Literacies of Discord: Chaos and Creativity at a Video Game Design Camp

• In Event: Disrupting "Designs" in Literacy Research and Practice

Abstract

A major strand of inquiry in New Literacies Studies (NLS) has illustrated the importance of attending to the role video games play in the literate lives of young people (e.g., Gee, 2003; Jenkins, 2000; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). Not only has such research helped combat the sometimes-paranoid discourses around video games, it has also shown how video games can support literacy development specifically and education more broadly. Other literacy scholars have attempted to orient their inquiry around video games and literacy in ways that decenter schooling (Author 2006; Author, 2015b), which has allowed them to grapple both with the complexity and permeability of context as well as with the affective, relational aspects of video game play. In general, however, there have been fewer studies exploring the literacy implications of young people engaged in video game design (e.g., Sanford & Mill, 2007), which is likely due to the relatively recent emergence of novice-friendly video game development tools (e.g., Scratch, Construct, PlayStation Dreams, etc.). Broadly, then, the purpose of this paper is to present findings from a study investigating how young people attending a series of week-long, residential video game design camps engaged in a wide range of literacy practices while playing, designing, and creating video games.
For this paper, I will describe how participants used Discord, a text chat and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service designed for gamers, as they played and created video games together during the camp. Drawing on Burnett and Merchant’s (2018) notion of “literacy as event”— a recent reconceptualization of Heath’s (1982) “literacy event”—I show how young people’s discordant literacy activities within the Discord server impinged upon the camp’s more controlled, designed physical space and illustrate how such ruptures opened up potentials and possibilities for friendship, creativity, and sharing. Because campers shared the same physical space as they interacted in the Discord channel—which, it is worth pointing out, is not what Discord was designed for—their interactions in the server came to bear on their interactions and activities. Campers would, for example, in one moment be focused on their projects, moving between their work and the Discord channel, and in the next moment, the entire camp would erupt in laughter and surprise at something someone posted in the Discord server, shouting, “Who posted that!?”, “I can’t believe you’ve done this!”, “Ban him! Ban him! Ban him!” Such discordant moments, which often passed as quickly as they appeared, were charged with movement, energy, and affect, giving form and substance to the camp as an emergent community. Ultimately, when viewed from the literacy-as-event’s relational perspective, the Discord server functioned as a primary mechanism by which the campers, the technology, and the physical space animated one another to support friendship and creativity through transgression and chaos.

Author

• T. Bradley Robinson, Texas State University