Design Analysis Course

This course introduces students to the study of games as cultural artifacts and provides an initial background on the approaches to game studies that have been developed over the past ten years. At the end of this course, students are expected to have a basic understanding of the issues in game studies, what it means to study games, and what some of the fundamental questions are.

Primary foci: games in culture (first context)), games and other games (second context)

Game Design Practicum

The goal of this course is to give students a basic understanding of the challenges of creating gameplay and designing a game, and to familiarize them with the processes currently used within the games industry for creating games. In this course, students compare and re-design existing games and also work on a project where they must create their own game design, pitch it to a panel of experts, and write all the documentation necessary to guide the design process through the creation of a final game.

Primary foci: games and other games (second context), deconstruction and components (fourth context)

History and Culture of Digital Games

In this course, students study the history and culture of computer games. Students begin by learning the history of computer hardware and software, starting with early prototypes from the 1950s, continuing with arcade, console and PC games, and concluding with the current trends in online games and multimodal games. One of the goals of this course is to survey the landscape of changing games and player audiences.

Primary foci: games in culture (first context), games and other games (second context), games and technology (third context)

Theories of Games and Play

In this course, students read and discuss the work of theorists like Huizinga, Caillois, Sutton-Smith, Csikszentmihalyi and several others who have provided theoretical frameworks and interpretations on the individual meanings and social impacts of play and games. The aim is for students to participate in productive discussions of these theories as a broad framework for considering the role of play and games in our society, focusing especially on theories of digital games.

Primary focus: games in culture (first context)

Nintendo Entertainment System Course

In this course, students investigate the cultural artifacts of a computational system, in this case the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), in concert with an analysis of its technical properties. Students play and critique a selection of NES games from the perspective of the hardware and software constraints under which they were created while also authoring original programs using emulator software. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the intimate details of the NES for the purpose of creating new games or other digital works on that system, and critiquing NES games.

Primary foci: games and other games (second context), games and technology (third context), deconstruction and components (fourth context)

Findings

Student Background

People who are interested in learning about games come from as wide a variety of academic backgrounds as researchers in game studies. Faye says, "you have computer science students, there's people who come because they love games, there's visual design students, I get a large number of film students, students from the business school, or students from any number of backgrounds, anthropology, psychology, etc." Most share an interest in games due to prior and current life experiences. This prior interest is what helps draw many students to these classes. Edward, who has a mix of art and CS students in his classes, notes that "I'd tell people about the course, and they'd get excited just out of a general interest. Games are so hot in the pop cultural sense, particularly with college students, that I was able to get a nice mix of students into the class."

Many students also register for these classes because they aspire to work in the games industry. Lance describes how "they're here because when they come out [graduate], they want to work on games." Other students, especially at the higher levels of education, want to complement their already games-related professional lives. Some are professional game designers, journalists, or musicians with years of practical experience. For them, applying to games-related programs or taking games classes is a way of "linking their passion and expertise in games with what they do professionally" says Bert.

Perhaps surprisingly, some do not have what we would call a formal education. Judy describes her experience: "I'm teaching a masters course and I've got a really big diversity of people in the course. Some people have only worked in industry and haven't done an undergraduate program. Other people have come from art programs. There's a woman who's just finished a degree in English at Yale, another guy comes from acoustic engineering, and a few people come from computing backgrounds." Lance's experience in his undergraduate classes is similar, "90% of them are high school graduates. The other 10% are usually people who, for whatever reason, didn't go to school or something like that. All of a sudden they've decided to come back to school. They're much older, like 40 or 45."

The most common differentiator, especially at the undergraduate level, is the academic background of the students. Most often, students come from technical backgrounds (computer science, engineering) or the humanities (media studies, art, or film). Iris says, "Generally, they come from science and engineering backgrounds, including computer science, as well as other areas. Every other semester I'll get a big group of humanities majors. These last few semesters have been more balanced, and I've been told that word is getting out that I teach a lot of videogames stuff in my class, and people are just signing up."

What effect does this variety of interests, background and expertise play in the context of a single course? First, it makes it harder to establish a common level of academic discourse in the class. When you have people with different backgrounds, the common denominator becomes quite low. Harold describes the issue as "if I try to make it very basic, then, of course, some people would be bored and find the level too low. Half the class wants one thing, and the other wants another. It can be quite frustrating for all parties involved." Judy describes this challenge as "I find that I have to outline basic theories. I'm sort of providing a basic toolbox that I wouldn't have to do if they had all come from similar backgrounds. The ones that know that, well, they sort of get frustrated."

On the other hand, particularly in design-focused classes, the heterogeneity of the students provides them opportunities to experience different perspectives and move away from their areas of familiarity. Kirk notes that "everyone has a certain background, whether it's computing, or visual design, or something else, like a literary background, or what have you. They all have different interests, goals, and also different trajectories. So there's a kind of a richness of different texture that they bring. These differences often create conflict. This is great because we can have actual conversations about those issues and show them [the students] that reconciliation is actually not the goal." Also, student heterogeneity can allow them to bring multiple skills to bear in their design projects and practice the communicational and management skills that will be useful to them in the workplace.

Role of Prior Experience with Videogames

Literature in education and learning has highlighted the important role that prior experience can play in learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Bransford et al., 2000; Kolodner and Guzdial, 2000). In particular, it is important to establish personally meaningful connections with what is to be learned (Papert, 1980). For example, the creation and design of games, considered personally meaningful to kids, has been explored as a productive means for learning computer programming (Kafai, 1995; Bruckman, 2000). I hypothesized that students' extensive personal histories with videogames would be an asset in learning about games.

My results suggest that prior experience with videogames can have a positive effect in the students' motivation, commitment and dedication. Charlie describes how "they realized that their passion could transform into something more serious. Even if they do not want to be involved in game studies or industry, they realized that gaming is not just for nerds, or for losing time, but something that deserved particular attention." Also, students' personal game histories provided them with a rich source of knowledge to draw from.

"[Students] regularly come up with really good examples that aren't discussed in any of the class materials. They rely on their own experiences, memories, and the expert knowledge they have of some genres. They can highlight the complexities that are involved in an issue rather than have this kind of uniform understanding of some received wisdom. We regularly ended up with this kind of varied and multicolored idea of the multiple points of view related to all the various aspects of games, their features, their role in social life, culture and so on." ”" Bert

However, many respondents reported that the role of personal game playing experience, especially when it was significant, was often negative.

"Their personal experience with games is actually a hindrance. It would be far better if they were coming at it without any experience in games. I find that what I do most is peel away what they already think they know from playing these previous games. So that's the biggest problem: peeling that 'knowledge' away." ”" Lance

In many ways, being expert videogame players interferes with their abilities to step back from their role as "gamers" or "fans" and reason critically and analytically about the games they are studying or designing. As Diane describes, "it's hard for them to break out of being a fan. It's even that much harder to take an objective step back, because they just have so much fun playing games." Edward comments that, "it's harder for them to step back objectively and get past the [idea that] I like games, I like to approach it as a fan, I wanna like a game” anything else either doesn't interest them or they can't seem to get around it."

"Students who know every game often have preconceptions about what games are, and I have to break those preconceptions. I have to find ways to make them see that games are an aesthetic form that hasn't been exhausted. Just because these are certain games or genres in existence, and this is the way things are... This is not the only way it can be! And so, breaking that down is sometimes more difficult than starting from scratch with someone who's maybe a casual gamer or just curious" ”" Faye

Students also find it harder to accept new ideas about games when their judgments are clouded by false assumptions about particular genres, titles and even the era a game is from. For example, they often assume that an Atari 2600 game, due to its simplicity in graphics and archaic hardware platform8, isn't worthy of in-depth analysis or can't have any artistic or cultural meaning. Kirk describes how, "I think that students often have issues with the conceptual idea of playing, let's say, a vintage arcade game carefully. The very notion that there's something in there, more than they can see from a single glance, is much more difficult for them than, say, admitting that Grand Theft Auto has some subtleties of meaning that they could tease out." For students, the apparent complexity of a game and the meaning they might be able to tease out often seem at odds.

Students are also challenged by having to shift from treating a game as a "consumer media good" to a cultural artifact that can have embedded meaning and ideas. Playing a game as a child over countless weekends with your friends creates a strong and lasting emotional experience that is difficult to overcome. Games that have been played in the past are viewed with nostalgia, and students have to come to terms with, in Alvin's words, "separating the memories of the good old times they had with the harsh reality that 90% of retro games are just rubbish."

The diversity of the prior videogame experience students have also plays an important role. Harold comments that "they [students] don't know enough about games when they start studying games. They don't know enough about the history of games, not only computer games, but other types of games as well. One way of putting it is that they haven't played enough games, to be more precise, they haven't played enough different types of games." While students often have over ten years of experience playing videogames, that experience can be limited in diversity. It is typical for students to have a specialized understanding of a particular game genre, like first-person shooters, but be completely ignorant, in terms of experience, of other genres like puzzle or sports games. George describes that "there are often people in my classes who have just played one genre of games. Maybe they've only played tabletop role-playing games, or maybe its just first person shooters and nothing else. These students have problems in the course because they can't relate to a lot of the material." These students' knowledge and experience is so ingrained in particular genre conventions, that taking alternate viewpoints

8 The Atari 2600 is a video game console released in 1977 that featured a microprocessor and popularized the use of cartridges that contained game code. It was a commercial success in the late 1970's and early 1980's. (Perry and Wallich,1983)and discussing other phenomena becomes much harder. This difficulty is often met by students with disbelief and strong emotional reactions. Lance describes how students "actually get angry, 'cause they think that they know games. They really get confused, angry, and frustrated, because they've been playing games all their life!"

Students often react by antagonizing the instructor when faced with the thought that they may not be as well-educated as they thought. As Iris describes, "some of them are convinced that they already know videogames. They already have an opinion and you can't teach them anything about a game they already played. In their minds, they're already experts. Their attitude is that you can't correct me." Students also question their teachers' gaming credentials: Who are you to tell me this? What games did you design? Have you played all the games I have? What games do you know?

Sometimes student's attitudes can also negatively affect their relationship towards the university itself. Instead of being a place where they can learn, the university course simply becomes a necessary step in the process of getting a diploma or a means for learning specific software tools they think are needed to get a job. In their minds, they are already qualified to work in the game industry, and everything else simply becomes an obstacle towards meeting that goal. As Lance mentions, "they think they already know how to make the best first person shooter or the best strategy game. So, their attitude is to demand that I just show them the 3D tools so they can start making them."

Edward's experience is similar "I've noticed that in the last five or six years students come in with a sense of entitlement. They treat their games education like a service and they're the customers. Their attitude is very much like 'I pay tuition. That doesn't mean that I'm a student, it means you should give me what I want'. This can get complicated when you need to push them in a different way, which can be quite often with students in [the program] I teach."

Practices and Discourse of Play

A lot of experience with videogames can also help confuse two issues: playing for fun and entertainment with playing for critical analysis and understanding. Kirk describes how "[students] mistake being successful at the play of the game, being a good player, as being a clever player...or a player with insight. The ability to perform in the game is not the same as being able to read or think about the game carefully." For some students, analyzing a game is equivalent to listing all its features together with their opinion: is it cool or not? "A lot of times people, when they get right down to it, sort of slip into feature reviews. It's one of the most difficult things to break, that kind of loose judgment on whether something is working or not", says Faye. George provides additional insight "If they're comparing two games, for example, they usually haven't thought out the reasons why they want to compare them. So, what they do is take two games they like, and then they just describe them. If you're lucky, they might tell you why they are like each other, and why they are different from each other. But they don't have a purpose for it, they just do it mechanically."

Edward describes how new modes of playing and thinking about games "sort of pushes them [the students] out of their comfort zone. I really wanted them to think more critically and to really push them to do it in a standard academic way. They really struggled with that. It was a masters level course, and I still had to really push them to work on their critical analysis." I found that it is common for students to have problems expressing ideas about gameplay or articulating their experience with games.

My research suggests that students are generally lacking in models of what an in-depth analysis or a game critique look like. Diane describes that "they might have opinions about things, and they are often extremely valid and interesting opinions, but it's also difficult for them to square that with using a methodological framework for thinking about a particular problem or addressing a certain issue." Judy mentions that students will typically "write reviews, so they say this is a really good game. I think that that's because most of the things that they've read have been games journalism, so they're kind of following that mode." Unfortunately, game reviews, which are written to help consumers decide whether or not they want to purchase a certain game (Stuart, 2005; Klostermann, 2006), are a poor referent for the kinds of in-depth analysis and critique which are often expected of students studying games. Ernest Adams, a professional game designer and consultant, comments that "reviews only compare games to other games; they don't analyze games in their larger cultural context (Friedl, 2002)."

While students often have a very good feel for gameplay aspects, they can have difficulties articulating what these aspects are and how they interact with each other to produce a game experience. Edward describes "they're very savvy about picking up a controller and figuring out how to play a game pretty much instantaneously. They get the general, 'Oh, here's how you interact with this game', and they can do that immediately. Sometimes it's magical watching them do it. So, that learning curve has already been attained just by their history playing games. That unbelievable familiarity makes them experts, but what's interesting is when you ask them to talk about games. They kind of devolve into likes and dislikes. So, they'll say things like, 'I played this game and I liked it because...' or 'I really enjoyed the”'. Understanding what they're trying to say gets really muddy because there is no sense of exactly what they're saying outside of that they like it, or don't like it." Faye describes the issue as one of lack of vocabulary.

