Playing With Theory to Build a Theory of Play

• In Event: Roundtable Session 62
  In Roundtable Session: New Approaches to Validity Judgments for Emergent Research Methods

Abstract

Perspective. Our work raises critical questions for collecting and validating evidence from which to build usable theory. What makes games so powerful is that what you know is directly related to what you are able to do and, ultimately, who you become. In our games students become scientists, reporters, and mathematicians. It is this potential to provide contexts that legitimize content and that establish a meaningful role for the person that, overtime, has become what makes games such a powerful curriculum.

Method. We will share findings from cycles of design and refinement of four virtual-game worlds (one focused on mathematics, science, and language arts, and social studies) situated in an online, multiplayer videogame called Quest Atlantis (over 50,000 children worldwide). Each unit passed through multiple iterations of classroom implementation, analysis, and redesign, informed by empirical data and our evolving theoretical framework. We will reflect on each to illuminate our theory of transformational play. Rather than manipulating one particular variable, or working to remove extraneous variables, our research spanned multiple time zones, multiple spaces, multiple variables, and multiple agendas. In fact, even our role as sometimes designer, sometimes theoretician, sometimes researcher, sometimes teacher, and sometimes player also shifted among what might be considered “messy” theoretical lines.
Specifically, we have advanced a theory of transformational play, which describes a strategy for situating the person, the content, and the context. Transformational play involves positioning students as active protagonists who interact with game characters and virtual environments to identify and solve personally meaningful problems. Legitimate dilemmas that can only be resolved by accurately engaging disciplinary formalisms and that binds person with both by positioning players as content-based agents-of-change whose actions have impact on the virtual world.

Results. We will overview the first iteration and implementation of each of the four units, sharing data from implementation and comparison studies that were used to simultaneously evaluate learning and participation while building theoretical claims about mechanism. We will share key design changes of each unit, showing how they both drew from and informed the underlying theory—especially highlighting the way theory was positioned to interact with research meetings.

Significance. The relationship between the design, the implementation, and the theory went through particular moments that on their own were arguably not valid, but collectively, and over time, across the multiple studies we began advancing what others might call petite generalizations based on plausible arguments. We now have a quite powerful and useful theory that is able to account for the iterative change in ways that allows others to benefit from our particular stories.

Authors

• Sasha A. Barab, Arizona State University

• Melissa Sommefeld Gresalfi, Vanderbilt University

• Adam Ingram-Goble, Arizona State University - Tempe

• Anna Arici, Arizona State University