I noticed that the female non-playable characters were all wearing short skirts, while the male non-playable characters wore long pants

While playing the game I remained cognizant of how female characters were being portrayed.

a Pokémon type chart

This game had something new that others didn’t, it lets you know when you’ve acquired all the Pokémon on a certain route. I could not continue until I caught them all.

mostly because of this week’s reading topic

In spirit of Pokémon’s 20th anniversary (February 27, 2016) I am playing Pokémon Alpha Sapphire on a Nintendo 3DS for this cycle’s play journal.

are proven educational effectiveness and overall impact on student learning outcomes.

of the transfer of knowledge

This would align with the assumed character/ narrative that exists.

Just the observation of a child using another skilled player as a resource as opposed to utilizing the programs "tutorial", gives the player more control over how she learns to play the game, rather be directed by the software.

How this question is answered could, in a sense, direct the overall development of the educational gaming market.

to applied practice in the classroom

"Bring Your own Device" policies at school.

If gaming literacies, levels the playing friend, providing equitable learning opportunities, how can we more effectively recruit students to be apart of that team?

What are the ongoing implications of STEM/ STEAM development using gaming principles in the classroom?

tudents in the "clubhouse" likely were able to work with one another to support them.

STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and math) studies in the K-12 arena

that apply to technically creative career paths in design and media.

I want to see what people have to say about why they might stop playing, as well as what brings them back to the game (and, apparently, the affinity space).

Mods appear to be a big part of the gaming experience with KSP

 I’m actually really into the development notes, which they try and release weekly – the notes are a good insight into the overall communication lines between the “game” (i.e., the people who are responsible for the base game) and the community at large.

People are generally ready to cheer each other on, which gives forums a positive vibe

 I look forward to exploring them more when I have a better understanding of terminology and game mechanics.

reliably ended in me nose-diving a space ship into the ground.

using the KSP Wiki, starting with the parts page

Well, I can’t say that I’m now a rocket scientist

that works with people’s interests rather than trying to force them a certain direction with a lot of flash and sleight of hand.

(I did, by the way, think that Bogost’s longer chapter from The Gameful World was really helpful for a deeper reading).

 I plan on utilizing some broader search methods and also tapping my peer network to see if anyone has good leads on where to find well-constructed research in this area.

and I think this lends itself to stronger, more open conversation.

need to figure out some new strategies for staying on top of it, but I’m feeling please with the experience and challenged in a constructive way.

Surprisingly… most of the time, it feels pretty good.

 I traveled downtown to join members of my cohort in playing a game

All of these things are rarely typical for people to experience while attending a lecture, or doing homework, or sitting in a classroom quietly writing.

are used for adult learning

Both types of reflective play session practices resulted in better understanding of the games we studied.

“In Game, In Room, In World,” captured the “multiplicity” of settings and how games and learning is situated by social context.

would not have been achieved by use of LMS discussion or solitary engagement with texts.

This drives the discussion forward in a way I’ve never experienced before and in a way that was motivating to engage with a text.

to annotate a live document.

without really being totally cognizant.

Perhaps it’s more important to teach students how to critique cultural artifacts, such as a video game, rather than to passively engage with it?

That’s why “gender neutral” games often times offer the best possible learning scenario without biases.

can be sexist (among many other negative things)

however these portrayals may be the result of systemic sexism in society as a whole and gender roles and identities crafted and perpetuated by consumer culture, religions, governments, educational institutions, sports, etc.

As games are considered by many a form of art, like film, can portray extremely sexist depictions.

For starters, game developers may employ more females as part of their development team. Or provide equal play testing scenarios for both men and women in order to assess a game’s appeal to both sexes.

Assuming it’s the intent of the developers to make the highest possible monetary return on the product.

genders

if I can connect the dots between gender and videogames

works by Ian Bogost

who use it as an educational tool for their kids

Police responded by stating that they would not do any type of screening whatsoever for firearms because of Utah's concealed-carry laws

the UC Santa Barbara shootings committed by Elliot Rodger this past May

will hopefully help to inspire more creative writing

We can be critical of the things that we love. That is possible. 