"We don't have a strong vocabulary for understanding what happens when you play. It's difficult to open up emotionally and describe what you feel. We experience games at a very visceral level and don't have, as a culture, a strong literacy in discussing games. You might go to a movie and someone who's not a filmmaker can discuss with you, at a deep level, the character motivations, or the editing of the film. The same can't really be said about gameplay. People can discuss the technology, but that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in how gameplay affects the human being, how the emotional experience is playing out." ”" Faye

Faye's comment raises another issue. Are these challenges unique to students studying games? Alvin mentions some of the differences he sees between film analysis and game analysis assignments. In his view, the idea that you can talk about games in a serious and academic fashion hasn't really moved beyond academia. Thus, students aren't aware of what "appropriate" models of discourse surrounding games are, and end up writing in the same style as what they read.

"When I force them to write a game analysis, students often fall back into a style that I call talking about 'the fun world of games.' Basically, it's really horrible writing about games. A lot of journalistic writing about games is like this. Students think they can get away with the same level of analysis that they get from these publications. They'll write stuff saying, 'You have a really big gun that is pretty cool and shiny'. This even happens with the grad students! When I give the same assignment for film analysis, the results are different. People know that you could fill five libraries with books about film analysis. Students know they can't just analyze a scene by saying, 'he

In many game classes, students are asked to think about and reflect on their understanding as they play, analyze, and think critically about the games they play. I showed earlier that this is something students in games classes find challenging. Students often confuse being insightful about a game with being successful at playing it. When describing a game, students also tend to focus on issues that aren't interesting or relevant to the learning objectives of the class they are in. For example, they might describe a game superficially, focusing on the features of a game or describing it judgmentally instead of analytically.

One way of thinking about these issues is to frame them in the context of how these students play games. Essentially, how can we help students shift their mode of play from one of "gamers" or "fans" towards one of "game designers" or "game scholars?"

In this chapter, I will begin to explore the third question I posed: (Q3) How can we help students leverage knowledge from personal experiences with games to create abstract and deeper knowledge? I explore one possible way to answer this question: How can using GameLog, an online blog of gameplay experiences, support reflective game playing and, thus, a deeper understanding of videogames. In this way, I aim to help students get more from their experiences with games.

Blogging for Learning

As a theory of learning, constructivism posits that learning is a process of building and refining knowledge structures. Knowledge cannot simply be transmitted; rather knowledge is constructed or created by learners as they build their own cognitive structures or mental models (Piaget, 1972). In this context, writing can be a powerful tool for constructing new knowledge (Forte and Bruckman, 2006). Research has long suggested that writing can empower learners to reflect on what they know and integrate existing knowledge with new knowledge (Britton et al., 1975; Emig, 1977; Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987).

There are many different ways in which writing activities have been successfully used for learning. However, we are interested in one in particular: the learning log. Learning logs are written responses to learning where students reflect on their understanding, thoughts, and ideas about their study (Baker, 2003). Learning logs are used to stimulate metacognitive awareness in learners and meta-cognition itself is a challenging skill that must be learned and practiced (Barron et al., 1998; Bransford et al., 2000). However, by keeping learning logs, students can assume responsibility for and take command of their learning (Commander and Smith, 1996). Traditionally, learning logs are paper based. However, in the form of weblogs or blogs, educators have also begun experimenting with taking learning logs online (Stiler and Philleo, 2003; Reagin, 2004; Wiltse, 2004; Du and Wagner, 2005). Wiltse, for example, studied journalism students who used a blog to summarize and reflect on the daily student presentations they attended in class. Student blog entries were supposed to include a summary of the topic and the student's reaction to it, such as whether they learned something new or surprising (Wiltse, 2004).

A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in reverse chronological order. They are generally publicly readable and, by allowing visitors to post comments, allow for limited asynchronous interaction. Research has shown that, among other things, people are motivated to write blogs to express themselves, as an outlet for thoughts and feelings, as a way to think by writing, and to foster community (Nardi et al., 2004).

In the context of learning, and in addition to the effects of paper-based learning logs, blogging offers possibilities for collaborative learning by allowing learners to share knowledge and experience with each other. Additionally, learners can be exposed to a diversity of perspectives and interact with each other in constructive ways.

The personal nature of a blog together with its public nature is also aligned with the idea that people learn better through building personally meaningful artifacts and sharing them with others (Papert, 1991). Some authors have also proposed that the public nature of blogging can help students develop an understanding that writing is a social and collaborative process rather than the act of an individual in solitary (Walker, 2005).

In the following section, I introduce GameLog, a custom developed online blogging environment designed for learners to engage in reflective practices of their gameplaying activities.

I consider it a domain-specific kind of online learning log designed to, among other things, help people think about their experiences with games, achieve a deeper understanding of games, establish connections across games, identify structural gameplay elements in multiple games, understand how gameplay can evolve and change over the course of a game, and articulate the emotional and personally meaningful experiences they have while playing.

GameLog

GameLog is a publicly accessible online community where people keep track of the videogames they are playing as well as those they have played (available at http://www.gamelog.cl). GameLog's primary feature is to allow registered users to write a blog of their gameplaying experience for each game they play. It is different from traditional blogging environments in that each user maintains multiple parallel blogs. Each GameLog is devoted to a particular game. When a user starts playing a new game, he creates a GameLog for that game and can then write his thoughts and feelings about it. When done playing, he can "close" his GameLog and indicate the reasons for closing the GameLog.

Figure 1 shows a few GameLogs created by a user. As indicated by the "Finished" status, this user's GameLog for The Sims is currently closed. The GameLogs for Grand Theft Auto”"San Andreas and Zelda: Windwaker, are also closed, but the user has indicated more information about why he is no longer playing them. Despite being closed, all three GameLogs are still available for public reading. The GameLog for The Sims 2, is marked as "Playing", indicating that it is an active, or open, GameLog.

Figure 1: List of GameLogs (user has been anonymized)

For each open GameLog, the owner can write an unlimited number of individual posts or entries. Each entry also includes the date and time written, when it was last edited and the number of total edits made since it was posted. In traditional blog manner, when viewing a GameLog, entries are displayed in reverse-chronological order. Users, including the owner, are allowed to write follow-up comments to each post. Table 5 shows a fragment of a post written for a particular GameLog. Whenever someone writes a comment on an entry, the owner of the GameLog is notified via e-mail and provided with a link to reply. The site also offers basic search and browsing functionality to allow users to find GameLogs written for particular games or by other users.

Table 5: GameLog excerpt (Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker)

November 19, 2006 10:20:48 AM

I went exploring again in Wind Waker, mainly to fill in some of the spots on Link's map. After a while, I came across one of the huge whirlwinds and fought the critter on a cloud inside of it. Even though it made it rather hard to aim at the critter properly, I really like the fact that the winds from the tornado affected the arrows Link shot off. Really, wind seems to be implemented better/more in this game than most others... which is appropriate, considering its theme. I just wish more games with weather effects -had- actually effects from the weather, not just pretty graphics. (Not that I object to pretty graphics.) After beating the cloud-guy”

Study

In Fall of 2006, GameLog was used as part of the regular curriculum in two game classes taught by the same instructor at a local university. The first class was an undergraduate lecture-style class where students explored and analyzed key developments in the history of digital media (U-class). While videogames were a significant part of the curriculum, students also learned about virtual environments, interactive television, the world wide web, and artificial intelligence for interactive characters. The second class I studied was a mixed graduate and undergraduate discussion-based class where students debated and engaged in issues of game design and analysis as a cultural practice (G-class). In this class students also explored game genres and their representational goals. In both classes, students were required, as part of their regular coursework, to play and design games, read scholarly articles, and turn in written assignments.

As part of their regular coursework, students in both classes were asked to keep a GameLog and write about their experiences playing a game chosen from a list of assigned games for that class. For the U-class, students were asked to choose one game, while they had to choose three games in the G-class. In both classes students were asked to play the game on at least three different occasions for at least 30 minutes each time. For each time they played the game, they were asked to write a GameLog entry. The assignment asked them to write about the experience they had while playing the game, including their thoughts on the characters, narrative and gameplay (characters and story, for the U-class). Also, in the case of the undergraduate class, students were asked to submit a short response summarizing their experience with GameLog. These responses were also collected and analyzed. The students' GameLog entries were not graded in the U-Class, though they were assessed on the quality of the short responses they submitted. In the case of the G-Class, students were graded on their completion of the assignment, not on the content of their written GameLog entries. The duration of the assignment was officially one week, although students were encouraged to begin their GameLog activities sooner.

Student Impressions

In order to get a sense of the students' perceptions of the GameLog assignment, together with the role they felt it played in their educational experience I conducted eight in-depth interviews once both classes had concluded. Three interviewees were chosen from the U-class and four from the G-class, in addition to the course instructor. As recommended for qualitative research (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), I employ theoretical sampling in which cases are chosen based on theoretical (developed a priori) categories to provide polar types, rather than for statistical generalizability to a larger population (Eisenhardt, 1989). Interview subjects were selected based on their academic level (undergraduate, graduate), level of interest displayed during class (engaged, not engaged), and participation on GameLog (minimum required, active participation).

Interviews were conducted in person and by telephone, averaging 46 minutes and ranging from 22 to 82 minutes in length. In addition to asking students about their experience using GameLog, the interview protocol includes questions about potential challenges of learning about games. The answers to these questions corroborate data described in Chapter 4. The student protocol also includes open-ended questions about their expectations regarding the course and changes they would make to the assignments. Interviews were semi-structured to ensure that all participants were asked certain questions yet still allow them to raise other issues they felt were relevant to the research. In the case of the students in the U-Class, I was able to use their written responses as prompts for additional questions and topics of interest.

All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. I then analyzed and coded them in an iterative process to identify and refine theoretical categories, propositions, and conclusions as they emerged from the data (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). I was interested in understanding what impressions students had of the GameLog assignment and what role they felt the assignment played in the context of their learning. Would students find it a meaningful and useful experience and if so, in what ways? Would they find that it detracted from their experience of playing games (i.e., turn the experience of playing games from "fun" into "an academic chore")? My analysis would hopefully show evidence of the role the GameLog assignment played in helping students achieve a deeper understanding of games. The interviews were also used to help contextualize students' GameLog entries. For example, I was interested in understanding how they went about writing their GameLog entries, why they chose to write what they wrote, what role they felt their peers' played in this process, and so on. The results of my analysis of students' GameLogs entries follow in later sections.

For my analysis, I used open coding to bring themes to the surface from deep inside the data (Neuman, 2000). In this process I assigned codes or labels to each interview answer. These codes or labels often overlapped, and individual interview answers often had more than one code or label assigned. Sometimes, as in the case of lengthy interview responses, I assigned different codes to different parts of each response. As I analyzed each interview, new codes emerged and existing ones were modified. This process continued until no further codes emerged. As part of this process I was also looking to identify consistencies between codes (codes with similar meanings or pointing to the same basic idea) that would begin to reveal themes.

In terms of the results of my analysis, I found that students generally responded favorably to the GameLog assignment. This contradicted the feedback that the instructor reported receiving prior to the completion of the assignment. He commented that "the students complained. Not all of them, but some of them. [”] I think that the complaint had to do with the feeling that there was an exercise that they were performing whose value they could not immediately judge. Why am I doing this?" My interview data shows that, once the assignment had ended, students perceived writing GameLogs as a positive learning experience. They reported the experience as interesting and enjoyable and remarked on its utility to them from an educational perspective. Aaron felt that "this written assignment is the best one so far", while Benjamin comments that it was "an interesting and productive experience." Cynthia summarizes the general impression of the students: "I found that writing journal entries about my game play was quite fun." I found that students attributed their positive impression of the experience of blogging about their gameplay experiences to three reasons:

1. Improves relationship with videogames as a medium

2. Provides a vehicle for expression, communication, and collaboration

3. Facilitates deeper understanding of videogames

In the following sub-sections I will discuss each of these reasons with supporting evidence and, where appropriate, I will also describe how my observations and findings illustrate students' understanding of videogames according to the four contexts for understanding games that I defined in Chapter 3.

Improved Relationship with Videogames

For the most part, students in both the graduate and undergraduate classes have had extensive personal experience with videogames, which are an important part of their everyday lives. Videogames are a medium they enjoy and are familiar with. This corroborates the results of a prior study that found that among college students "gaming is virtually commonplace. Computer, video and online games are woven into the fabric of everyday life for college students (Jones, 2003)". Many students commented about how the experience of writing about the games they played improved their enjoyment of games in general. Dominic describes that "writing my GameLog allowed me to work through my gaming experience. [”] I was able to get a deeper appreciation for the game that I was playing." Ellen doesn't consider herself a gamer and wrote about a game she had never played before. Like others, she noted, "I thought it was an interesting way to approach playing videogames because this helped me understand how I was playing and what I was doing. I think that now, when I actually play games, if I approach the game a different way, maybe I would enjoy playing games more, or I would have a better time." During their experience with GameLog, students begin to realize that engaging with the medium of videogames is an active process requiring more than "merely" playing. In addition to playing, they also reflected on how they were playing, what their expectations were, and what they felt when playing. As I will describe later, they also began to change the way they played games. Thus, they began to understand how a game playing experience depends not only on the particular game played, but also on how the game is approached.

