This work, which I began in Fall, 2007, is my dissertation research (Constance Steinkuehler, advising) and, I hope, the foundation for a series of studies that I’m interested in pursuing in the next several years. The central idea can be summed up as this: 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?

I come at this from a decidedly situated/distributed cognition perspective. I see these ad hoc communities of designers as communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), learning and employing sophisticated “new literacy” practices (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). I’m committed to mapping the social networks of these design communities, but also tracking the 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, do participants in these informal design spaces utilize skills gained in these spaces in other settings?

I’ve focused, so far, on three different kinds of “design” activities in what I label informal design spaces. Taking a cue from the long-standing (and, in my opinion, rather tired) “narratology vs. ludology” debates in the games studies literature, I’ve tried to repurpose the discussion from being one less about what is the fundamental nature of games (are they interactive stories or are they rule-based systems?), to one in which we use the language of narrative and ludology to describe the kinds of affordances of the spaces occur around these forms of media. In particular, I’ve sketched out a rough framework for thinking about the relationship between narrative and ludic elements of games:

By this, I’m arguing that the games themselves afford and constrain different kinds of discussions (and, I argue, design). For cases in which the topic of discussion does not have much storyline or a restrictive storyline barring players from engaging in meaningful play around them, I characterize this as “high narrative constraints.” In cases in which a game allows players to muck about in the game’s mechanics, allowing players to customize one’s play, I characterize this as “low ludic constraints.” And so on.

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. The category of “narrative play” (high ludic constraints, low narrative) maps well onto the activities I’ve been studying regarding timelines and The Legend of Zelda games. The category of “ludic play” (high narrative constraints, low ludic) seem to map well onto the design activities regarding “talent builds” in World of Warcraft. And, the low-ludic, low-narrative constraint category of “game design” is simply that — for my dissertation, I am investigating design communities in which wrestle with constructing games with both narrative and rule-based elements, implemented in Adobe Flash.

After all, Flash games (and other “casual games”) are one of the most interesting aspects of the future of gaming — they’re portable, they’re cheap to develop, cheap to play, and millions of people who would never self-identify as a “gamer” play them. The casual games of the last few years are inclusive to players of all ages and different genders (unlike many of what we normally consider “videogames”), are deceptively complex, and, increasingly, involve sophisticated and innovative gameplay. (And, as xkcd indicates, they’re fun, too!)

But, so what? Let’s look at the final quadrant: Cases in which “players” have little to no room to construct their own narratives and little to no room to modify their own “gameplay” experiences resemble traditional schooling, in this sense. Yes, this is a bit of a strawman, but belies a serious point — the kinds of activities and engagement we see around commercial games should be held in high contrast to the limited forms of instruction experienced in most formal schooling settings. My goal is to shine a light on the productive practice of design itself, in informal communities of passionate participants of varying ages and expertise, as a means to illustrate some of the currently broken elements of the American educational system (strict testing regimes, NCLB, etc.).

Given the pressing economic and social issues facing the nation, I argue that we must turn to new media to give us a sense of how to design curricula and learning environments for the future. 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.

If you’re interested in reading more, here are a few links to recent writings and presentations which deal in part with these issues:

• I lay out the framework in a bit more detailed of a fashion in a poster presentation [PDF] I presented at GLS 4.0 (and won an award for Outstanding Student Poster).
• Jim Gee and I have a chapter [PDF] in the upcoming book The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy, detailing how argumentation and reasoning work in the Zelda “timeline debates.”
• Constance Steinkuehler and I have recently published a paper [PDF] in the Journal of Science Education and Technology on the kinds of scientific reasoning and discursive practices found in World of Warcraft “talent build” discussions.