It's straightforward textual analysis. I'm looking at patterns and presenting evidence and arguments to back up those claims.

but I didn't know how to explain it.

It was my way of pulling feminist theory out of academia into a more public space for a wider audience.

she canceled a speaking engagement at Utah State University after an anti-feminist detractor threatened a mass shooting when police refused to search attendees for weapons, citing the state's concealed-carry law.

we are not fucking Mario racing to the castle to beat Bowser because we know there’s a princess in there waiting for us.

I’ve heard it come out of my own mouth, in moments of anger and weakness.

their inner John Galt

Like life is a video game and women, like money and status, are just part of the reward we get for doing well.

graduate students

Remi Holden

Yahoo! Lecture Series, Univ. of Michigan School of Information, Jan 2013, Ann Arbor, MI

“Looking at an online textbook that is really just still a textbook—it just happens to be online.”

to “make fun videos”

Using expensive Promethean boards as if they were cheap whiteboards, wasting limited district dollars.

skill-practice games for crowd control or simply to engage kids in something

Identify uses of technology in schools that promote learning, development and success for all students versus uses that don’t.

And which are, in fact, worse than a pencil?

ways not necessarily connected to academics or schools

That observation deserves serious attention because how a problem is structured makes all the difference in the world

That is, even the best of educational games tend to be marginalized and channeled in the direction of extra-curricular activities.

are not solely theoretical

the act of asking good questions, guided by the construction and testing of theories, in a way that illustrates the very essence of the scientific method

focusing attention on imaginative and efficient use of resources

Equations: The Game of Creative Mathematics

even in our secular schools, a tendency towards sectarian thinking.

a world where Gods collide and their followers depend with greater and greater certainty on the correctness of their God's solution

Further, they learn that some kinds of problems are more important than others.

Therefore a puzzle-based education might not prepare people for life after school as well as a game-based education might.

There is an endless array of secrets that others know and you don't.

A game creator is "God-like"

The more you know about a mystery, the more mysterious it becomes. The more you know about a secret, the less secret it becomes.

not just in terms of whether a player's team wins or loses

that does not have a solution

School grades

Fred Goodman

providing newpathways for work in the field

to be critiqued

but by the contract it establishes with players when they accept itsrule set and enter into the space of play

when we, in fact, need to look atplayers’ performance and understandtheirunderstandings of them.32

tensions in distinction between the real and the virtual,in school and out of school, formal and informal, learning and teaching, knowing and being.

Weknow, for example, that play is iterative as is good learning, and that gaming is a practicerooted in reflection in action, which is also a quality of good learning.

what routes to policy change

that make sensibleuse of digital media

This strikes us as a fascinating social organization where adultswith particular interests/backgrounds/resources can serve as targeted learning brokers for the children

Phil Bell,in his group’s study of everyday learning as it relates to science and technology, has foundseveral complex and fascinating social contexts that provide reinforcing conditions initiating(and sustaining) the gaming that is present

Nichole Pinkard

But as both Everett and Watkins and Pitaru show, entry into a broadecology of gaming is never a given. Many barriers to entry exist.

and new learning spaces

Designers of cell phones, operating systems, and new learning spaces would do wellto learn from games. When the stakes are so high, a system can’t afford not to teach

but to the entire tool-set available to the player within agaming practice

Key moment Number Four requiressupport of acommunity of practiceon the part of design

Key moments1–4 infuse the ecology of gaming, creating feedback loops that cycle through levels of en-gagement, agency, mastery, expertise, and back again

the power peer-to-peer learning affords the evolution of a knowledge sys-tem, and the range of guises in which such learning is currently cloaked

Key moment Number Three requires support ofreflectionandinterpretationon the part ofdesigners

Key moment Number Three occurs when a player turns to another and asks, “Wantme to show you?”