Writing GameLogs helps highlight the tension between playing games "for fun" and for deeper understanding and analysis. Frank notes that "I don't believe it made me play the game any better than I normally would have." Playing a game with an eye for analysis requires a different approach. This surprised some students like George who commented that the assignment "took away from the experience of playing the game. It was like reading a really good book and stopping and taking notes. It's just not the same as reading it for pleasure all the way through with no interruption." Harrison even felt that games like Grand Theft Auto are "meant to be played and enjoyed, not to be thought out or analyzed." When faced with an assignment that required using their experience as a resource for analysis and understanding, students begin to wrestle with the notion that games are more than "consumer media goods" and can be engaged as cultural artifacts with embedded meaning and ideas. In this way, they can begin to approach, play, and understand videogames differently and thus become better prepared to study and learn about them.

"I came to analyze the way that I was playing, the way that I was actually using the games, and my experiences doing that. You never really think about that. I guess most people don't really think about what they're doing when they're playing games or how they're playing the games" ”" Isabel

Expression and Collaboration

Students described writing GameLogs as a positive learning experience because it allows them to articulate ideas they have difficulty communicating, express themselves, share opinions and, to a lesser degree, collaborate in creating a shared understanding of a game. Patricia describes, "I thought I knew the characters, but trying to explain their personalities and habits was quite hard until I really sat down and did the GameLog." For Orianna, writing a GameLog provided a different opportunity:

"It was interesting to see whether other people thought the same things about the game that I did. I was playing an abstract game and was curious to see if they had the same notion of it as I did. Or, was I completely off-base? It was hard for me to know what should be interpreted and what not. And so, it helped to read what other people think." ”" Orianna

In both classes studied, students were asked to write about their experience with a game from a relatively small list. Since GameLogs are publicly readable, this meant that students enjoyed access to the wealth of opinions, thoughts and experiences of their peers regarding the games they were playing and studying. As mentioned by Orianna, this allows students additional opportunities for reflection, as they read each others' GameLogs. Oriana's comment also shows her reflections on how other people experience the game she played. In this way, she moves away from one of the aspects of a naïve understanding of videogames I described in Chapter 4. I should note that the students were not explicitly asked to read each others' work, but most chose to do so anyway. By reading their peer's thoughts and reflections, students began to understand how different people experience games differently (moving away from a naïve understanding of games), saw what their peers chose to focus on, and learned about aspects of a game that they may not have noticed or cared to think about. This experience can help deepen one's understanding of games. It also helps students consider the reasons and motives people might have for playing games they may not care for.

"I've never understood why people play The Sims. So here I was playing it and trying to get into those reasons. And so, it was interesting to read other people's thoughts and then think about it, because I didn't feel the game that way. What actually grabbed them was something that I didn't care for, but now I had a sense of what it was. To me, that was totally unexpected." ”" Quentin

Some students also took advantage of the feature on the site that allowed them to comment on each other's GameLog entries. Comments posted were generally supportive and friendly. There were no incidents of deviant behavior such as personal attacks or inappropriate comments. This could be explained by the prior knowledge students had of each other. Raphael's comment highlights how an appreciative audience can positively affect the experience of writing and reflecting:

"I liked the feedback. It made me feel less worried that I was a horrible video game player and concentrate more on my experience. I don't necessarily want tips on how to play the game but commenting on my blog makes the blog experience better. Why have a blog in the first place if nobody else is going to read it?" - Raphael

Some students, aware that they were going to write about their experience and that this would be read by others, chose to change the way they played the game in order to communicate or demonstrate something to the potential readers.

Jackson describes, "Generally I just play a game for a quick 30 minutes and then I can then get up and leave. But this time, I know it's going to happen beforehand [referring to playing The Sims], so I'm thinking how can I play it so I can write about it and share the experience rather than just sitting with the The Sims and just doing just random things for an hour or so."

The quality of the student writing was another issue raised during the course of our study. Students perceived writing in a blog as less formal and more relaxed than a traditional class writing assignment. Their entries were commonly riddled with grammatical and orthographical errors considered inappropriate for a formal assignment (for a review of similar issues of quality in journalistic blogs see Seipp, 2002).

However, the informality was perceived by the students as liberating. In taking a more relaxed approach, students reported they could express themselves more freely and were able to come up with insights more readily. Heather describes, "if [the instructor] had told us to play these games and write an essay about our experience, I wouldn't have seen the way that I played the game, the way that I wrote about it in the journals. My journal logs are more personal. I cheated! [in the game] I wouldn't have written about that in an essay. I wouldn't have talked about my experiences in the same way, in the same fashion." Since their writing occurred closer to the actual experience, they could capture information, impressions, insight, and feelings that were more personal and concrete.

The course instructor also perceived the value in this different kind of assignment as he noted that "maybe this is something I should change. Part of this is because my courses were focused on this end result. I have this sort of old-school insistence on synthetic research output ”" a term paper. Maybe it's not always the best demonstration of a particular kind of mastery. Maybe if I taught the undergrads again I would have them write a bunch of little things, and that would be the right answer."

In the same way that the field notes of a researcher's observations are the initial step in the process of writing an academic research paper, a students' GameLog entries help lay the foundations on which learning and understanding can happen.

Facilitating Deeper Understanding

In addition to changing the way they related to videogames as a medium, students reported that the reflective writing activity helped them achieve a deeper understanding of the games they were studying. "It helped me understand a bit more. When you play through, you're kind of in it, so it's hard to have an insight. Writing afterward is like looking in from the outside. It helps you put on a different perspective" says Jeremy. Like many of his classmates, writing on multiple occasions about different sessions of gameplay helped him understand a particular game in different ways and focus on specific elements or aspects of a game that would previously have gone unnoticed.

Kathy describes her experience with Façade, an interactive drama game, where the player witnesses, and tries to mediate, the marital crisis of the non-player characters Trip and Grace:

"I begin connecting any little action I executed in the game to any response that the interacting characters gave. For example, two of the three times I played, Trip recounted several things I had said throughout the evening, and I begin to connect that somehow he thought I said such-and-such when I had actually meant something totally different. Looking back over the conversation as I was journaling, I began to realize how the characters interpreted different comments depending on their mood at the moment. For example, when Grace was angry because of a previous comment by Trip, she always interpreted my comments as invading on the territory of the marriage." ”" Kathy

There is also evidence supporting the idea that students engaging with the four contexts of understanding games11 I defined in Chapter 3. Isabel describes: "I began to realize that you can't describe a game like a movie. Well, except for the pre-game movie-like clip [referring to cut scenes12]. In describing a game, you have to get into different details than movies, even though when you look at someone playing a game, they can look very similar." Isabel's reflection shows her contextualizing games with respect to other cultural forms, in this case movies (1rst context).

Similarly, Neil begins to understand the relationship that a game such as The Sims has with virtual pets like Tamagotchi. He has realized that the core gameplay of both games is the same, and that both rely on a particular human motivation (to nurture). In this sense, he is understanding aspects of The Sims in context with other games (2nd context). Neil describes:

"The characters in The Sims reminded me of Tamagotchi pets. The Sims' characters had the same addictive feeling of caring as the Tamagotchi pets. My thought while playing was that the characters were more like children, or a pet, the player has to take care of. The user has to feed them, make them shower, and do other basic human functions. When it gets down to the bare requirements that a Sims character needs for fulfillment, they are the same needs that a pet dog would have. " - Neil

Orianna's experience is similar to Neil's as she begins to explore the similarities and differences between two games that are part of The Legend of Zelda series (2nd context). Additionally, she also wonders about the rolethat different generations of hardware play in shaping the experience of playing each game (3rd context).

"I played Zelda [Wind Waker] and writing about it made me think about its gameplay in comparison to other games I had

11 1rst context: games in culture, 2nd context: games and other games, 3rd context: games and technology, 4th context: deconstruction and components.

12 A cut scene is a brief, generally non-interactive interlude in a game. It is usually used to advance a game's plot.played. I hadn't really played Zelda since the NES. It was really interesting for me to think about the one I was playing on the Gamecube, compared to the original NES version, because they are two completely different types of game now. The hardware systems are totally different, what you can do is totally different, and so on. However, it was still strangely familiar”" ”" Orianna

Harrison commented on the fact that "when you analyze the game you can't help but notice the many shortcomings in the game. [These issues] can be easily ignored if you're just playing, but when you write about it you can't help but think about it." Harrison's comment illustrates another issue the students are beginning to come to terms with: distinguishing the "parts" of a game and how they function, from the impact they have on the game and the experience of playing it, as a whole (4th context for understanding games). Jeremy illustrates, "I noticed that looking in from the outside, the game maybe is pretty simple and even flawed, but when I played it, the game was much better. It was like understanding how the whole was greater than each of its parts."

By reflecting on their game playing activity, students like Dominic note, "I was able to see that there were more things to the game then just following the missions." The reflective process helps them realize certain non-obvious insights as they begin to identify components of games and see how they interact and create certain experiences. For example, Meredith noticed that feedback from non-player characters serves as a reward in Harvest Moon, while Louis had an insight on the effect that the character creation system has on the narrative in games like Oblivion and Knights of the Old Republic. Nigel debated how the voice of Carl, the player-controlled character in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, helped create a less immersive experience than that of Grand Theft Auto III, despite the similarities in their gameplay. In addition to understanding games from the 4th context, Nigel and Louis reveal they are also considering the 2nd context for understanding games. Even students like Jessica, who felt that the GameLogging experience detracted from her enjoyment of the game, remarked, "I did understand the game more than I did before." By writing their GameLogs, students begin to understand the role that certain elements play in the experience or design of a game. They can also begin to relate them to each other, and see how sometimes the same elements appear in other games, playing different roles.

Understanding a particular game, however, can mean more than the ability to deconstruct it, or view it holistically. Maurice describes that writing a GameLog "helps me get in tune with what I just did and keep track of what's going on over the long term. Journaling gets me to think of the game outside of playing the game itself." Maurice begins to make sense of his experience and can understand the game in a broader context. Orianna summarized the role of the experience as helping to "start thinking about more than just the gameplay, but also the physical aspects of sitting down and playing a game, analyzing them culturally, and how do they relate to other practices. How do games relate to our experiences, not just with games, but with other people and the world, how have they changed? It's about trying to think about games as a much broader subject." I found that the experience of writing about their gameplay experience was useful for the students in helping them achieve a deeper understanding of videogames.

Shifting Modes of Play

In Chapter 4, I reported how game studies class instructors often found that students had difficulties in stepping back from their role as "gamers" or "fans". One of the particular challenges students in these classes face is that of confusing playing games for fun and entertainment with playing them for critical analysis. While I did not study, or observe, students playing games, I did find evidence that students began to play and approach games differently due to their experience with GameLog. For example, Nate describes how he began paying more attention to details because "keeping a GameLog forced me to come up with content to write about, and the only way to bring forth quality content was to examine the game through a critical eye and notice all of the extra details." In another example, Jarrod, in the context of his experience with Grand Theft Auto III, reflects his interactions with characters in the game. He notices how his insights come from the fact that he was playing the game differently.

"This was a very interesting experience, because when you play a game like Grand theft auto, you don't really think about how the players are interacting, you just play. It was neat to really think about why it was necessary for the characters to interact the way they did, and it really makes you think about how limited certain possibilities for interaction really are. Yet at the same time you can see that there are still a ton of other ways to interact with the characters." - Jarrod

Jarrod's impressions are mirrored by Zoey, who describes some of the ways that writing a GameLog can influence how games are played.

"Depending on the gamer and the game, the idea of game logs can influence the playing of a game. By using such a log, gamers can keep track of what has happened in their game. They can help decide on new strategies that would not otherwise be thought of. Also, it helps to keep track of what the gamer has tried or would like to try in the game. In addition, the player may get new ideas from just writing one." - Zoey

So, in what ways can blogging about gameplay experiences support the process of shifting modes of play? Summarizing, students found that blogging about their gameplay experiences changed the way they played games. In particular, they began:

” Paying greater attention to details

”" Notice things that would otherwise have gone undetected

” Planning ahead

”" Keep track of what they would like to try in a game

” Playing games with broader issues or questions in mind

” Trying out new actions and in-game activities

Log Entry Analysis

In the last section, I discussed the students' perceptions and feelings about writing a reflective online journal of their gameplay experience. I also showed how they begin to demonstrate a deeper understanding of videogames. The experience of writing a blog of gameplay experiences also supported students in playing games differently. Now I will describe the results of my analysis of students' GameLog entries.

A total of 137 entries were written by 35 students (24 U-class, 11 G-class). The average entry was 235 words long with a standard deviation of 119 words. The shortest entry was only 17 words long, while the longest was 773 words. Similarly to my analysis of the interviews I reported earlier, the student's GameLog entries were analyzed and coded in an iterative process to identify and refine theoretical categories, propositions, and conclusions as they emerged from the data (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). In this case, however, I was interested in getting a sense of the kinds of things students wrote about and how they wrote them. Would they tell the story of what happened when they played the game, or would they write about their difficulties playing? Would they approach the assignment as a chance to analyze specific aspects or would they try to convince the reader on the merits (or lack thereof) of the game played? In particular, my analysis would hopefully show evidence of reflective gameplay, identify common patterns across student entries, and help explain why those patterns exist and what role they played in students' understanding of games. The process used was similar to that of the interview analysis described earlier in terms of the iterative coding (refer to sub-section titled Student Impressions on page 87).

