gamer identity issues

Last week in my videogame class I raised a question toward the end that made sense only to the teacher.  So now I’ve thought it through, and I think I can raise it better.  To understand the games I played for this check out http://www.filamentgames.com/projects

ok, i had a whole week to think through my question from the end of class and i think i can better phrase it  now, especially given the games we played for this week.  when we truly play games for fun we learn as a consequence of playing, but the focus of our game play is on the playing experience.  in some cases we develop a specialized Discourse (i.e. pwnd) that accompanies our play, we begin to play games that are very similar (my husband plays sports games and shooter games, that's about it).  'serious' gamers develop a gamer personality surrounding their game play.  casual gamers play slightly differently, but still play for the experience, i farm for experience.  they also develop specialized languages and Discourses assigning in-game meaning to seemingly useless things (like farmville and fuel).  the home game experience of casual gamers and serious gamers is all about experience.  casual gamers more interested in wii games, and other console games of a similar nature again play for the experience.  it is fun to wii bowl with family and friends who otherwise wouldn't play games.





in educational games we're asking students (but not actually asking) to put aside the fun experience of game they're used to and actually learn through the game.  this is where i have my issue and where my question stems from.  we never discuss the importance of explaining the purpose of using a game to students, we never discuss how the home gamer identity may impact the school based learning we're expecting, we never contemplate the school based gamer identity students must develop to be successful in school games.  we're so focused on the good learning that can come from games, that we never consider how the home gamer experience may impact school game play.  this is a key point that needs to be addressed.
thinking about this as i played the Filament Games this week i began to see the issue.  first i played Argument Wars.  this game was fairly interactive, and pretty easy to figure out the right answers for Miranda v. Arizona.  what i did notice is i did not retain any of the content i didn't already know.  i was able to read various potential arguments, and i can't remember any of them now.  i just wanted to win.  so content became meaningless to my retention, and only important to my game winning.  i set my goal of winning, and succeeded (the miranda rights are pretty obvious).  so, to successfully use this game in the classroom would the teacher need to be setting the goals of game play to ensure content is more important than play and winning?  if yes, why aren't we talking about how to teach students to play games, how to meld home gamer identity, what is school based gamer identity, what exactly are we expecting out of these games?  are these even games?  i'll return to that question in a minute.



next in argument wars, being an English Rhetoric and Composition student i immediately noticed the 5 paragraph essay design of the game (bonus points to your English 101 and high school English teachers if you noticed this as well!!).  was i supposed to also learn how to select an argument, provide support and counter the opposing views argument, like a traditional essay?  was i supposed to learn the laywer/judicial Discourse being used in the court cases, or just feel slightly left out of the Discourse being used around me in the game?  am i supposed to now understand argument, the five paragraph essay, argument support, judicial discourse, academic discourse, and some of the ammendement content?  what was the point of playing this game.  again, if the teacher needs to step in and direct students whose expectations are being met, and do we have gamer identity issues here?


obviously i'm saying yes to all this, that's why i asked the question last week about home gamer identity not necessarily melding with school gamer identity.  the 17 year old government high school student playing Argument Wars instead of Halo may want to scream pwnd when he/she wins miranda rights over the state of arizona, but it's not fitting at school, but it's fitting at home.  how does he/she celebrate this victory?  how does he/she even know if winning is a victory?


next i played EcoDefenders.  the little creaters are pretty cute, so it was pretty fun.  i LOVED that this was considered and called a simulation.  i created a creature to destroy another creature, then was told to "run it through the simulation" to gather data and see what happened.  this was perfectly fitting for testing my knowledge of ecosystems.  my creature totally destroyed the one i was competing against, but i do have a biology degree, so i'm sure that helped me.  it was the fact that this was not a game, but a simulation that made it easier to understand my in game objectives, and behave in more 'school mode' than 'gamer mode.'  however, the rest of the games i saw were called games, not simulations.  so maybe we need to move toward school games being considered simulations, and think about them as ways of implementing knowledge.  this may help alleviate the gamer identity issues i'm noticing.  i did see identity issues with this game, i was asked to create my creature, and probably spent 5-10 minutes deciding.  i had to weigh the skills, colors, sleeping habits against my counter part.  again, having a biology degree i knew to look at these factors, and if preceeded by a lecture students should know this, so again, it seems like teachers are setting objectives for how games are played in school, influencing this yet undiscussed 'school gamer identity.'
my only problem with EcoDefenders is that as soon as my creature destroyed its opponent, i was given a test.  so what was the purpose here? was this a simulation in skill and drill, did the test make it educational?  did the test have real life consequences?  should i have been so excited for getting 100% (i'm a nerd)?  how does the successful defeat of my opponent creature and my success on the test matter to my class?  who sets these goals, and again, how do they affect my 'play'?  am i even playing anymore?