Key moments Oneand Two are requirements of any good learning system, digital or otherwise. As a teacherIoften measure the quality of my own instruction within this framework. Key momentNumber Two requiresdepthon the part of design

gaming as a productive literacy drivesfeelings of personal agency, affecting both life and thought.

many games players come to feel a sense of agency or ownership..

he player feelsinvestedin the experience

“Can I save it?”

heframes the question of “Can I try?” as a conduit for social inclusion

or a player who lacks confidencewill rarely choose to play, in the same way that a student who lacks confidence in his orher ability to read will tend to shy away from reading, and most certainly will refrain fromdemonstrating that ability in front of others.

Can I try?”

that gaming represents an ecologythat is tangled up in a range of other ecologies—social, technological, economic, political—and that learning how to activate gaming as one node within a larger network holds promisefor those willing to engage

Although. . . we may recognize the learning potential of games, thisrecognition alone does not change the structural conditions that insist on the bifurcationbetween entertainment and education and correlate only academic content with educationalsuccess” (p. 114)

Having kept each of these concerns in mind, I did my best to create a volume that supportedcomplementary and contradictory perspectives without the weight of too much conceptualprejudice

gaming-as-ecology I pushed the authors to explore the designand behavior of gamesas systemsin which young people participate as gamers, producers,and learners

it is equally critical to address howplayers take on active roles in determining how, when, and why they learn

and no two players ever experience the “same”game

One cannotlearn about or from games without engaging in their play

and many games take both digital and nondigitalforms. Play across media is one way games are mobilized within everyday activity.

Gaming can include interaction with nondigital media.

of a need to identify the kinds of questions not yet asked, thekinds of research not yet done—the failings, in other words—of the current approach to afield that is only now beginning to take shape.

but by the ways that particular practices are in circulation with others. (p. 64)

Gamers not only follow rules, but push against them, testing the limits of the system in oftenunique and powerful ways.

thelusory attitude,the attitude required of playersin order to play.23

a cognitive attitude tied directly to the creative, improvisational, and subversivequalities of play

Gaming is play across media, time, social spaces, and networks of meaning; it includesengagement with digital FAQs, paper game guides, parents and siblings, the history of games,other players, as well as the games themselves.

The concept ofgamingas it is used in the following pages goes beyond games, in the same waythatlearninggoes beyond the configuration of a classroom

This is where the real work needs to be done to better understand the connectionsbetween forms of gaming and certain kinds of acquired knowledge and practice.

“Video games are not just stagesthat facilitate cultural, social, or political practices; they are also media where cultural valuesthemselves can be represented—for critique, satire, education, or commentary” (p. 119).

ongoing tensions be-tween industry relations, distribution infrastructure, patterns of player/viewer engagement,genres of representation, social agendas, and educational philosophies.

Acknowledging that gamesalreadyoperate as robust learning systems forces afocus on the intrinsic qualities and characteristics that guide the types of learning and newliteracies gaming and games advance.

According to Constance Steinkuhler “Online technologies provide new opportu-nities for ‘anytime/anywhere’ social interaction, and the number of innovative curriculardesigns that incorporate online collaborative environments has been steadily increasingsince such technology first emerged.”17

“We are just learning how toexercise that power—individually and collectively—and fighting to define the terms underwhich we will be allowed to participate.”16

Henry Jenkins

is antithetical to theway most schools currently operate

and perhaps even from those of theirmentors or teachers

ames develop players’productiveliteracies, an ability touse digital technologies to produce both meanings and tangible artifacts.

his does not bode well for those seeking a silver bullet toslay the games and learning beast. It does suggest, however, that ongoing work will need tobe done to design and support asetof gaming and learning frameworks for use by students,parents, teachers, and researchers

on his or her own terms

Jane McGonigal

KurtSquire

the contributors to this volume, each in his or her own way, sharesin the belief that exposure to the flexible rule sets and iterative, cyclical play embodied inboth design and gaming practices are critical for thinking about literacy in the twenty-firstcentury.

nd toward an emphasis on creative production and the principles of design asastarting place and main area of emphasis with kids.