From my analysis, I was able to identify common patterns across entries. From these patterns, I determined six prototypical styles of GameLog entry: overview, narrative, comparative analysis, plan/hypothesis, investigation, and insight/analysis (see Table 6). The diversity of styles found illustrates the multiplicity of ways students approached the task of reflecting on their gameplay experiences. Not all the students approached the task in the same way, and students often changed their approach from one GameLog entry to another. Also, some students wrote entries that took multiple approaches and mixed styles in the same entry. This was common in longer entries.

Table 6: GameLog entry styles

Style

Brief Definition

Overview

General description of the game.

Narrative

Description of what the player did and what happened during the game session.

Comparative Analysis

Description and comparison of specific elements of a game with another game.

Plan/Hypothesis

Description of goals or questions the player wants answered followed by a plan for achieving them.

Investigation

Description of an investigation or experiment performed during the gameplay session.

Insight/Analysis

Description of a specific insight or analysis of an element or aspect of the game.

Table 7 shows the distribution of the frequency of different styles used by the students in each of the classes. For example, by the end of the assignment, 41.7% of the students in the U-Class had written using three different styles.13 The frequencies are divided by class type because students in the U-Class wrote fewer entries (avg. of 3.1 entries per student) than those in the G-Class (avg. of 5.4 entries per student). Recall that the assignment for each class differed in the number of games students were

13 Not all of the students who used three styles wrote using the same combination of styles. So, one student might have written an overview, narrative and an investigation while another might have written an overview, narrative and comparative analysis.asked to play and write about (one or three games). Despite the differences in the number of entries written, Table 7 shows that there are no significant differences in the variety of styles used by the students in each class. This table also shows that most students did not strongly favor one style with only 8.6% of the students in both classes using only one style for all their entries.

Table 7: Distribution of frequency of styles used by participants

Number of Styles Used

U-Class

G-Class

Combined

1

8.3%

9.1%

8.6%

2

16.7%

18.2%

17%

3

41.7%

18.2%

34.3%

4

25%

36.3%

28.6%

5

8.3%

9.1%

8.6%

6

0%

9.1%

2.9%

I will now describe each style, show excerpts from GameLog entries that exemplify the style described, and also discuss the pedagogical role that each of these styles can play as students are learning and creating a deeper understanding of games. The excerpts are reproduced verbatim from the students' GameLogs. For reasons of privacy, the usernames the students used to write have been replaced with pseudonyms.

Overview

The Overview style consists of a general description of the game written for a reader who is assumed to be unfamiliar with the game in question. Entries written in this style generally attempt to provide some sort of context about the game being played. For example, it may refer to earlier games in a series or other games that may be similar. Additionally, there might be some reference to the circumstances that illustrate why author decided to play the particular game or if there is any prior history with the game in question. Entries written in the Overview style are also often accompanied by criticism or praise for certain aspects of the game.

In the following example, Zach describes how Boundish is part of a broader series of games. Although Zach's overview does not provide much in the way of detail, it is interesting to note that he presents Boundish as a tribute to early videogames, placing it in the context of other games (2nd context of understanding games).

"Boundish is part of Nintendo's Bit Generation series. The complete series includes Soundvoyager, Orbital, Coloris, Boundish, Digidrive, Dotstream, and Dialhex. I just ordered the complete series from eBay, and I can't wait for them to arrive.

Of the five games on the cart, I've spent most of my time tonight playing Box Juggling and Human League. Both of these games are best described as Pong variants and tributes to early moments in videogames." - Zach (Boundish)

Emily begins her first entry for John Conway's Life by describing the rules under which it operates.

"To begin with, here are the "rules" of the game:

For a space that is 'populated': Each cell with one or no neighbors dies, as if by loneliness. Each cell with four or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation. Each cell with two or three neighbors survives. For a space that is 'empty' or 'unpopulated' Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated[”]" ”" Emily (John Conway's Life)

Writing an Overview requires that the student reflect on the game and consider how it should be presented to someone who isn't necessarily familiar with it. It is an exercise in contextualizing the game for an uninformed reader.

Writing an Overview requires dealing with questions like: What are the important features? What is the core gameplay? What does the reader need to know in order to get a feeling for what this game is like? Additionally, it can be an exercise in reflecting on prior experience and knowledge of the game in question. For example, students might have to recollect what they've heard about a particular game or reflect on what their pre-conceived notions of the game might be. What kind of experience do they think they will have? How will their experience account for what they have heard about this game? In the case of writing about games they might have played previously, students are also prompted to recall their prior experiences. Did they enjoy the game? For what reasons? How do they think this new experience might differ? What memories does this game bring back? 63% of the participants wrote at least one entry that was an Overview and 21% of the entries were written in this style. Additionally, 75% of the entries written as an Overview

In this chapter I explore the same question as in the last chapter: (Q3) How can we help students leverage knowledge from personal experiences with games to create abstract and deeper knowledge? However, I explore another way to answer this question: How can participating in the Game Ontology Project help students use their personal experiences and knowledge of videogames to make connections with abstract concepts and ideas while contributing meaningfully and legitimately to the academic study of games? As I explore this question, I will also seek to find an answer to another of the questions I posed in Chapter 1: (Q4) What role can novices play in a professional knowledge-building community of practice?

First, I will outline some of the educational research that informs how I explore these questions. Then, I will describe the Game Ontology Project (GOP), a wiki-enabled hierarchy of elements of gameplay used by game studies researchers. In principle, as suggested by literature on communities of practice and knowledge building, participating in the GOP can help students use their personal experiences and knowledge to make connections with the abstract concepts and notions in the ontology. Since the ontology is actively used by game studies researchers, it also provides an opportunity for learners to participate and contribute meaningfully and authentically. However, how can we make the GOP approachable and useful to students? Also, how can we evaluate whether or not the students' participation was legitimate? I then describe how the GOP was used in a university-level games class. The results of this experience show that it helped students reflect on their prior experience with videogames and that they used this to gain a deeper understanding of videogames. In order to answer the question of whether or not the students' participation was legitimate, my analysis also includes an evaluation by game studies experts on the quality, type, and role played by the students' contributions. Finally, the results of this experience, both positive and negative, will frame a discussion of unsolved issues and future implications.

Authenticity for Learning and Participation as Learning

Learning research has argued the importance of providing students with an authentic context for fostering learning (Shaffer and Resnick, 1999). For example, project-based inquiry science (Blumenfeld et al., 1991), has focused on ensuring that what students do in the classroom somehow reflects or recreates some aspect of the real world outside of the learning environment. Others help learners interact with subject matter experts or non-school members who can serve as mentors, share knowledge, or answer questions (Songer, 1996; O'Neill and Gomez, 1998; Ellis and Bruckman, 2002). It has also been argued that using the tools and methods of a discipline encourages learning in that community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). For example, students might learn history by "making history" as professional historians do (Kobrin et al., 1993) or engage with mathematical problems as mathematicians (D'Ambrosio, 1995). However, most learning in traditional environments is disconnected from external communities of practice and disciplines. For example, students might design and carry out scientific experiments that, while valuable pedagogically, do not contribute to science itself. Allowing students to meaningfully participate in authentic practices that contribute to a larger body of knowledge is difficult for a variety of reasons. For instance, real-world science is often not accessible to students because authentic activities that are interesting to students are too open-ended and require content knowledge and scientific thinking that students do not have the supports to realize (Edelson, 1998).

If we understand learning as a process of transformation of participation (Rogoff, 1994), of both absorbing and being absorbed in a "culture of practice", the lack of meaningful connections between novices (students) and larger communities of practice (experts, scientists, etc.) can be problematic. Lave and Wenger (1991) describe how learning occurs through legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). LPP describes how novice members of a community often begin participating in peripheral tasks that contribute to the goals of the community. These activities, while typically simple, are valued and important to the community as a whole (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Thus, how we can design learning environments that: 1) are approachable to learners, 2) allow learners to contribute legitimately to external communities of practice, 3) support visibility and access to the practices of a broader community?

Game Ontology Project

The challenges faced by students with respect to a lack of critical vocabulary for talking about games are perhaps unsurprising due to the newness of game studies as described in Chapter 2. Many game designers and professionals, noting the lack of a unified vocabulary for describing existing games and thinking through the design of new ones, have called for a design language for games (Costikyan, 1994; Church, 1999; Kreimeier, 2002). These calls have been answered in multiple ways. For instance, many of the proposed approaches focus on offering aid to the designer, either in the form of design patterns (Kreimeier, 2002; Björk and Holopainen, 2005), which name and describe design elements, or in the closely-related notion of design rules, which offer advice and guidelines for specific design situations (Fabricatore et al., 2002; Falstein, 2004). Each of these approaches are constantly evolving, growing, and adapting to the ever-changing landscape of videogames. The ever-growing size of collections of gameplay design patterns, design rules, or terminology can be daunting to students who can easily feel overwhelmed and not know from where to start.

The Game Ontology Project (GOP) is another approach. The GOP is developing a game ontology that identifies the important structural elements of games and the relationships between them, organizing them hierarchically (Zagal et al., 2007). The term ontology is borrowed from computer science, and it refers to the identification and (oftentimes formal) description of entities within a domain. In describing structural elements of games, the ontology's entries are often derived from common game terminology (e.g. level and score) and are then refined by both abstracting more general concepts and by identifying more precise or specific concepts.

Each ontology entry consists of a title or name, a description of the element, examples of games that embody the element, a parent element, potentially one or more child elements, and potentially one or more part elements (elements related by the part-of relation). The examples describe how the element is instantiated in specific games. There are two types of examples, strong and weak. Strong examples are "obvious" or canonical exemplars of a particular entry, while weak examples describe borderline cases of games that partially reify the element. Table 8 shows an example of a particular ontology entry called "To Own".

The GOP is distinct from design rule and design pattern approaches that offer imperative advice to designers (Fabricatore et al., 2002; Falstein, 2004). The project does not have as one of its goals to describe rules for creating good games, but rather to identify the abstract commonalities and differences in design elements across a wide range of concrete examples. The ontological approach is also distinct from genre analyses and related attempts to answer the question "what is a game?" Rather than develop definitions to distinguish between games/non-games or among different types of games (Elverdam and Aarseth, 2007), the GOP focuses on analyzing of design elements that cut across a wide range of games. The GOP does not attempt to classify games according to their characteristics and/or mechanics (Lundgren and Björk, 2003), but to describe the design space of games.

Table 8: Example Ontology entry - "To Own"

Name

To Own

Parent

Entity Manipulation

Children

To Capture, To Possess, To Exchange

Description

Entities can own other game entities. Ownership does not carry any inherent meaning, other than the fact that one entity is tied to another. Changes in ownership can not be initiated by the owned entity. Ownership can change the attributes or abilities of either the owned or owning entity. Ownership can be used to measure performance, either positive or negative. Ownership is never permanent; the possibility of losing ownership separates ownership from an inherent attribute or ability of an entity. Ownership of an entity can change in variety of ways, including voluntary and involuntary changes of ownership. It is important to note the difference between owning an entity, and using an entity. For example, in Super Mario Bros, when Mario collides with a mushroom, the mushroom is immediately used and removed from the game world. Mario never owns the mushroom.

Strong Example

In Super Mario World, Mario can collect mushrooms (or fire flowers or feathers) to use later. Mario owns these entities and can choose when to use them.

Weak Example

In Ico, the player character must protect a girl called Yorda. While the player only directly controls Ico, his actions are very closely tied to leading, guiding and protecting Yorda. One could argue that Ico, in effect, owns Yorda because of the way they are tied to each other.

The GOP also distinguishes itself from other approaches by using prototype theory as an alternative to traditional classification. Traditionally, things are in the same category if and only if they all have the same properties in common. The GOP has found that for many concepts in games there is no such list of properties that supports a binary category membership function. Thus, many parts of the ontology have fuzzy boundaries regarding what games exemplify them (or have aspects that exemplify them). This is particularly evident in the GOP's use of examples. These examples are important because they help define the center of the category, and illustrate the nuances and interpretations an ontological definition may have.

Finally, the GOP is also different from other approaches due to its hierarchical nature and its support for multiple levels of abstraction. While other approaches, such as Bjork and Holopainen's gameplay design patterns establish relationships and dependencies between patterns (Björk and Holopainen, 2005), these relationships are not hierarchical and generally occur at the same level of abstraction. In the case of the GOP, entries at the top are generally abstractions and generalizations of those entries beneath them in the hierarchy. Entries at the bottom are generally much more specific.

Affordances for Authentic Learning and Legitimate Participation

In principle, the Game Ontology Project, used in the context of a games class, provides students with opportunities to learn and acquire a critical vocabulary about games, participate in the creation of new knowledge about games, and also gain a deeper understanding of games. In particular, the structure and organization of the ontology, together with some affordances of the technology on which it resides, should be valuable for promoting learning.

Game Ontology Project Affordances

As described earlier, the GOP distinguishes itself from other approaches due to its reliance on strong and weak examples as well as its hierarchical approach. By relying on strong, or canonical, and weak or borderline examples, the GOP affords the exploration of the space of game design. Categorizations aren't binary, leaving ample room for discussion and revisitation. The ontology's reliance on examples also provides a clear entry point for students to legitimately and peripherally participate. Students could leverage their own personal knowledge by adding examples from games they are familiar while also refining those entries that already exist. Participating in this way, students could, in principle, begin to associate what they know about games with the knowledge created in the GOP and identify those things they may know implicitly.

