Theorizing Literacy Collectives Through Adolescents' Pleasurable Play of Narrative-Based Video Games

• In Event: Play and Role-Play: Pleasure, Affect, and Living Texts

Abstract

This presentation analyzes the sustained vitality of literacy events that charged the growth and cohesion of a teen videogame club, ‘GamesRLit,’ in an urban youth centre. It provides two contributions: First, it theorizes the role of vitality over time in the production of pleasure and collectivities through singular literacy events; second, it theorizes how the production of a collective around a shared text is related both to literacy learning and to how pleasure can be important to composing literacy collectivities. Implications include how adolescents’ pleasurable videogame play compels consideration of how conceptions of pleasure ‘reading’ should expand to include new media, collectively felt critical thought, and felt-activist movement toward more just, collective futures that emerges from shared videogame play.

Authors

• Christian Ehret, McGill University

• Emily Mannard, McGill University