Dream Moves: Fostering Equitable Discursive Futures in a Video Game–Based Ecology

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

Abstract

Objectives
We situate dreaming as a collective act of envisioning and building futures. In particular, we illustrate how ‘dream moves’—defined in this paper as intersectional and justice-oriented discourses and pedagogies—fostered opportunities for collective dreaming among Black/Brown/femme/Queer teachers, young people, and community members. These examples offer insight into how these practices can be tinkered with in other educational spaces in order to foster more transformative, collaborative and emancipatory learning experiences for nondominant youth.

Theoretical Perspectives
As a making and tinkering learning space, the Learning to Transform (LiTT) Video Gaming Lab privileges sensemaking and dreaming toward various futures within the context of nondominant youth’s everyday practices, such as video gameplay. Specifically, we illuminate what alternative futures are developed in tinkering spaces as well as how we build them together. Here, we point to equity as the pedagogical “how” of teaching and learning whereby specific designs, moves, language, and cultural and intellectual histories center and open up possibilities for equity and equitable futures (Vossoughi et al., 2013).

Methods and Data Sources
All of the data sources for this paper emerge from a larger study done in Summer 2022 as part of the LiTT Video Game Lab. As a part of the larger study, youth partners attended weekly design sessions held via zoom, and worked collaboratively to dream up and design a virtual city—LiTT City—within Grand Theft Auto V. For the purpose of this paper, we draw on a small group meeting (3 hrs) in May 2022 where a subset of our LiTT ecology met to brainstorm new designs and storylines to implement in LiTT City. This particular event was chosen as a robust example of how agentic nondominant futures are being collectively crafted as well as clear discursive moves and designs made to support a kind of sociopolitical future-making. We created video activity logs of all recorded design sessions, logging about every 3 minutes of activity. We also added observer comments, reflexive memos and team notes to both the videos and the video transcripts.

Findings and Significance
Findings for this paper focus on the specific practices, the how, that undergird “dream moves”: (1) Using tinkering vocabulary that encouraged equitable participation aimed at futurity and plurality; (2) Engaging liminality and complexity through specific and intentional questioning that asks participants to resist finality, binaries, and dominant conventions and constraints of past and current lived histories to imagine otherwise new alternative worlds; and (3) supporting participants in embodying futures whereby collectively tinkering with origin stories and game characters in GTA 5 helps participants see their futures in both the game and real life as tinkerable, as stories and environments we can concretely change. Highlighting these three discursive moves has important implications in understanding and leveraging collective sociopolitical future-making for collective Black/Brown/Queer dreaming and worldbuilding.

Authors

• Ashieda McKoy, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Tiera C. Tanksley, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Addie Shrodes, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author