Researcher as the Amateur: A Nonexpert Uses Games for Public Engagement With Science

• In Event: Creating Space for Academics Through the Project of Public Intellectualism as Public Engagement

Abstract

Objectives: This paper examines the experiences of a collaborative group that developed and
shared a game called GeoDesic Radio to engage the public with environmental issues. We
explore the intersections of our design process, the message(s) we hoped to convey through the game experience, and our conversations with players. We will also consider these intersections from the perspective of two members of the collaborative group who were not scientists, and so are amateurs in Said’s sense of public intellectuals engaging the public on topics outside of their discipline (1994).

Perspectives: Within the field of science communication, public engagement means that
scientists and publics take part in a two-way communication as equals so that both sides benefit from the interaction (Trench & Bucchi, 2014). Our collaborative group approached this form of engagement by designing and sharing Geodesic Radio, a game that could be played face to face with the public. In a general sense, playing a game is akin to having a conversation with the world of the game – the player makes a move and the game changes states and/or responds to which the player then makes another move, which is like turn taking in a spoken conversation (Gee, 2014). The game’s design shapes the conversation topics, how the player contributes to the conversation, and the subsequent message(s) the game potentially conveys. In addition, when the collaborative group discusses with players their experience and produce a player story, or narrative of what happened in the game, it is a spring board to encourage players to discuss with us their ideas about the environment.

Methods and Data Sources: The collaborative group in this paper developed a participatory
fiction game called Geodesic Radio, which invites players to make stories based on clues
(pictures, audio files, and notes) about a futuristic world presented on a crazy board. Members of the public played it at art festivals and produced player stories. Both the design process of the game and the player stories were the topics of our collaborative autoethnographic interviews (Morgan, 2012; Nairn, Cameron, Anakin, Juntrasook, Wass, Sligo, & Morrison, 2015). This data was analyzed through content analysis (Saldana, 2015). The game’s message was analyzed according to Gee’s unified discourse analysis (2014) and multimodal analysis (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996; Jewitt & Oyama, 2001).

Conclusions and Significance: In producing player stories with members of the public, the
collaborative group speculated together on the future of the oceans in a blending of realistic and fictional characteristics, and were surprised at many of the bleak visions players produced about that future. The expert oceanographer disseminated disciplinary knowledge and challenged misconceptions of the players. For the design process, the fictional nature of the game enabled the amateurs to contribute to the design and message as much as the expert. The implications are that a participatory fiction game can provide amateurs with creative avenues for engaging the public with issues important to them while are limited in the ways they can interact with the public compared to the expert.

Author

• Mathew Evans, Arizona State University