The GOP's hierarchical structure accommodates varying levels of abstraction that can facilitate student understanding and navigation. Students may begin by exploring entries that are more concrete (at the bottom), and, as they become more comfortable with the definitions, they can climb the hierarchy exploring those that are more abstract. This provides a natural way to understand the broader context of certain entries. For example, students might begin by exploring an entry called "Level". By going "up" and reading about its parent entry, "Spatial Segmentation" they begin understanding that "Level" is a specific type of "Spatial Segmentation" and what role this plays in a game. The ontology also describes other types of segmentation that aren't spatial, and students have access to a framework that helps them understand how "Level" relates to a "cousin" entry called "Wave" (an entry under the "Segmentation of Gameplay" sub-hierarchy that isn't a child entry of "Spatial Segmentation").

The GOP affords knowledge building. Recall that knowledge building is a process by which ideas that are valuable to a community are continually produced and improved. The result of knowledge building is the creation and modification of public knowledge, knowledge that lives "in the world" and is available to be worked on and used by other people (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 2002). Scardamalia and Bereiter (1991) have taken this idea into the realm of formal learning by proposing knowledge building activities as a way of altering discourse patterns in the classroom so that students would assume what they called "higher levels of agency", i.e., come to see themselves as constructors of meaning.. The core elements of successful knowledge building are using ideas as objects to think with, viewing ideas as improvable, and fostering idea diversity. As learners better understand the problems and questions they are exploring, ideas change and improve. Knowledge building systems require a critical mass of articulated ideas before they become useful. The GOP provides an existing structure and content that serves to mitigate this challenge. The existing content thus can scaffold knowledge building by providing guidance about what entries (ideas) should look like, how they might be structured and organized, and how they might be refined over time.

Knowledge-building is driven by discourse (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1994). In particular, knowledge building discourse focuses on problems and depths of understanding. For knowledge building, explaining is the major challenge. This is very similar to the raison d'être of the GOP: identifying, understanding, and describing structural elements of games. Knowledge building discourse is decentralized with a focus on collective knowledge. The knowledge of those who are more advanced does not circumscribe what is to be learned or investigated, and novices push discourse towards definition and clarification. In the case of games, not everyone is an expert in every game. Thus, there is room for everyone to provide their own examples and knowledge. Also, the non-static nature of the entries implies that anyone can provide examples that push discourse towards refining and clarifying entries. It is often the case in the GOP that when an entry has too many weak examples, its definition either needs to be refined or a new sub-entry needs to be created for which those weak examples become strong examples.

Knowledge building discourse should interact productively within more broadly conceived knowledge building communities. Students using the GOP have the opportunity to interact, contribute and participate directly in an on-going project that is active and used by game studies researchers. They have the chance to truly participate as knowledge builders in an existing community of practice. In summary, for students, the GOP facilitates:

1. Leveraging the use of personal knowledge of games

2. Browsing and learning by incorporating varying levels of abstraction

3. An environment focused on discourse where knowledge is continually refined and improved

Wiki-Related Affordances

The GOP currently resides on a wiki-enabled website. A wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add and edit content (Leuf and Cunningham, 2001). It is a simplification of the process of creating HTML web pages combined with a system that records each individual change that occurs over time, so that at any time, a page can be reverted to any of its previous states. A wiki system thus allows anyone with a web browser to easily edit and create webpages.

The GOP uses Mediawiki, the same technology used by Wikipedia. Wikipedia, a popular end-user editable online encyclopedia, has been described as an environment where knowledge building often takes place (Bryant et al., 2005). It is also among the most prolific collaborative authoring projects ever sustained in an online environment (Bryant et al., 2005). Its success as a tool for supporting knowledge building can be partly explained by certain features normally absent in other wiki implementations. Mediawiki allows registered users to maintain "watchlists" of pages they wish to pay attention to. Users are notified whenever a page on their watchlist is edited. This feature allows users to keep track of the changes that a page might go through. Another feature is the "talk page". Talk pages are secondary webpages, one for each primary page, where users can discuss issues surrounding the topics of the primary pages. Should certain content be added, deleted, or moved elsewhere? Talk pages can support the process of knowledge building by providing a space for users to discuss the knowledge they are creating. Also, novice users can use these pages to understand the evolution of a certain page and understand how consensus was achieved regarding the current state of a page.

The medium of knowledge building discussions is important. Features such as talk pages and watchlists help mitigate many of the challenges to knowledge building, such as dealing with conceptual discussions that are "left in the air" (Cummings, 2003). Talk pages are also different from threaded discussions, which can be problematic since they have no systematic way of promoting convergence of ideas (Stahl, 2001). In the case of Wikipedia, some researchers hypothesize its success lies in how it encourages community introspection: it is strongly designed so that members watch each other, talk about each other's contributions, and directly address the fact that they must reach consensus (Viegas et al., 2004). Through participation in a resource like this, even novices to the Game Ontology have direct access to the practices, discussions, and reasoning of the game studies researchers that use it. Having the Game Ontology on a wiki-enabled web site also provides opportunities for people outside of the project to easily participate. There are many legitimate opportunities to help build knowledge in the ontology. Not only are there numerous entries that are lacking in depth and examples, but there are also entire areas that haven't been explored. In summary, the technology platform supporting the GOP affords knowledge building by:

1. Providing separate spaces for content and content discussion

2. Providing visibility of the discussions and process behind the creation of content

3. Helping users keep track of content they are interested or involved in

Study

In early 2007, the Game Ontology was used as part of the regular activities in an introductory game design class. The class was an undergraduate lecture-style class with over 200 students. In the class, students were required to play and design games, read scholarly articles, and turn in written assignments. Participants were recruited at the beginning of the term, and 81 students chose to participate.

Data Collection and Analysis

As part of their regular coursework, students were introduced to some terminology from the GOP. Three weeks later students were asked to complete a game ontology assignment. For the assignment, students had to pick two games they knew well. Then they had to find entries in the ontology and edit them in such a way as to add those games as examples (strong or weak). Students had to edit at least two entries (ex: game A as a strong example of one entry and weak example on another, and vice versa for game B), but they could edit up to four different entries. The only additional restriction was that at least two of the examples should be added to entries under the "Rules" sub-hierarchy.

Students were graded only on the completion of the assignment. Because it is often the case that disagreements about examples has led to the refinement of the ontology, grading did not focus on the correctness of the examples. Additionally, students were offered the possibility of extra credit for participation that went above and beyond the assignment requirements, such as meaningful contributions to existing entries, proposing new entries, and participating in discussions on the talk page. The researchers were not involved in the assessment, though they did participate in the discussions that took place on the ontology wiki pages. The duration of the assignment was officially one week, though students could begin their participation sooner.

Only 49 of the 81 students that signed up to participate in the study contributed to the game ontology, one of the final assignments in the class. The instructor noted the drop-off in participation, "I did notice that a fair number of students didn't actually do the Game Ontology Project assignment. It seemed like many students missed that last one and many students seemed to miss the other final assignments. Due to the duration of class and due to the other assignments that we had, I got the sense that students tended to fall behind." For many students, like Violet, the amount of class work near the end of the term forced them to focus on assignments they felt were more important, "I think I didn't do it actually. Yeah, I was swamped by this project from another class, oh, and the project from [this] class as well." I did not find evidence of more substantive reasons to explain the drop-off in student participation.

In terms of the changes made to the ontology, a total of 381 edits were made. Edits varied from very minor (one or two characters, such as when correcting a typo) to one or two paragraphs in length. In total, 65 different ontology entries were edited, and participants contributed a total of 128 different examples. Additionally, I conducted interviews with sixteen students, three of the teaching assistants, and the instructor. As in my other studies, I employed theoretical sampling. This means that cases are chosen based on theoretical (developed a priori) categories to provide polar types, rather than for statistical generalizability to a larger population (Eisenhardt, 1989). Interview subjects were selected based on their level of prior experience with games (novice, intermediate, gamer) and participation on the GOP (none, minimum required, active participation). All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. In addition to asking students about their experience participating in the ontology, our interview protocol includes questions about potential challenges of learning about games. The student protocol also includes open-ended questions about their expectations regarding the course and changes they would make to the assignments. Interviews were semi-structured to ensure that all participants are asked certain questions yet still allow them to raise other issues they feel are relevant. Data from the interviews was used to contextualize and provide insight to the analysis of student participation. All interviewee names appearing in this chapter have been changed for reasons of privacy.

I also analyzed the quality of contributions made by the students. Three subject matter experts were asked to evaluate a random selection of examples written by the students. The subject matter experts were selected due to their prior experience working as researchers on the Game Ontology Project. The goal of this evaluation was to determine whether or not their contributions were valuable, i.e., should the example remain in the ontology? I also wanted to get a sense of how these contributions could be characterized.

Of the 128 examples written, the experts evaluated a randomly selected sample of 96. Assuming a normal distribution, this sample size is representative of the larger population for a 95% confidence level and 5% margin of error. Each expert independently reviewed 32 different examples. Additionally, for purposes of calculating interrater reliability, a separate random sample of ten examples was independently evaluated by all three experts. As recommended by Lombard et al (2002), two indices were selected to determine interrater reliability. In terms of percent of agreement, two of the three raters agreed 100% of the time and all three agreed 60% of the time. Fleiss' kappa (1971) was calculated as 0.87. According to Neuendorf, from a review of "rules of thumb" set out by several methodologists, "coefficients of 0.90 or greater would be acceptable to all, 0.80 or greater would be acceptable in most situations, and the criterion of 0.70 is often used for exploratory research. (Neuendorf, 2002)" More liberal criteria are usually used for the indices known to be more conservative, such as Fleiss' kappa (Lombard et al., 2002). Thus, in the case of this research, a value of 0.87 is considered acceptable.

In the following sections, where appropriate, I will describe how my observations and findings illustrate students' understanding of videogames according to the four contexts for understanding games I defined in Chapter 3.

Samples of Student Participation

I will now present and briefly discuss two contributions made by different students for the same Ontology entry. One of the examples was evaluated positively by the experts and the other was not. My goal isn't to comment on the insight, quality, or general correctness of the contributions. Those issues will be discussed later in the context of the experts' analysis.

Checkpoint

Checkpoints, as defined in the ontology, "are specific (non random and predetermined) places or moments in a game wherein a player is not forced to start completely over if he or she were to lose a chance. This, of course, only applies to those games where the loss of a chance implies having to begin anew (instead of continuing at the place and moment in which the chance was lost). The use of a checkpoint enables the player to start automatically at the checkpoint that is closest to the ending and has been activated or visited.

Different games have different mechanisms for the "activation" of checkpoints. Checkpoints are usually activated simply by reaching them or by explicitly interacting with an object that represents the checkpoint within the level. Each level can have multiple checkpoints." The Checkpoint entry is a low-level entry (i.e., it has no children) and its parent entry is Gameworld Rules.

In the following example, the student describes how checkpoints have been implemented in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. The example also notes how this implementation has additional effects on gameplay (e.g.,. "give 5 extra seconds") that are not considered in the original Ontology definition.

This entry was evaluated positively by the expert reviewers, though they said parts of it should be rewritten for clarity and brevity.

"Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island is a strong example of the checkpoint system. During the levels players encounter 'star hoops', which once jumped through, save the players position in the level at that point. If you die, you are brought back to this point, and there are mutiple star hoops throughout each level which save you place as long as you jump through them. These hoops also increase you star number, or the amount of time you have to retrive the crying baby mario (a clock counts down when you are injured and mario has been displaced, indicacting how many seconds you have to retrive him or essentialy lose a life and start over) - Once you jump through the hoop you are give 5 extra seconds to this time, but only once. So if you die, or lose baby Mario, you are still brought back this spot in the level. It is possible to play past levels, but previous completions of a level do not affect where you star out in the level." ”" Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (strong example)

In the following example, presented as a weak example, the author argues that Tekken 5 does not really have checkpoints. The author explains what happens when the player-controlled character dies in the game, and notes how this is different from the definition of checkpoint. This example was not evaluated positively by the expert evaluators, though it was noted that this example drew the expert to think about improvements that could be made to the Ontology entry.

"There are no real checkpoints in the main game because when a character dies during the arcade mode, they are just prompted to press start before the timer runs out and that person has another go at the stage where they died on. These "Continue?" screens are not a checkpoint because they can appear anywhere along the way in arcade mode and not in specific locations as there are no real locations in the game." ”" Tekken 5 (weak example)

Results

Overall effects and Student Perception

In general, the students were positive about the role they felt the GOP played in the context of the class. Anne felt that "it was a good assignment because it really made you think and try and really think about the aspects of the games you had played."

For the majority of the students, the ontology was a source of definitions. Bert describes that "there were a lot of times where [the instructor] would just be rattling away all these terms, and I would be a little bit scared in my seat, and I would write down what I didn't understand, and I would go home and check it out." Many of these students didn't perceive the GOP as a "living" source with definitions that could be debated, edited and improved.

On the other hand, some students found that using the GOP broadened their understanding of games. Frank noted that "I didn't really think about games along those terms before, and it was nice to have a new perspective on games." Understanding games as the combinations of structural elements of gameplay was novel to them. Anne comments that she "thought the categories were really interesting. I hadn't thought about the breakdown of games before, so I really liked that." Finally, some students felt it was helpful to them in the context of their game design projects. Joe felt that "when you're making a game, there a lot of choices you have to make, and knowing your options made your choices clearer."