Colin Lankshear, Michele Knobe

The meaning ofknowingtoday has “shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to be-ing able to find and use it.”1

produce some of the most powerful, persistent, and problematic lessons about race inAmerican culture

S. Craig Watkins

Playing video games is a kind of literacy. Not the literacy that helps us read books or write term papers,but the kind of literacy that helps us make or critique the systems we live in. . . . When we learn to playgames with an eye toward uncovering their procedural rhetorics, we learn to ask questions about themodels such games present. (p. 136)

Ian Bogost

Mizuko Ito

theater games likeSibling Rivalrywere used in contexts rang-ing from activism to acting

nor a digital one

As kids get left out—not only of videogame play but also of other digitally based experiences popular among their peers—they willcontinue to fall further and further beyond.

He argues that making digital games accessible to a wider audiencebenefits everyone by providing opportunities for play across communities.

Given the relative scarcity of empirical research on video gameplay

Stevens, Satwicz, and McCarthy follow with “In-Game, In-Room, In-World”—a captivatingethnography of young people in different families playing video games in their own homes

In this chapter, Geetakes on the intersection of game design and good learning, choreographing potential sitesof engagement between the two by drawing on contemporary work in the learning sci-ences.

These chapters articulate a form oflearning ecologypresent inthe way kids game

In the end we decidedto use them all; each name came with subtleties and distinctions that would have been lostwithin a unifying framework.

We could not even decide on a shared nameto refer to our object of study—games, digital games, video games?

from education, the learning sciences, film studies, technology, anthro-pology, game design, performance studies, computer science, and youth development.

My goal, and that of the authors selected for inclusion,is to pepper this often black-and-white mix with shades of gray, pointing toward a moresophisticated understanding of the myriad ways in which gaming could and should matterto those considering the future of learning

casts them as a Holy Grai

in the sense of how all of the various elements—from code to rhetoric tosocial practices and aesthetics—cohabit and populate the game world. Purposefully broadin scope and multidisciplinary in perspective,Ecology of Gamesis intended to complexifyadebate around the value of games and gaming that has been, to date, overly polemicand surprisingly shallow

who haven’t been invited to play

act as a point of entry or departure

gaming literacies,orfamilies of practice

present, missing, or reinforced

wenow just call themkids

hybrididentities

across highly personalized networks

An idea that to many seems new today turns out to have graced the lips ofresearchers some fifty-odd years ago

A virtue of gaming that is sometimes overlookedby those seeking grander goals. . . is its unparalleled advantages in training and educationalprograms.

Perhaps, too, this exposure causes in some of these young people a critique of schooling as it currently exists

makes many schools look uninspired and out of touch with the realities of how human learning works at a deep level.

However, it is clear that these principles resonant with what theorists in the learning sciences have said about learning in content areas in school.

I believe that these principles would be efficacious in areas outside games

some of the learning principles

Distributed and dispersed knowledge that is available “just in time” and “on demand” is, then, yet another learning principle built into a game like RoN.

distributed and dispersed across many different people, places, Internet sites, and modalities (e.g. magazines, chat rooms, guides, recordings).

An affinity space is a place or set of places where people can affiliate with others based primarily on shared activities, interests, and goals, not shared race, class, culture, ethnicity, or gender. They have an affinity for a common interest or endeavor

see Chapter 6

This social aspect of RoN, and games in general, makes RoN and other games the focus of what I have elsewhere called an “affinity group” (Gee 2003), and what I now prefer to call an “affinity space” (see Chapter 6)

Online there is a worldwide university of peers and experts available to any player all the time.

Every player knows there are an immense number of Internet sites and chat rooms from which loads of things can be learned and to which lots of questions can be directed.

The skill tests are, as they often are not in school, developmental for the learner and not evaluative (judgments carried out by authority figures).

was that I had not properly evaluated my skills

How do they know when they are ready to move on to the more rigorous challenges of the normal difficulty level and harder levels, as well as multiplayer play?

Games cycle through periods of pleasurable frustration and routine mastery—a cycle of storm and calm

he pleasure of mastery

The player has moved to a new level of expertise and will then eventually face a yet harder problem that will start the process all over again

The player must integrate his or her old skills with new ones, forming a new and higher skill set/strategy