Speculative Pedagogies in Video Game Play: Designing for Proleptic Relationality in Collaborative World-Making

• In Event: The Learning to Transform (LiTT) Video Gaming Lab: Modding Worlds for Sociopolitical and Sociotechnical Transformation

Abstract

Objectives
Through our work, we have found that play, learning, and the speculative can be interwoven to support expansive meaning making and consequential learning (Hall & Jurow, 2015). This stands in stark contrast to what we commonly see in the design of traditional learning environments, particularly those that employ digital technologies in service of maintaining control over young people’s learning. Thus, we seek to continue efforts by equity-oriented educational scholars who center imagination and ingenuity in everyday practices (Gutiérrez, Cortes, et al, 2017) in the use of digital tools in learning design. Specifically, we look at how the socio-technical affordances of networked video gameplay mediates robust collaboration and imaginings of new social futures.

Theoretical Perspectives
​​Spaces of play are recognized as sites for robust meaning making (Cortez, McKoy, & Lizárraga, 2022; Gutiérrez, Higgs, et al, 2019), literacy development (Gee, 2007), and complex negotiations over historically produced power structures (Gray, 2014; Leonard, 2003; Shaw, 2012). Of importance, speculative pedagogies are a set of mediated practices that organize toward future learning—immediate and more distant futures. Implied here is that our futures are increasingly undefined, and that we are positioned to engage in proleptic work that is similarly dynamic. In our studies of gaming ecologies, we observe speculative forms of mediation that are imbued with hope and possibility for a new social world that is just beyond our individual and collective grasp: speculative relationality, speculative complexity, and speculative trans-disciplinary world-making.

Methods and Data Sources
The vignettes and analysis are drawn from 195 hours of video data recording during gaming sessions between high school youth and instructors/coordinators who were part of our project. Our intergenerational group of participants engaged in Role Play (RP) on a customized server environment of Grand Theft Auto V (GTA5) for approximately 5 hours a week, for 13 weeks during the summer of 2022. Young people and adults crafted digital identities in this gaming ecology called LiTT City and were expected to engage with each other while “in character,” as they collectively organized, designed, and planned for new modifications to the GTA5 sandbox environment. Video and audio were logged on a variety of metadata, interviews transcribed (Taylor, Bogdan, & DeVault, 2015), and digital artifacts analyzed using multimodal analysis (Hull & Nelson, 2005). Codes were developed inductively (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997).

Findings and Significance
We illustrate examples of three forms of mediation observed in networked video game play: (a) speculative relationality: strategic and speculative collaboration marked by playfulness, irreverence, and an intention to engage in future gaming, but with undefined roles; speculative complexity: collaborative sensemaking that centers historically-produced socio-political dilemmas, resulting in robust examinations of the tensions that emerge in everyday meaning making; and transdisciplinary world-making: collective engagement in the creation of a new digital world within the gaming ecology by leveraging expertise across disciplines. Our claim is that the tools and participation frameworks of our designed gaming ecology mediated these proleptic practices—organizing towards future learning and crafting a world that centers the hopes and desires of Black, Brown, queer and other communities.

Authors

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author