Other studies have shown that even though online resources may be public, they will not necessarily be perceived as public by those that are using them (Hudson and Bruckman, 2005; Forte and Bruckman, 2006). This was not the case in my research. Students realized that their participation on the ontology would be visible to people outside of the class as well as the games researchers that regularly worked on the ontology. They realized they were making changes and adding content to a public resource, and that their work had consequences beyond the assignment. In this sense, the assignment was an authentic and legitimate activity.

Mary noted that "I was sort of worried about putting something in that wouldn't fit because it is an editable site, and so I would put something in, and it would be like...oh that's really wrong, I'm going to mess things up for the game researchers." Mike, on the other hand, described how he was concerned with the correctness of his examples because "if somebody were to have put things in categories that they didn't belong, and they weren't corrected, then they might have learned to opposite of what's true."

Navigation and Participation

I hypothesized that the hierarchical structure would prove beneficial to students participation and understanding of the ontology. For many students, this was in fact their primary way of browsing the ontology, and they often started with the entries suggested by the instructor.

However, I found evidence of other popular ways of navigating. Dave describes how "there's a list sorted by alphabetical order, and I just looked through which ones looked more interesting to me" while Chris opted to "just randomly bring a page, just any random page. And this is how I navigated through that because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to add." In addition to a hierarchical style of navigation, students made use of random and indexed navigation.

The choice of navigation is tied to the way that students approached the task of adding strong and weak examples. Some students approached the game ontology with a specific game in mind and then tried to identify entries for which they could use that game as an example (strong or weak).

The other approach was to start from an entry they found particularly interesting or compelling and then try to come up with examples (weak and strong) for it. Students with a game in mind favored indexed and random navigation, while those focused on the entries found the hierarchical scheme more useful.

Supporting Deeper Understanding

Student participation in the GOP also seemed to afford a deeper understanding of videogames according to the contexts outlined in Chapter 3: games in culture (1st context), games and other games (2nd context), games and technology (3rd context), and deconstruction and components (4th context).

Since the purpose of the GOP is to define and organize important structural elements of games, it is perhaps ideally suited for the 4th context of understanding games. Unsurprisingly, I found evidence to support the idea that students are beginning to understand games in this context. As I will explain later, the use of strong and weak examples was especially productive.

Although I didn't find significant evidence of supporting understanding games in the context of culture (first context), there is evidence for the two remaining: games and other games (second context) and games and technology (third context).

In the following example, the contributor argues that Randomness16 is present in Baldur's Gate in the way that attacks are resolved. The example notes that Baldur's Gate's rules system is based on another game whose attacks are resolved by rolling dice. The author of this example is demonstrating an understanding of aspects of Baldur's Gate in context with other games (2nd context).

"In the computer role-playing game Baldur's Gate, the success of a player character's attack is determined probabilistically by rolling a 20-sided dice. Since the rules-system is based on a well-known paper and pencil role-playing game (Dungeons and Dragons), it can be assumed that the players are aware of the probabilities involved." ”" Baldur's Gate (strong example)

I also hypothesized that the use of strong and weak examples would prompt students to reflect on games at a deeper level. Tom discusses that the game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion forced him to explore some issues more deeply.

"It was really challenging to come up with specifically strong and weak examples of things because there were some of them that you could come up with gray areas for. In Oblivion, depending on which version of the game you have, you may get a strong ending or a world exhaustion [referring to the entry Game Ends and its child entry Gameworld Exhaustion], because if you have the PC version you could download more pieces or more modules to increase your game time, and those are all part of the world. So in a sense, the world never really ends." - Tom

16 Randomness is described in the Game Ontology Project as: "the results or resolution of certain events or actions are determined in a probabilistic manner. The probability may or may not be known to the player. Randomness is also known as chance." This entry is a low-level entry (i.e., it has no children entries) whose parent entry is Gameplay Rules.

The use of strong and weak examples in the Ontology helped some students think more deeply about the entries and how they relate to what they see in certain games. In general, they achieved a more nuanced understanding. While coming up with strong examples was generally considered easy by most students, having to identify weak examples and justify their reasoning elicited greater reflection and discussion. Tom's example is also illustrative of how he begins to understand games more deeply. Tom began to consider Oblivion in the 3rd context (games and technology). Here he comments on how the platform on which the game is executed changes the game. Additionally, he is considering two versions of the game, thus also foregrounding issues of the 2nd context (games with respect to other games). Orville also commented how participating in the Ontology made him consider issues of the 3rd context, "I found it interesting that it wasn't just about the software. It was also about the interface and the hardware which I found is an integral part of the game experience. I hadn't thought about that."

In the following weak example for the entry Lives,17 the contributor explains how in Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past there is a health system that isn't represented like other games that have strong examples of Lives. However, there is a non-central game mechanic, capturing a healing fairy in a bottle, which is functionally similar to how Lives work. This example highlights how achieving a deeper understanding of games in the 4th context (deconstruction and components) entails more than just identifying components, but actually understanding how they work and what role they play. In the example below, there is a functional, rather than representational, similarity, thus making for a valuable and insightful example in the Ontology.

"In Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, fairies have healing powers. 'Touching' a fairy will restore some of Link's hearts [the player controlled character], but the fairies can also be captured by use of the bee net. If Link possesses an empty bottle, the fairy can be stored in the bottle for later release/use as normal. Additionally, if a bottled fairy exists in Link's inventory upon depletion of hearts, Link will die, but be immediately resurrected with half of his maximum hearts filled, and gameplay continues. If no fairy is present, the player must reload from a save point. This is a weak example of Lives because Zelda does not have an explicit

17 (abbreviated) Lives represent a measure of opportunities that a player has to succeed in the game. Expenditure (or loss) of a life implies a break in gameplay as opposed to a continuous gameplay experience in which certain attributes may decrease over time. For example, if the character the player controls a shield which is able to take damage (and disappear), it should not be considered a life, since the players' gameplay experience is not interrupted when, say, a missile hits the shield and disappears. The break in gameplay is usually accompanied by a representation of the loss incurred. For example, an animation of the player-controlled avatar falling to the ground in a faint.representation of this concept, the hearts representing Link's health in a similar fashion to Half-Life's health bar. However, when the player has captured a fairy and dies, the resurrection is functionally very similar to what happens in regular games with lives. In this sense, the fairy in the bottle is equivalent to Link having an extra "life" stored away." (weak example)

Challenges

There are many barriers to eliciting participation and collaboration on wiki environments (Guzdial et al., 2002), and our study was not an exception. Many students were not familiar with wikis and the features offered by Mediawiki. This confusion led students to possibly fail to understand that regardless of their activity, the wiki site still contains all the information necessary for grading the assignment. When asked why he didn't edit other people's contributions, Chris comments that "if somebody had put that there, and that was their contribution, then it might not be a good idea to move it for the sake of their grade. If I moved it, it would look like they didn't put something."

Forte and Bruckman (2007) have noted that instructors can find it challenging to assessing collaborative wiki work. So, an alternate hypothesis for understanding students' reticence to collaborate on the wiki is that students believed that removing content from a page would affect the teaching assistants' ability to grade the assignments. Also, having one assignment may have limited the possibilities of students engaging more with the discussions surrounding the entry definitions and value of certain examples. For many students, completing the assignment was an issue of "fire and forget", as there was little incentive to return to the ontology, read what their classmates may have added and possibly refine knowledge created on the site.

Improving the assignment can help with some of this. For example, the assignment could be changed to encourage continued participation. Another approach could be to try similar, but shorter, assignments and have students engage with the GOP more fully over the whole of the course.

A broader issue is how to help students move from viewing knowledge as static and "given" to something that they can help create and define. Essentially, there is a tension between becoming familiarized with the vocabulary, ideas, and concepts in the ontology and realizing that you are participating in refinining, defining those same concepts. For many students, this wasn't a distinction they could articulate. When asked about whether he considered making changes or edits to an entry, and not just adding examples, Joshua recalls "I hadn't thought of that. I guess people could, but then you wouldn't have these standard terms, right?" Kyle also brought up the issue of standardization and positioned his participation in the ontology as one that should reinforce, rather than challenge the status quo of existing definitions, "it's interesting that you standardize terms and that you have specific examples for each term and I guess that we [the students] come in to help shore up the walls or fill in the blanks."

There are alternate hypotheses that might explain students' view of the ontology as static. One is that the way in which the ontology was presented to students may have misled students into assuming a static view of knowledge. Also, students might have viewed their participation in the GOP as peripheral and that, since they were not central members of the project, they were not qualified, or ready, to participate more centrally. However, further evidence is necessary to support these hypotheses.

Contributions to Game Studies

The expert evaluation of the examples written by the students was quite positive. The experts determined that 60% of the examples should remain in the ontology while only 14.5% should be removed (see Table 11). For the remaining examples (25.5%), the experts were ambivalent. Most of the examples, including those the experts thought should remain in the ontology, were judged to need further proofreading and editing. Others could be improved by providing further information that better contextualizes the example with respect to the entry where it appears. For instance, one expert notes, for an example added to the "Boss Challenge" entry (see Table 9), "[I] would like a little more detail on the structure of the 'town' and 'gym leader' situation for those of us who are Pokémon-challenged. I'm guessing you fight people in the town and work your way up to the 'gym leader' boss." Other examples could benefit from the removal of unnecessary commentary or editorial such as the opinion of the relative merits of a game over its sequel. "There's valuable info here, just a little noise around the signal", notes one of the experts (see Table 10). The expert reviewers also found some examples (10% of all examples) that should be changed from strong examples to weak examples or vice versa.

Table 9: User submitted example lacking enough detail

Boss Challenge (Pokémon)

Pokémon is a strong example of a game with Boss Challenges. Usually in every town, the player must defeat the gym leader. Each gym leader has different types of Pokémon such as Water or Fire and different strategies are necessary for defeating each one.

The results of the evaluation were also positive, even when considering only those examples that should be removed. Few examples were considered "non-salvageable" (only 6% of all examples) because they were incorrect or did not apply to the particular ontology entry where they were included. More than half (56%) of those examples evaluated as "should be removed" were considered relevant, but not worth the effort to correct. One of the experts noted, "Sometimes the students didn't seem to find the right words and simply explained the examples very poorly. I found 2 types of 'bad' examples, the least of these were those that were not relevant. Most were relevant but poorly explained."

Table 10: User submitted example with extraneous information

Character Customization (NBA Shootout 2005)

NBA Shootout 2005 provides the player with a flood of features of customization for his or her character. When you start customizing you can first choose the height of your player which also correlates to which position that you would choose. You wouldn't like to put a 5' 4" player in a post position. After you are allowed to choose what skin color you want, color of your eyes, and all the aspects to your uniform that you want. The feature that allows you the most fun though is the feature that allows you to control the body parts of the player. If you want the player to have huge hands, go on ahead. The game allows you to control every aspect of customization which makes this game a strong example of character customization.

When characterizing the contribution made by the examples added by the students, perhaps the single most common feature was that the examples helped add variety to the ontology (58% of all examples). In this case, the criterion for variety was determined at the level of each individual entry. In other words, does the example add variety to the entry in which it appears? Of the examples that added variety, 79% refer to a game that many people have played or know about (46% of all examples), thus making the entry more accessible. When trying to understand a particular entry, it is helpful to have a variety of examples that refer to well-known or popular games so that people are likely to find a game they can relate to their personal experiences.

Variety was also increased through the addition of examples that refer to games that are unusual or rare, yet still important for people to know about. This was the case of 21% of the examples that added variety, in other words, 12% of all examples. Examples that refer to games that are unusual or rare can help broaden students' understanding by drawing attention to games they might not h

When I began working on this research, I was interested in understanding not only the learning issues involved in learning about games but also in somehow validating and arguing for the importance that games have in today's world. Games have recently been the center of a lot of media attention as a causal factor of a lot of society's ills, including youth violence, child obesity, and social alienation (for an overview of recent media coverage refer to ESA, 2008). Having been interested and engaged with games of multiple shapes and sizes for most of my life, I felt compelled to somehow engage with games on their own terms, support their study, and better understand the role they have played, and may continue to play, in society at large. While many are worried about the "effects" of this new medium, for good or for bad, I have wondered what it means to understand them, and through this, begin to explore the relationships between games, the activity of playing games, and the affordances of this medium for expressing and communicating. My big question has therefore been this: What does it mean to understand games, and how can we support learners in developing that understanding?

Table 12 shows the questions I explored to address this question. I began by discussing the importance of achieving a better understanding of the challenges of learning about games (Q1). We know that games aren't necessarily easy to play or easy to learn to play (Gee, 2003; Squire, 2005). We also know that, in general, achieving deep understanding of a domain or subject matter is hard (Bransford et al., 2000). So, what are the particular problems that learners face when learning about games as an expressive medium? What types of challenges will they encounter and how can we address them?

Table 12: Motivating Questions

Q1

What are the challenges of learning about games?

Q2

How can we characterize a naïve understanding of games?

Q3

How can novices leverage knowledge from their personal experiences with videogames to create abstract and deeper knowledge about the medium of videogames, and what may we generalize from this?

Q4

What role can novices play in a professional knowledge-building community of practice?

