Connected Gaming: Challenging the Playing Versus Making Divide

• In Event: 52.069 - New Perspectives for Serious Gaming: Games That Integrate Making and Playing for Learning

Abstract

1. Objectives
The goal of this theoretical paper is to advance an argument for connected gaming within the serious games movement, challenging the traditional divide between playing and making video games as distinct learning activities.

2. Perspectives
For over a decade, the educational potential of playing video games has received generous attention from popular media and academia. Yet a recent series of meta-analyses (Girard, Ecalle, & Magant, 2012; Vogel et al., 2013; Young et al., 2012), have begun to question merit of solely playing video games, with the reviews citing limited curricular impact and far less motivation and cognitive benefits than what has been previously claimed by serious gaming.

Regardless of the debate sparked by such reviews, there is undeniably one notable absence in such examinations: namely, the inclusion of constructionist gaming approaches, or those approaches in which games are designed by students rather than by professionals for their learning benefits. Such an omission is particularly glaring given recent efforts to promote computational thinking (Grover & Pea, 2013) and broaden participation in computing (NRC, 2011). In this paper, we examine research on game-playing and game-making over the past decade that not only signal a shift toward making games but also blurring the boundaries between making and playing games—a blurring that is perhaps best epitomized by the remarkable success of the game Minecraft (Duncan, 2011).

3. Methods & Data
In Connected Code (2014), we distinguished between computational thinking, as a systematic way to problem solve, and computational participation, which too entails systematic thinking but equally emphasizes connecting and engaging with others through digital networks. Our research here utilizes computational participation as our lens of analysis for over ten years of gaming studies, examining (a) what evidence exists in terms of the cognitive and motivational benefits of having students make games, and (b) to what degree making games offers children the opportunity to not only learn academic content but connect with each other computationally.

5. Results
While our review is ongoing, we have categorized studies around making games as offering three distinct advantages. First, game-making provides a rich context for learning code which increasingly is a challenge facing schools as programming is regularly cited as a new literacy of the 21st century. Second, game-making is also game-sharing—a means to foster collaboration among youth over content that has genuine currency in youth culture. Here we examine the ever-growing online communities of game makers through sites such as Scratch and NewGrouds and consider what these informal networks of may have to pedagogically offer the more formal and traditional spaces of classrooms. Third, we examine creativity and criticality of constructionist gaming approaches and how children can become more discerning consumers of digital content by tapping into their own enthusiasm to create and mod video games.

6. Scientific significance of work
The proposed book will be a timely publication in light of a recent development to bring back programming in schools, both nationally and internationally as well as better integrate digital technologies in classrooms.

Authors

• William Quinn Burke, College of Charleston

• Yasmin B. Kafai, University of Pennsylvania