hopefully this helps explain my issue with gamer identity posed last week in class.  i think when used correctly games can be helpful, but we really need to understand what we expect them to do, and what they do on accident (was the 5 paragraph essay format an accident?).  if we don't recognize the home gamer identity, and the difference we're expecting in schools, and address what we're expecting in schools games/simulations (i'm really leaning towards overhauling word choice and going with simulations in school settings) may never move beyond rewards for good students. 

language work

When we make a promise, we do something through language. Promising is verb that cannot be acted out in physical embodied actions like running, jumping, writing. Making a promise is an action that is considered social work. It bonds two people together through the words uttered. Other forms of language create bonding situations. In some cases we understand the bonding language and participate, becoming a bonding member of that social group for that moment, other times we don’t understand the language and are left on the outside of the bonding. Yesterday I saw a situation where 4 co-workers assisted a gentleman and his lady friend. Both were probably in their late 50’s. The lady was wearing an electric blue, skin tight mini dress, and was thin. As soon as she turned around her dress then showed the black straps criss-crossing across her back. As soon as she was out of ear shot three of the 4 co-workers immediately huddled up and starting asking if everyone saw the dress and what was she thinking. The fourth co-worker attempted to join the conversation about the hideous dress, but had great difficulty being convincing in his conversation skills, so he appeared on the outside of bonding, actually standing at a socially awkward angle to the other three huddled employees. In this case language did a lot of harm and a lot of good. The dress wearing woman has no idea any of this conversation happened, so surprisingly it’s not her that felt harm, but the non-bonding employee at the awkward angle. He was unable to join in the impromptu office bonding session so he was left out of the bonding through language, impacting his perceived identity by his co-workers, and he was physically left out and he hung on the skirts of the impromptu circle. In this case he tried to join the bonding, but was not as effective as the other three; they saw through his attempts and deemed them either inadequate, fake, or simply not correct for what they were doing, so they dismissed it. In human interaction through language we communicate more than just meaning, we communicate identity, social position and social relationships. We build contexts in which these meanings occur, and we assume roles as appropriate within each context. For the most part this social work is done subconsciously. In cases where bonding fails, the failure becomes more conscious, and in most cases is due to differing styles of bonding. In this case the outcast employee was male; his typical bonding patterns were not conducive to electric blue dress choice analysis. But, could we get the bonding employees to recognize that their choice of bonding method is what left out the fourth co-worker or will they simply heap the blame on him for not participating in the right way?

context matters

i read three articles for my videogame class that focus on design and context and the interelatedness of these two things.  These articles made me think of online education. currently it seems English educators (those teaching 101/102) are intimidated by virtual space.  typcially we're known for teaching shakespeare and austen so of course the internet intimidates us.  but, we're moving toward the internet with classes, so educators within English trying to help with this transition are trying to make the internet less frightening by telling educators you can simply translate your face-to-face assignments to virtual space, and wahlah, you're now teaching a virtual class.  in this way the big bad scary internet is no longer scary.  but this approach is supposing there is nothing really going on in a face-to-face classroom outside the assignments, and it's assuming that the context of virtual space has no impact at all on the classroom environment.  well . . .we all know what they say about assuming.

so, based on these articles, the design of a given videogame influences the literacy practices in and around that game.  some of the skills developed to learn to be in (literacy as more than just reading and writing and into learning how to be and how to communicate within spaces) a given videogame can transfer, but essentiall the game stands alone.  so, what i want to know is how do we apply these ideas to online education (hello dissertation). 

