My ongoing research concern, dubbed Gamers As Designers, has been focused on the ways that “everyday” gaming practices illuminate informal design practices.

This work has been concerned with two, linked questions:

• How do online communities around games serve as spaces for people to design things, and what does this tell us about learning with digital, interactive media?

• How can we value pre-existing engagement with games and leverage gamers’ desire to modify games toward STEM learning goals?

Valuing a decidedly situated/distributed cognition perspective, I have first come at this research from the perspective of uncovering learning practices embedded within the interest-driven practices that engaged gaming fans conduct online. These ad hoc communities of designers work as shifting communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), learning and employing sophisticated “new literacy” practices (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). I have mapped the social networks of these design communities, but and tracked changes in Discourse (Gee, 1999) of participants within them. How is meaning made in these communities? How are argumentation and reasoning employed to these tasks? How do participants develop identities as “designers”? And, most importantly, how can we help participants in these design spaces utilize skills gained in these spaces in other settings?

I am attempting to bridge research on learning in affinity spaces with creating environments to support games and STEM learning, and outline both below:

Affinity Spaces

I’ve focused, so far, on the design activities in what I label informal design spaces (Duncan, 2010), otherwise conceived as gaming “affinity spaces” (Gee, 2004; Gee and Hayes, 2009; Hayes and Duncan, in press). One insight is that we can map different kinds of gamer activities onto specific “gamer communities” (Squire, 2008) which evince different forms of design activities. I have investigated informal design contexts ranging from narrative design around long-term series of console games (The Legend of Zelda; Duncan & Gee, 2008), ludic design within communities of massively-multiplayer gamers (World of Warcraft; Duncan, 2010), and casual, Flash-based game design (Kongregate; Duncan, in press). In many ways, my research on the casual games of the last few years have presaged the form that this research is now taking, moving from the arena of game fandom into game modding and design.

Games and STEM Learning

As this project shifts from a sole focus on existing studies of learning in gaming affinity spaces to an intervention/learning lab model, I have focused the “design” practices within these spaces on the proximal goals of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics content. In particular, conceiving of the creative activity of game design as providing a driving “A” for arts to help transform STEM learning into “STEAM.” In March, 2012, I will be piloting a group of youth in the Gamers As Designers Program, utilizing a variety of game development and game modding tools, ranging from Scratch to modding the commercial game Portal 2, with the goal of investigating how interest in game modding/design can spur on engagement with these media as well as the development of technical proficiencies.

Implications

In the “New Literacy Studies” literature, the issue of how best to foster “designers of our social futures” (New London Group, 1996) is over a decade old, and seems an increasingly prescient insight with every failed bank, ecological crisis, and continued political upheaval. To put it bluntly, we need a generation of learners who both understand systems and can design better ones. I see the potential of digital, interactive games and the communities around them as one of our best hopes for developing these abilities, and a renewed focus on the culture of game modding/game design, whether online or in a structured program, as a key way forward.

If you’re interested in reading more on this and other projects, please check out the Recent Papers link for recent manuscripts.