My initial question (Q1) motivated the importance of understanding the initial understandings and misconceptions that learners may have about games (Q2) and also suggested ideas and possible avenues for addressing the challenges identified. In particular, given the fact that most students have extensive prior experience playing videogames, I chose to explore how we can help learners leverage that knowledge and experience to help them achieve a deeper understanding of videogames (Q3). I chose to explore my third question through the design and use of two online learning environments: GameLog and the Game Ontology Wiki. The idea behind GameLog is to explore how we can support students in getting more out of their experiences with games. In other words, given that students learning about games usually play games, how can we help them improve the potential for learning and deeper understanding of games as an expressive medium that those experiences may have? The idea behind the Game Ontology Project is to explore how we can support students in getting more out of their game experiences. In other words, can their knowledge of games be turned into a resource that may benefit others, as well as themselves? In this last case, I also wanted to explore some of the implications and challenges of providing learners with the opportunity to contribute legitimately contribute to an ongoing game studies research project. In particular, I was interested in exploring the role that novices might play in a professional knowledge-building community of practice (Q4).

In the following sections I will revisit each of the questions I posed and discuss my findings and contributions for each.

Answers to Questions

Q1: What are the challenges of learning about games?

To explore this question, I conducted a qualitative research study in which I performed in-depth interviews with twelve professors and instructors of game studies courses. My results indicate that learning about games can be challenging for multiple reasons. I also found that, in some cases, these challenges also provide opportunities for learning. The general themes I found can be summarized as issues pertaining to the:

1. background of the students,

2. prior experience with videogames,

3. practices and discourse of play,

4. medium of videogames, and the

5. field of game studies.

Issues related to the background of the students

Most students who are taking game classes are drawn to these classes due to their prior and current life experiences with videogames. This means that many game classes attract students from a wide variety of backgrounds. Game classes also attract students who have prior game industry and professional experience, but are looking to complement their years of practical experience with an academic understanding of games. This situation provides the following:

” Challenges for Learning

”" Instructors have a hard time establishing a common level of discourse in class.

”" Students don't necessarily share the same goals.

” Opportunities for Learning

”" Heterogeneity of student backgrounds provides for opportunities to experience different perspectives.

”" In design-based classes, students can bring multiple skills to bear and practice communicational and management skills that will be useful in the workplace.

Issues related to the students' prior experience with videogames

Most students who are taking game classes have extensive prior experience with videogames. Many consider themselves "gamers" or "fans". However, many students' prior experience with videogames, while extensive, are often limited. Students' prior experience with videogames provides the following:

” Challenges for Learning

”" Students have difficulties stepping back from their role as "gamers" or "fans" and reasoning critically, analytically, and taking alternate viewpoints about games.

”" Students find it hard to accept new ideas about games when their judgments are clouded by false assumptions about particular games, game genres, and so on.

”" Students often consider themselves experts in videogames and don't feel they can learn anything new about games, or a game they might have played.

”" Students often view game classes as a means for learning how to use the tools for making games, instead of as a means for learning more about games.

” Opportunities for Learning

”" Students' prior experience can have positive effects on motivation, commitment and dedication to the courses.

”" Students' prior knowledge of videogames can provide them with a rich source of knowledge that can add variety and depth to the game class experience.

Issues related to the students' practices and discourse of play

Most students who are taking game classes, due to their extensive prior experience, can rapidly and easily learn to play new games. They have a good feel for gameplay aspects and are also often quite successful at playing games. With regards to their experience surrounding the practice of play, students often encounter the following:

” Challenges

”" Students often confuse being successful at the play of a game with having insight or deep understanding of a game.

”" Students often confuse analyzing a game with listing the features a game may have with their opinion of each.

”" Despite the ease with which students can play games, they often have difficulties expressing ideas about gameplay and articulating their experience with games.

”" Students are generally lacking in models of what appropriate academic or critical discourse surrounding games looks like. Additionally, they lack the vocabulary for describing what they observe and understand.

”" Students find it difficult to learn new modes of play such as playing for analysis or for design.

Issues related to the characteristics and particularities of the medium of the videogame

Videogames have been described as a medium with particular qualities. For example, much has been made of the participatory nature of the medium of videogames (see for example Murray, 1997). This quality, interactivity, could have profound implications. Videogames have also, arguably, played an important role in the development and adoption of computing technology (Burnham, 2001). The technological platforms on which videogames are executed have also rapidly evolved and improved in terms of processing capabilities, storage capacity, graphics, and so on. The characteristics of the medium, together with the technological platform on which they are executed influence learning about videogames in the following ways:

” Challenges

”" "Accessing the content" of a game (i.e. fully experiencing it) requires knowing how to play a game. Students unfamiliar with a game thus need to first learn how to play it before they can begin to deal with other issues.

”" Playing videogames is time-consuming. This makes playing games assigned for classes challenging, especially if there is no prior experience with the game in question.

”" It is often assumed that students have prior experience with the games that will be studied and analyzed in class and it isn't always the case that students will have that experience.

”" Rapidly evolving technological platforms make it challenging to provide access to older games, especially in their original (often obsolete) hardware incarnations.

”" Students' judgment is often clouded by false assumptions and nostalgia related to older games.

Issues related to role and influence of the field of game studies

Game studies is a nascent discipline dedicated to studying digital games and associated phenomena. As an emergent field, it is still in the process of establishing its identity (Mäyrä, 2005), and is wrestling with what its fundamental concepts, ideas, and theoretical models should be. The existence of a formal field of study, together with its newness, plays the following role in learning about games:

” Challenges

”" Professors and instructors are often figuring out what the "fundamentals" are (or should be) and there is a perceived lack of established canon to refer to.

” Opportunities

”" Students feel a great liberty to question and criticize what they read and learn and thus engage in the dialectic and fluid nature of the field.

”" The field of game studies is accessible for participation and also publication.

Q2: How can we characterize a naïve understanding of games?

By synthesizing many of the findings related to the challenges of learning about games, I can provide a characterization of a naïve understanding of games (Q2). Understanding the common misconceptions and initial understandings faced by learners is important if we expect students to learn (Donovan et al., 1999). Furthermore, we can use this knowledge to guide the design of learning environments that leverage and engage learners' misconceptions. For example, cognitive tutors for supporting algebra learning take advantage of the typical problems learners face and use this knowledge to support learners when they make mistakes (Anderson et al., 1995). Linn and colleagues' work on the Knowledge Integration Environment explicitly addressed students' naïve understanding of light in the design of the models they chose to design (Linn et al., 1998). My research contributes to our understanding of how we can support learning about games by providing a characterization of a naïve understanding of games. Summarizing, someone with a naïve understanding of games will often:

1. Confuse being insightful about a game with being successful at playing a game.

2. Describe a game superficially.

”" Focus on the features of a game over describing the rhetoric of a game or the experience of playing it (e.g. "this game has hi-res graphics", "the game has a ton of maps to play").

”" Describe a game judgmentally rather than analytically (e.g., "this game sucks", "this game is cool").

3. Assume that people experience a game the same way they do.

4. Be familiar with specific genres or types of games, but have a narrow view of the medium.

5. Think they can't learn anything new from games they've already played.

This characterization can be used for the design of learning environments for supporting learning about games as well as to address issues regarding the design of curricula in games education.

As with my research on the challenges of learning about games, my characterization of a naïve understanding of games is just a beginning. In further research it would be interesting to explore the potential differences between students who are novices to playing games and those who self-identify as "gamers" or "fans". Do novice game players also share many of the misunderstandings about games that are commonly seen in popular press media (i.e. "games are only for kids")? Further research is also necessary begin to identify the reasons behind some of the evidence for naïve understanding in people learning about games. Do some students naively describe games superficially because of what they read about games? What role, if any, do game reviews play?

Q3: How can novices leverage knowledge from their personal experiences with videogames to create abstract and deeper knowledge about the medium of videogames, and what may we generalize from this?

Given the challenges identified (Q1) and a characterization of a naïve understanding of games (Q2), how can we help learners leverage that knowledge and experience to help them achieve a deeper understanding of videogames (Q3)? Prior experience plays an important and valuable role in learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Schank et al., 1999; Bransford et al., 2000). This is particularly so when the learner has personally meaningful connections with what is to be learned as the learner will then engage more attentively (Papert, 1980). Thus, students' extensive personal histories with videogames can be an asset in learning about games. The literature suggests strategies for leveraging experiences such as encouraging reflection and providing new contexts where knowledge from experience can be applied (for an overview, see Bransford et al., 2000). I therefore explored this question through the design and use of two online learning environments: GameLog and the Game Ontology Wiki.

GameLog

GameLog is an online environment designed to support blogging of gameplay experiences. It is designed to support reflective game playing and thus, a deeper understanding of videogames. From a study in which GameLog was used as part of the regular curriculum in two university game classes, I found that blogging about gameplay experiences:

” Affords opportunities for students to reflect on their gameplaying activities.

” Affords personal expression, communication, and collaboration with other students as students share opinions and see what others think.

” Allows students to contextualize their understanding of games.

” Can be an enjoyable experience for students as well as foster a deeper appreciation for games.

I also found that blogging about gameplay affords a deeper understanding of games with respect to the four contexts for understanding games I outlined in Chapter 3: in the context of human culture, other games, the technological platform, and by deconstructing them and understanding their components. Additionally, blogging about gameplay:

” Affords the exploration of multiple perspectives and viewpoints.

” Affords the development of an inquiry of gameplay where students can begin to formulate questions, plans, hypotheses, and investigations they can pursue during their gameplay sessions.

My findings also suggest that the structure of the GameLog assignment played an important role in affording a deeper understanding of games. Students were asked to play a game on three occasions and then write three entries on that experience. I found that writing on multiple occasions encourages students to write different things each time, helps them focus their attention on specific details, provides the opportunity to plan, investigate, and follow up on ideas, and also affords revisiting a game under different lenses. The iterative design of the assignment was thus important in promoting skills and practices that are important for seriously understanding games. In traditional learning environments, students usually get only one chance to "get it right", before moving on to the next assignment. Writing on multiple occasions about the same game helps incorporate iterative practices that have shown useful positive learning benefits in other contexts, such as science learning (Kolodner et al., 1998).

The use of GameLog also highlighted the importance of providing students with multiple opportunities to practice the skills they need to develop together with providing them with occasions to reflect and articulate their ideas at a level that is closer to their observations and experience. It is too often the case that learning activities privilege the end products, like a mid-term report, over the activities that act in support of that end product. Although the quality of the students writing was "informal" in terms of quality (e.g., poor grammar, very informal, etc.), the experience of blogging undoubtedly helped students create the "raw materials" on which their deeper understanding could build upon. In this sense, blogging, as a reflective activity, can help students bridge the gap between experience and understanding.

Game Ontology Wiki

The GOP, which resides on the Game Ontology Wiki, is developing a game ontology that identifies the important structural elements of games, relationships between them, and organizes them hierarchically (Zagal et al., 2007). I conducted a study in which students were invited to participate and contribute to the GOP as part of their regular curriculum. In particular, students were asked to provide examples to existing ontology entries from games they were familiar with. I found that participating in a knowledge-building environment like the GOP:

” Affords opportunities for students to reflect on specific characteristics or aspects of games they have played.

” Provided students with a source for definitions and concepts about games and gameplay.

” Can be an enjoyable experience for students as well as foster a deeper appreciation for games.

I also found that providing strong and weak examples to existing ontology entries affords a deeper understanding of games. Participating in the GOP affords a deeper understanding of games with respect to the three of the four contexts for understanding games I outlined in Chapter 3: in the context of other games, the technological platform, and by deconstructing them and understanding their components. Participating in the GOP facilitates a deeper understanding of games by helping students:

” Establish connections between experiential knowledge of games and the abstract concepts and ideas in the ontology.

” Think about games from the perspective of structural elements of gameplay.

As in earlier research of participation in wiki environments (Guzdial et al., 2002), I found certain challenges that posed barriers to student participation. Despite student familiarity with features of wiki environments, I found that students may not necessarily understand the implications of certain of these features. For example, students often refrained from editing their peers' contributions in fear of adversely affecting the teaching assistant's ability to grade the assignments. Aditionally, some students viewed the knowledge on the ontology as static and "given". In this sense, students interpreted their participation in the ontology as one that should reinforce, rather than challenge the status quo of existing definitions. Although there is some evidence that computer-supported learning environments may help change students' epistemological beliefs (Chan, 1999; Elen and Clarebout, 2001), it is still important that researchers and instructors be aware of the socio-cognitive and socio-cultural factors, including student beliefs and attitudes, that may influence the success of these kinds of learning experiences (Chan and Van Aalst, 2003).

Another important aspect of the students' participation in the GOP has to do with the fact that it was an authentic game studies research project. I will discuss issues of authenticity, legitimacy, and the role student participation played in the ontology in the context of my fourth question.

Q4: What role can novices play in a professional knowledge-building community of practice?

Authentic participation, in the context of learning, has been described as important for promoting learning and deeper understanding (Shaffer and Resnick, 1999). In the context of a knowledge-building community such as the Game Ontology Wiki, what exactly constitutes authentic participation? From Lave and Wenger's characterization of the role of novices in professional communities of practice, we get the notion that novices engage in menial activities that are important and necessary to the community (Lave and Wenger, 1991).

I conducted a study in which students were invited to participate and contribute to the GOP as part of their regular curriculum. In particular, students were asked to provide examples to existing ontology entries from games they were familiar with. With regard to the role novices played as part of this experience, I found that:

” Students felt they contributed meaningfully to the ontology.

” Students contributed legitimately to the ontology by adding knowledge that enriched the Game Ontology.

” Students contributed legitimately to the ontology by helping push expert thinking in new directions.