thinking about the importance of context: How do we create context "to be encountered by a participant, from which meaning emerges" while teaching a virtual course (Zimmerman, 28)? how do we design the context to be condusive to more traditional school based learning, where students still feel engaged with the instructor, their peers and the institution (which just helps graduation rates in the end)? I especially like the idea that "people pick up different skills, values, and attitudes in different literacy practices. Thus, we need to study literacy in terms of specific practices situated in specific social and cultural contexts" (Gee & Hayes, 2). If we apply this idea to the virtual classroom we also have to ask questions about different classroom experiences students may have due entirely to the context, and what are the advantages, disadvantages? how do we teach students how to be students, and learn when they aren't sitting in front of us? how do we transfer all the social work we do through language into virtual space, since Gee & Hayes are making space important to all that other stuff?

why am i in eng 101?

What is the point of English 101? In high school we attend classes of different subject matter, and are slightly exposed to the idea that not all disciplines communicate the same. We know to use slightly different words when describing aspects of literature and narrative in English class than we do describing chemical reactions in chemistry. However, at the university level the difference in language usage is even more pronounced, the ways of developing and presenting an argument are more specific, so a student must learn to communicate in different ways in different classes. As a student progresses through their major courses the goal is the communication will become easier because they are now engrained in the disciplinary discourse of their major.


The problem with this model is the lack of exposure to this type of communication prior to beginning university life. Most high school students naturally shift their discourse as they move between situations, speaking one way with parents, a different with teachers, and a different with friends. They do this code switching unconsciously. At the university level they are expected to code switch into impersonal academic discourse, communicating properly within the discipline of their choice without direct instruction. When they fail at this task, when they can’t pass their PSY 400 paper off as psychology lingo enough, the English 101 teacher is blamed. Clearly no one at the university taught that student to write. But is it really writing that’s the issue, or is the lack of understanding by the student that they need to learn the code of psychology to write a paper for PSY 400 and earn a good grade. It has become the burden of the English 101 teacher to teach the student not just academic discourse, and the way to construct a rhetorical argument at the university level, it has now also become the job of ENG 101 to teach students to be aware of code switching and how to code switch themselves into discipline specific lingo.

So . . .in the classroom setting, what’s language (what the code is presented in) have to do with anything? In the course of a normal day we use language to create an image of ourselves in specific context with specific people. We think through language, we describe through language, we create our reality through language. In the university, disciplines have created themselves and their importance through specific language. The language is then used as a test of identity. If you can’t use the language properly, you clearly aren’t a member of this group. Language and identity presentation through language is the way we test each other for authenticity. So . . .the ENG 101 classroom now not only has to teach argument presentation, academic discourse, code switching, we also have to teach the importance of code switching. These are all things we do every day in settings we have innately learned these skills, why is it so hard to do all this in the university setting?

what are we forgetting?

"learning, even in these individualistic terms, is very much a matter of being situated in a material, social, and cultural world" Gee, What videogames have to teach us, page 179

I'm very interested in online education. Today NCTE sent out an email to its members advertising a 3 part class that will teach you how to think about your assignments and make them accessible for online English instruction. I refer to this (what i consider cop out) technique as assignment translation. i just want to make my f2f assignments fit in the online classroom so i'm 21st century. I think Gee's quote above is one of my favorite's because it shows just how much we're missing when we buy into assignment translation, we're completely ignoring the context and all the situated meanings that come along with that context. some educators see the digital world as scary, new, dangerous, so translating assignments is the easy way to offer their class in the new way. they never consider how much effort it took them to figure out how to pay bills online, to talk to their friends, family and co-workers through email. all of these activities required the individual to become familiar with a particular interface and to use it a certain way with certain people to attain a certain goal. however, all of this is forgotten when we think of online education. but why?

cultural models

cultural models, according to Gee, are ways we recognize the world based on our belief systems. These systems are typically innately learned, so we’re not always aware of them. When we think of work, and we assume that a good employee should always show up on time, and work their hardest, we are speaking of a specific cultural model learned by middle and working class America. We don’t always practice this belief, but it is the idea we hold about work.


