Gaming Everyday Dilemmas: Learning Critical Literacies Through Collaborative Composing on Video Game Play

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

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines how collaborative composing on video game play can raise everyday dilemmas that drive the development of critical literacies, practices to critique the social world and imagine otherwise possibilities (Gutiérrez et al., 2017; Pandya et al., 2021). We approach everyday dilemmas as complex problem spaces to trace the contours of injustice and design more just worlds (Muñoz, 1999; Zavala, 2016). Collaborative composition has the potential to identify these dilemmas because it requires writers to surface and negotiate their lived experiences and practices of meaning making (Blackburn & Schey, 2018). We conduct a discursive analysis of compositions and discussions centered on video game play, guided by the question: How did collaborative composing on game play, and discussions of these compositions, mediate the emergence of everyday dilemmas?

Theoretical Perspectives
This study is framed by Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and queer of color critique that frame dilemmas of everyday life as key drivers of expansive learning (Engeström, 2001; Johnson, 2001; Muñoz, 1999; Zavala, 2016). CHAT has tended to approach expansive learning as linear trajectories of change that occur as activity systems encounter and resolve “historically accumulated structural tensions” or contradictions (Engeström, 2001, p. 137). Queer of color critique attunes us to the ways dilemmas are experienced by marginalized communities as “the pressures of everyday life, forces that shape a subject and call for different tactical responses” (Muñoz, 1999, p. 38). Through these lenses, we follow how everyday dilemmas are complex, possibly irresolvable, problem spaces that nevertheless mediate practices through which learners survive and transform oppressions.

Methods and Data Sources
This analysis emerges in an intergenerational social design experiment focused on video games as tools for youth and adults to collaborate on shared dilemmas experienced across everyday life (Gutiérrez et al., 2017; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010). We focus on data generated during a Fall 2021 course with 13 undergraduate and high school students, three university educators, and three educators from youth media organization partners. We conducted analytic logging and transcription of video recorded discussions, which informed coding and discursive analysis of multimedia reflections on video game play mediated by course readings on learning sciences and gaming studies.

Findings and Significance
Guided by prompts that paired readings with game play, students composed multimedia reflections in dialogue with peers and educators. Because games are sociopolitical artifacts that represent society (Gray, 2020), these assignments became sites to explore everyday pressures at the intersections of power and consider what otherwise worlds might be possible. Small group annotation and discussions deepened these explorations, often making dilemmas explicit. We explicate these findings through three moments wherein writing on, and discussion of, video game play surfaced a dilemma of social design. For instance, a group of five women and femmes of color surfaced the dilemma between fighting for representation and choosing invisibility of intersecting identities to avoid harassment. At a time of rapidly accelerating hate at the intersections of power, video games can animate activities through which youth and adults develop critical literacies.

Authors

• Addie Shrodes, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Ashieda McKoy, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Alexis E. Hunter, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author