Other Issues and Findings

Over the course of this research I have encountered other issues and findings that don't fit as cleanly or neatly under the umbrella of the specific questions I outlined earlier. In the following sections I outline some of these.

Motivation

The attraction kids feel towards playing games is often cited as one of the reasons for studying and understanding them. If we could somehow leverage the motivational power of games for the purposes of improving our schools, learning "wouldn't be a problem". Some of the earliest research on the use of videogames for learning focused on identifying and characterizing the intrinsically motivating qualities of videogames (Malone, 1980; Malone, 1981; Cordova and Lepper, 1996).

Unfortunately, as Joseph and Nacu noted (2003), the medium by itself generally isn't enough. Games aren't necessarily easy to play or easy to learn to play (Gee, 2003; Squire, 2005). Squire, for example, found when introducing the strategy game Civilization III into curricula, that "students were anything but immediately motivated. In part, this lack of motivation resulted from the fact that most students needed six to seven hours of gameplay to understand even the most basic game concepts.

Although after-school students were less resistant and more motivated to learn the game, roughly 25% of students in school situations complained that the game was too hard, complicated, and uninteresting, and they elected to withdraw from the gaming unit and participate in reading groups instead (Squire, 2005)."

So, what role does motivation play in the context of learning about games? In my research, I found that students who choose to learn about games generally are interested in them and also have considerable background experience and personally meaningful connections to games. These characteristics, in principle, are an ideal combination. However, as in Squire's findings (Squire, 2005), I found that motivation cannot, and should not, be considered a "silver bullet" with the power to engage students and help keep them "focused on their learning".

Regardless of the activity or the medium, motivation is something that will wax and wane. In a learning environment there are simply too many issues, all of them interrelated, for it to be possible to isolate one and hope to solve everything. Motivation is one ingredient among many. In many cases, addressing a lack of motivation may be the first thing that needs to be addressed. However, for a learning environment to be successful, a host of other ingredients also need to be in place in the right amounts.

Expertise

When I approached this research, I assumed that students studying and learning about videogames were experts on videogames. Studying expert videogame players as they learned about games seemed an interesting scenario to explore, and I was curious about the possible challenges they might face.

When I conducted the preliminary study on the challenges faced by students learning about videogames, I was surprised by the challenges students faced. Summarizing:

” An expert player isn't necessarily more insightful, and might even be less so than a novice player.

” Expert players are often blind to broader issues of videogames.

” Player's expertise is often very specific, limited to certain types of games, and often full of gaps.

” Expert players aren't often comparable to each other due to the wide variety of games, game types, skills required to play, and technological platforms they are familiar with.

The expertise students had was often counter-productive and hindered their learning more than it helped them. While this raises challenges for the instructors, it also raises the question of what expertise, exactly, these students have. There is a need for a more nuanced perspective of what we mean by "game expert".

Crowley and Jacobs (2002) define an island of expertise as "any topic in which children happen to become interested and in which they develop relatively deep and rich knowledge." Perhaps "expert gamers" could be considered as having some sort of island of expertise surrounding videogames? Crowley and Jacobs suggest that these areas of connected interest and understanding create "abstract and general themes" that become the basis of further learning, both within and around the original topic area, and potentially in domains further afield. However, what would those abstract and general themes be in the case of games?

As I described in Chapter 4, students are often experts at playing games and have considerable knowledge of how to interact with games. However, the islands of expertise built around game playing do not necessarily connect with discourse and deep understanding of game studies.

College-age students learning about videogames are significantly different than the children Crowley and Jacobs describe. Islands of expertise, they argue, develop as the culmination of a long series of collaborative interactions that are opportunistic and relatively unremarkable when viewed individually, but which collectively create a powerful linkage between understanding and interest (Crowley and Jacobs, 2002). These islands of expertise are constructed using explanatoids: short fragments of explanatory talk, typically between parent and child.

In the case of videogame experts, this explanatory talk probably arises from communication with peers as well as from people they interact with while playing games. It would be interesting to track what game players learn in this way. It would also be interesting to explore what kinds of islands of expertise develop when one has a game designer or a games studies scholar as a parent or companion while playing. More research is still necessary to better understand the types of knowledge that videogame experts have and how this knowledge was created.

Conclusions

Having re-visited my findings for each of my questions, I now return to my main motivating question: What does it mean to "understand" games and how can we support learners in developing that understanding?

The medium of games is developing at a rapid pace. Many of the games currently available on the market would have been inconceivable, technically and creatively, ten years ago. Developing a deep understanding of videogames can be likened to chasing a moving target, since ideas and notions of what games are and what meanings they can convey are continually being challenged and negotiated. It only takes one new game to radically change your understanding of the possibility space of the medium as a whole. Games that birth new genres and explore novel gameplay ideas are designed, developed, and released at a rate that many would consider alarming. From this perspective, it is perhaps unsurprising that I found that both novice game players as well as "gamers" experienced challenges to understanding games.

Generally speaking, novices at playing games found the issues related to learning about the medium to be more problematic. On the other hand, "gamers" seem to have more issues from their practices and discourse of play as well as their prior experience with videogames. Arguably, the issues faced by novice game players will "go away" as new generations grow up in environments where videogames are increasingly prevalent. In other words, novices to games will become rarer.

However, videogames are changing too much, and too fast, for us to assume that many of the challenges of learning about games will be solved simply by broader exposure to games as a medium. Essentially, many of today's "gamers" are novices with respect to the games that were current 10 years ago. In this sense, the skills, experience, and knowledge they have are quite limited when considering the broader picture of the medium.

Also, given the rapid pace at which the medium is growing and developing, current "gamers" are rapidly "left behind", becoming novices with respect to the newest and latest games.

These issues highlight the importance of looking for solutions that are, for the most part, independent of focusing on supporting learning about games as they are currently understood. Rather, we should explore ways of helping learners make sense of games as they are currently understood while also preparing them to make sense of the games that are yet to be invented. This requires learning better how to help them use their understanding of what currently is to envision and create what could be.

In GameLog, I showed how blogging can be used to help students reflect on their experiences and thus gain new insights from them as well as help them begin to approach future experiences with new perspectives. In the Game Ontology Wiki, I showed how participating in an ongoing research project by adding new knowledge can be used as a way to help students establish connections between their knowledge and the concepts and ideas developed as part of the research project. By participating in an ongoing project, students could also gain visibility into knowledge building as a way of understanding, and creating new understanding.

However, the experience of adding new knowledge and participating in a knowledge-building enterprise contrasts with the evidence I found supporting the notion that students perceived the ontology as a static source. In particular, this notion seems to contradict the current rhetoric in which youth are becoming "digital" and increasingly accustomed to create, re-create, and re-interpret their experiences with media by mixing, recombining, editing, and mashing-up new artifacts from previous ones (Jenkins, 2006).

So perhaps we were too quick to propose "re-mixing" as a way of understanding and creating new understanding? I think not. There are other explanations for my observations. One possibility is that students viewed their participation in the GOP as peripheral and that, since they were not central members of the project, they were not qualified or ready to participate more centrally.

Students may have perceived that proposing and editing ontology entries was an activity better left to "the experts" rather than appropriately open to all. It is also possible that the "school" context is what essentially misled the students into assuming a static view of knowledge. As Barab and Duffy (2000) describe, "all too frequently, school culture accords knowledgeable skill a reified existence, commodifying it, and turning knowledge into something to be 'acquired'." Further research is needed to better understand whether or not this experience was isolated and what role the object of study (games) and the structure of the assignment may have played.

My work also shows another perspective on the notion of helping learners make sense of games as they are currently understood while preparing them to make sense of the games yet to be invented: help learners by allowing them to help the experts as well. I have shown how we can support an emergent field in defining the language and vocabulary necessary to developing a common understanding of its objects of study. We can do this by allowing novices in the field to participate in knowledge building with experts and also contribute to the growth of the field.

However, we do not know in what ways this result depends on the fact that the field of game studies is new and rapidly evolving. My research indicates that some of the factors that played an important role in this experience include the degree of established theory of the field, the relative experience of the experts, the knowledge and experience of novices with regard to the subject matter, and the personal relevance of the subject matter to the novices' lives. In the case of game studies, we have a field with little established theory concerning subject matter that is close and personal to novices' lives. In this sense, game studies, as a discipline, is "close" to the average "gamer". This "closeness" makes it easier to create spaces of shared discourse where new understandings can be created.

Designing environments that can bring novices and experts together is not trivial. For example, as I discussed in earlier sections, novices often face significant challenges to participation. Kids as Global Scientists (KGS) is an example of an environment that successfully overcomes many of these challenges.

In KGS, students collect local weather data, collaborate with peers and are also mentored by professional scientists (Songer, 1996). In BioKIDS, kids collect information regarding the distribution and behavior of animals in their neighborhood (Parr et al., 2002). The data collected by students in BioKIDS can potentially be used by biologists. In the case of KGS, it isn't clear in what ways the expert mentors may have benefitted from the experience. In BioKIDS, even if student-collected data was used by experts, it isn't clear if the students are aware of what eventually becomes of their work. In each of these projects, demonstrated positive learning effects notwithstanding, there seems to be an unrealized potential for creating a space for meaningful contributions to a broader community or discipline.

Meaningful contributions can be understood as a particular perspective of the term "authenticity" in learning. Shaffer and Resnick found that, in general, there are four "kinds" of authentic learning (1999): (1) learning that is personally meaningful to the learner, (2) learning that relates to the real-world outside school, (3) learning that provides an opportunity to think in the modes of a particular discipline, and (4) learning where the means of assessment reflect the learning process.

Shaffer and Resnick argue for the importance of achieving all of these to promote engagement, learning, and deep understanding. My work has primarily focused on issues related to the first three kinds of authenticity. In particular, I have been able to combine the 2nd and 3rd kinds of authentic learning described above by providing opportunities for learners to contribute to their discipline. This form of authenticity helps establish a connection between the learner and an existing community of practice. If we understand learning as a process of enculturation and identification with a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991), the legitimacy of the contribution a novice may make could be a critical component of the learning experience. It is educationally valuable when novice scientists engage in scientific thinking as scientists do; it can be even more so when they do science that is useful to science itself.

The particular contribution of allowing for meaningful contributions comes from strengthening the ties between learners and novices and a community of practice. The community of practice benefits in two ways: from the contributions made by the novices and, indirectly, from the greater ties and connections that are established between this community and potential future members. The community of practice also benefits from the greater, and stronger, ties it may create with a broader sociocultural environment.

In the same way that the Samba schools of Brazil are successful learning environments due to the tight dialogue they maintain with Brazilian culture and society (Zagal and Bruckman, 2005), emergent fields can be supported by helping them establish these closer ties, provide broader mechanisms for legitimate participation, and allow for greater diversity of its participants.

I argue that GameLog and the Game Ontology Wiki are an example of this kind of support. I also argue that this is, perhaps where the key to supporting understanding and learning about games lies. We know that learning rarely happens in isolation and in a sense, learning is about removing isolation. Learning is about establishing links and bridges. In the case of games, I have discussed the challenges of making connections between personal experiences with games and abstract concepts and ideas. I have also talked about establishing links between the games that exist now, the ones that existed before, and the ones that are yet to exist. Establishing links between novices and experts has also been a theme of my work. Are there other links left to explore? Of course there are. For example, the game industry isn't particularly fond of research academia. Academic work is usually considered dry, overly general, or incompatible with current market trends. Research either discusses concepts that require technology that aren't available for mass-market adoption, or they obsess over gameplay and ideas that are considered dated and thoroughly explored by the industry. How could we support a greater understanding of games by bridging these two communities?

In this sense, having a deep understanding of games is more than being able to analyze games in a meaningful way, know how, and why, games help create certain experiences and evoke certain emotions and feelings in its players. It is also more than knowing how games are used, and can be used, as an expressive medium, or being able to engage in informed discussions on the merits (or lack thereof) of a particular game. Understanding games is about having the ability to establish connections between games and between games and anything else. Supporting learning about games is thus about facilitating these connections.

Future Work

GameLog

As I write this, GameLog is being used as part of the regular coursework of games classes at three different institutions of higher learning. In addition to the need for maintaining the software and ensuring that the site remains functionally usable, this unsolicited and non-advertised interest in the use of GameLog raises a series of questions. How does the way GameLog is used and adopted in each of these classes affect what students learn? What happens when students from each of these different classes, each with different learning goals and pedagogical objectives, interact with each other? What can they discuss with each other? As I noted in Chapter 5, one of GameLog's contributions is that it provides students with the opportunity to share opinions and collaborate in creating a shared understanding. It is an open question whether or not this will continue to happen felicitously when there are significantly more students using the system, and these students don't all share the same educational context and goals.

Additionally, the instructors of the different courses are adapting the assignments in which students use GameLog for the particular needs of their courses. In Chapter 5 I showed that not all the studen

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JOSÉ P. ZAGAL

Dr. José P. Zagal is a game designer, scholar, and researcher. He is Assistant Professor at the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University where he teaches game design and ethics. His research work explores the development of frameworks for describing, analyzing, and understanding games from a critical perspective to help inform the design of better games. He is also interested in supporting games literacy through the use of collaborative learning environments. Dr. Zagal is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations and the Journal of the Canadian Gaming Studies Organization. He is also a member of the executive board of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). José received his PhD in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008, his M.Sc. in engineering sciences and a B.S. in industrial engineering from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1999 and 1997.