What does it mean to be gaming literate?
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Gaming literacy involves more than just understanding games as systems or stories. It means using games to develop agency through understanding systems, empathy through engaging with stories, and choosing to play in a way that promotes compassion over selfishness or antagonism. Being gaming literate means recognizing that our choices and values in games can impact the future, so we should critically interrogate games and always work to rebel against values that don't promote coexistence.
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What does it mean to be gaming literate?
- 1. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE GAMING LITERATE? A series of questions and partial answers for MMSEE 2017 Mark Chen, University of Washington | @mcdanger | markdangerchen@gmail.com markdangerchen.net | esotericgaming.com
- 6. I’m wasting my time. You’re wasting your time!
- 7. Whatevs
- 16. Knowing how to read and write? LITERACY?
- 17. Knowing how to read and write? LITERACY?
- 18. Knowing how to read and write? Not KNOWING anything. Only DOING. LITERACY?
- 19. PARTICIPATION DOING --> material setting across texts and objects. Expertise is not all in your head! (Games) Literacy as VERBS
- 29. THE SECRET WORLD
- 46. OK. But literacy as material participation is a general definition. What do GAMES offer?
- 47. WHAT ARE GAMES?
- 48. SYSTEMS
- 54. STORIES
- 63. What does it mean to be good at games? Understanding SYSTEMS
- 64. What does it mean to be good at games? Understanding SYSTEMS = Pattern recognition
- 65. What does it mean to be good at games? Understanding SYSTEMS = Pattern recognition = Learning
- 66. What does it mean to be good at games? Understanding SYSTEMS = Pattern recognition = Learning = Fun
- 67. What does it mean to be good at games? Meaning out of STORIES
- 68. What does it mean to be good at games? Meaning out of STORIES = Relating to events and characters
- 69. What does it mean to be good at games? Meaning out of STORIES = Relating to events and characters = Connecting experiences
- 70. What does it mean to be good at games? Meaning out of STORIES = Relating to events and characters = Connecting experiences = Learning
- 71. Understanding SYSTEMS -> Ability to make meaningful choices
- 72. Understanding SYSTEMS -> Ability to make meaningful choices Making Meaning from STORIES -> Ability to make meaningful connections
- 73. Understanding SYSTEMS -> Agency Making Meaning from STORIES -> Empathy
- 74. MEANINGFUL PLAY Playing is BELIEVING in something. Believing that choices matter. Believing that the self matters. Believing in a future.
- 75. MEANINGFUL PLAY WHAT IS THAT FUTURE? We make connections when we play. To systems, to others. It’s not just my future. It’s THE future. The future of everything. It’s EVERYONE’S future.
- 76. BUT AGENCY AND EMPATHY ARE NOT ENOUGH. We also make connections to VALUES through our actions. We therefore have a choice.
- 77. BUT AGENCY AND EMPATHY ARE NOT ENOUGH. Do we play a selfish game or a collective game? Do we believe the world is fundamentally antagonistic or do we believe we’re able to coexist and thrive? I choose the latter.
- 78. BUT AGENCY AND EMPATHY ARE NOT ENOUGH. For me, games are about COMPASSION, not just EMPATHY.
- 79. GAMING LITERACY MATTERS Our choices do matter. Our values therefore also matter. We make informed choices based on our understanding of the systems we inhabit and the connections we see.
- 80. GAMING LITERACY MATTERS It behooves us to be critical, to always interrogate, to doubt, to never settle, to rebel and be subversive. ALWAYS. WE MUST ALWAYS BE GAMING.
- 83. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE GAMING LITERATE? A series of questions and partial answers for MMSEE 2017 Mark Chen, University of Washington | @mcdanger | markdangerchen@gmail.com markdangerchen.net | esotericgaming.com
Editor's Notes
- Image free to use from: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/993646/alien-frontiers
- As a kid… (tho obv this is a newish photo)
- Here’s an actual photo from when I was a kid. (I’m the DM.)
- As a kid…
- Adults in my life were always warning me that I was wasting my time playing games.
- So much so that I internalized it. But I was naturally academically capable and able to efficiently do that so I could make time for games.
- After college...
