I play videogames.

Not very well most of the time, and not as often as I’d like, but I play them, study them, and think they’re critical for fostering the kinds of learning environments we desperately need in the American educational system. In the past several years, I have been active writing and presenting on these topics (the picture above is from a recent Games For Change festival, with my friends Moses and John). Understanding games and games culture is, I think, one of the most important tasks for 21st century education research.

I started off as a cognitive scientist, both for my undergraduate degree (at Miami University), and my master’s degree (in the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University). In my previous research life, I studied scientific thinking — the means by which argumentation, reasoning, problem-solving and expertise played roles in the development and justification of scientific theories. Developing accounts in which I applied cognitive frameworks toward understanding the creation of scientific models, I focused on using cognitive approaches to help understanding something about exemplary practice in the “real world.”

Yet, this just wasn’t enough for me — in 2006, I re-entered graduate school after several years teaching. In order to better understand how learning occurs with popular, digital media, I entered a doctoral program in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, majoring in Educational Technology with a distributed minor in Learning With New Media. I’ve been a part of the Games+Learning+Society Initiative here, working with students and faculty to both understand the fundamental learning processes involved in interaction with videogames, as well as the potential ways we might leverage them toward learning environments.

I’ve found myself drawn to questions about cognition, learning, and specific genres of games since I’ve been here, which I’ll describe a bit more in the following sections…

Online Communities

This is my dissertation research — looking at how productive design-like activities are developed through participation in online communities around videogames. For more about this, please feel free to read up about The Gamers As Designers Project.

Virtual Worlds

I’ve been employed under my advisor Constance Steinkuehler’s milestone for a large John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Grant to study informal scientific reasoning in World of Warcraft discussion forums. In this work, we found a whopping 86% of the sampled forum posts exhibited some form of social knowledge construction, with more than half of the posts (58%) showing some form of systematic and evaluative processes indicative of scientific reasoning. This is quite huge, compared to our expectations, and to the common stereotype of the sullen, unenaged gamer. Quite the contrary, actually — gamers utilize sophisticated scientific and mathematical skills, in the right settings with an interesting topic they can contribute to.

This work has been published in the Journal of Science Education and Technology, and we have received a fair amount of positive press for the work, ranging from an interview Constance did with Wired magazine, to being picked up by the Associated Press national wire (and subsequently by CNN, Fox News, etc.). After piloting with a smaller group of participants (who I worked with in the past year), Constance is now building new afterschool programs with a group of 13-17 year old boys, playing World of Warcraft and seeing if the things we’ve identified in the game can translate into educational interventions.

Here’s some footage (a “worked example”) of me working with some of the kids in Constance’s World of Warcraft afterschool program. When asked about about their progression in the game, they quickly leapt into talking about their experiences using a game map we had on the wall, as well as the kinds of things they were doing around the game:

I’m impressed with the degree of excitement among the kids talking about this particular game, but also how that excitement has clearly spread into learning new game-specific skills, and meeting new people online. As Constance noted, we aimed to “broaden their horizons” through participation in this game.

Music Games

I’ve long had an interest in doing something related to music games. First, as a guitarist for over thirty years, I’ve been drawn to the games purely out of fun, but also because it’s interesting to see the ways that skills potentially transfer — I found it quite easy to play the game on Expert, and began to wonder a bit about how expertise manifests in the game.

I performed a small, pilot study in early 2007, applying Chase and Simon’s (1973) approach to understanding perception in chess, by focusing on the visual representations presented by the game and analyzing the ways that experts “chunked” (visually organized) information on the screen differently than novices. I’ve written up the results in a brief paper, and recently presented this work at the Games+Learning+Society 4.0 Conference in Madison.

I’m interested in expanding this project eventually, and have talked with faculty in Educational Psychology and Music Instruction here about the ways we might learn from game experts to help foster the learning of music (rhythm, most likely). I can see games like this — especially Rock Band — leading toward useful instruction. After all, Harmonix (the designers of Rock Band) have stated that if one can beat the drums on the “Hard” difficulty setting, you’ve pretty much learned how to play the drums.

Interactive Fiction

I’ve been interested in developing interactive fiction — text-based adventure games — lately, but haven’t done much beyond playing around with Inform 7, one of the best and easiest game design environments I’ve seen. Now, of course, most current proponents of interactive fiction bristle at the description of them as “games,” though this genre of text began as commercial games in the 1970s and 1980s (the games published by Infocom, for example). Last year, another student and I began to play around with adapting kids’ literature into text-based game format, but it didn’t get very far beyond an initial prototype.

In the future, I’d like to leverage what’s interesting and powerful about recent interactive fiction — written within the past 15 years, such as Photopia, Slouching Toward Bedlam, and Christminster — toward learning aims. These games feature sophisticated writing, require critical literacy skills, and often involve novel game mechanics.

If “what’s old is new again,” perhaps the rarity of solely text-based games might be appealing for those wanting to teach traditional textual literacies (reading and writing), not to mention the impressive portability of text. These games can be played on twenty year old computers, any computer with a web browser, cellphones, and so on. Also, leaning on the potential ambiguity of text (common words can have multiple meanings and text is inherently interpreted, bringing identity and social roles into play, etc.), I wonder how we might take an “archaic” game genre such as this and use it in formal educational settings to teach something about language. These are all exploratory ideas at this point, but I’m interested in pursuing them further.