Sometimes our beliefs don’t match our actions, and we don’t recognize this mismatch. Yesterday I saw a guy getting on the bus I was on with a Che Guevara tattoo on one calf and a red communist star on the other calf. The work was well done too. About 5 minutes into the ride he begins a conversation with his companions on where they should eat dinner. He throws out quizno’s. the ridiculously corporate toasted sub shop. Now che and most versions of communism (china is attempting communism with capitalism, we’ll see how that works out) are very anti-capitalism, but here is my fellow bus driver, buying into capitalism for his dinner while he wears anti-capitalism on his skin. A slight mismatch of cultural models, but not one he’s recognizing. Like most people, these mismatches are below our notice.

These models function in a way to make daily life easier for us. Instead of processing ideas like quizno’s is a national chain, which is pro-capitalist, I’m not capitalist, I should make my food choices accordingly, most people simply make choices based on convenience and ease. It’s easy to know how to act as a student when in a classroom. The student knows to sit in the many desks facing the front, and the teacher knows to go to the front of the classroom to be the teacher. These are cultural models of classrooms. These school cultural models are also where we get into trouble. With increasing movement of classes to online where do students pick up their cultural models of how to read and behave online? I have to figure out the correct way of leaving author feedback on a fanfiction site, and I have to figure out how to write a diary post on dailykos, and I have to figure out how to talk to fellow WoW members, all of this is done by lurking. But in a classroom everyday counts, and we must have a presence to earn the grade. So how do we figure out how to act? Are student simply mashing their other cultural models into something that fits within the environment? What happens when one student’s model doesn’t fit well with another’s? Ultimately, how do we create space in an online class to allow students safe space to explore the region and figure out how to interact and how to be, so they can get the most from the class?

what's language got to do with it?

Language is never innocent. Individual words and how we put them together is deeply tied to the identity we try to portray, the culture we came from, and the culture we try to demonstrate when we use those words. Today in class discussion one student mentioned that in certain parts of the south typical dinner meals are catfish caught by the men, and hush puppies. Another student complained that waffle house doesn’t know how to make grits. Then a third student asked what a hush puppy was. As an arizonan if I say I caught a catfish and we’re eating it for dinner the table would go elsewhere for dinner, they understand that the place I would’ve caught the catfish (the canals or lakes) are not spaces where fish are really considered edible. My student not knowing what a hush puppy is demonstrated her lack of cultural knowledge of a word. Again, language is never innocent. Our knowledge of words is meaningful, and our word choice is meaningful. If we’d never talked about community use of food words my students would never have had a reason to discuss hush puppies and grits, and other students would never have had a reason to acknowledge their lack of knowledge of those words.


In word choice outside of food, but still in the face-to-face classroom I will hand out an assignment, walk through what I’ve typed up, ad libbing as I go. I’ll also ask at various points (that organically feel like stopping points when walking through an assignment sheet) if everyone understands. If there are questions, clarification is offered, and other questions may arise based on one students question. Then the assignment will continue. As the students work through the steps of the paper writing process, my physical presence in answering questions the class before an assignment is due allows me and the student to negotiate the meaning until we reach a point where both teacher and student feel we are discussing the same thing with the same understanding so the ‘correct’ assignment will be turned in. this language negotiation happens f2f but what happens when we put composition classes in online spaces. Instead of receiving ad lib’d assignments, students simply download the assignment sheet, and are given the opportunity to contact the teacher if further clarification is needed. Instead of the teacher opening up the space for meaning negotiation, the student must do the work by showing up for a teacher’s office hours (whether virtual or f2f) or by composing an email. Either way the work load is shifted to the student. The student must put in work, and effort to negotiate the meaning of the classroom language, the teacher is no longer present to help start that negotiation, that discussion. Can we move this negotiation to online space? Can we virtually ad lib so students have the opportunity to negotiate the meaning? If we can, how do we move this?

We can also debate the usefulness of this meaning negotiation. Maybe students would be better off not being able to negotiate, but by simply writing the assignment. In a f2f classroom with 20 students, if 2 of them do not show up on the day the assignment is handed out, but they attend every class after then until the paper is due, will they have the same grasp on the assignment as the 18 students who were present?