- I got a job doing techie artsy stuff for a science museum.
- I eventually recognized that my work life and my play life had converged. All that time spent playing games growing up helped me design games for science.
- I decided to go to grad school to learn how to make my games for learning better.
- Once in grad school, I got sidetracked into studying how players learn teamwork in online games. The story of these players is deeply seated in new ways of thinking about learning and literacy. I wrote a dissertation turned book for Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s series on new literacies.
- So, what do I mean by new literacies?
- Much of this may be familiar to you, but the short of it is that traditional views of literacy considers it the ability to read and write.
- But what does this actually mean? It’s not the crux of it.
- Taking a cue from science and technology studies methodologies, evidence for literacy is born out of doing things, not knowing things.
- Doing is participating in a community. Literacy then is socially defined and the community sets standards for what counts and how it manifests. This shifts focus of what constitutes literacy to what does the practice of literacy look like? From nouns to verbs.
- Example 1: The materialness of raiding in WoW...
- Clear example of games as a form a literacy… Even going by the knowing stuff definition… But in terms of practice, it takes quite some time of sophisticated play to understand what’s going on here and to also curate for yourself which add-ons to install, etc.
- Expertise wasn’t just the stuff you knew, but also *how* you did the things you did AND what stuff you used in that doing.
- These are screenshots of a strategy guide for a particular fight in WoW.
- Specifically, the use of charts and meters to monitor and assess play is something that comes out of authentic practice. Much more about these things can be found in my book.
- Example 2: A more recent example of cross-texts literacy in games can be found in The Secret World, which I delved into again earlier this year. This MMO is different than WoW in that there are many quests in the game that aren’t a string of auto-pilot sorts of tasks.
- One specific quest where you have to decipher morse code is a good example.
- DROP LOCATION
- Another thing about TSW: In-game urls go to real websites...
- And it’s got lots of things like this! Cryptographs
- Here, I’m using an external text editor to decode the message.
- Exporting in-game map to mark it up...
- Drawing on the map, using a third-party app, lets us see the location for certain quests or hidden messages/objects in the game.
- Example 3: Literacy as material practice can be found in tabletop gaming, too. Image of dice from barefootliam’s deviant art page.
- Here’re some typical D&D resources.
- A mockup of a D&D setup.
- Another setup.
- So far, I’ve mostly just been showing how gaming spans across multiple material resources. This is a general definition of literacy, though… what does gaming in particular have to offer?
- Image free to use: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1100134/eclipse Eclipse
- XCOM2 screenshot by author
- Image by killerdecoy from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC4BV2ODDjI The Division
- Image from: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1511263/catan Settlers of Catan
- Image from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Awesomenauts_-_Screenshot_06.jpg Civ 6
- Image from Marvin Boyd on YouTube, Eve Online
- Gone Home
- Some stories are designed experiences by the game developers: Gone Home
- The Walking Dead
- Banner Saga
- Cart Life
- Papers, Please
- Depression Quest
- Archer game at the Ballard Board Game Meetup Group
- So, to me the best games are systems and stories.
- The systems part of gaming points to systems thinking and pattern recognition as the valued activity.
- The stories part of gaming means that making connections between experiences is valued.
- They’re both about meaning making. One is understanding how something works, the other is understanding. And, again, the process in which these meanings occur comes out of material practice.
- These things are really other ways of saying agency and empathy.
- Ultimately, for all this to work, players have to believe in some imagined better future.
- Lately, I’ve been challenged to wonder whether these are enough for educators to value in gaming, though… It’s one thing to understand and gain agency in systems and empathy with others, but where you take that understanding matters. We therefore need not just people who understand, but people who care.
- IE. it’s possible to leverage the agency and empathy learned through games to one’s advantage. But it’s also possible to see it as a way to collectively make change.
- IE. games should be about compassion, not just empathy.
- It’s all about choice. The choices we make based on our understanding suggests that we need to be ever critical of the systems in place.
- We must always be gaming. To game is to understand, to act on that understanding, and to question whether the game should be changed or meta-gamed by cobbling together disparate parts similarly to the add-ons and material resources used to play MMOs.
- About Mark
- plug!
- Image free to use from: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/993646/alien-frontiers