The Pedagogical Metagame Is Afoot! Honoring Youth’s Vitality Rights in Formal and Informal Learning Contexts

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: (Re)Considering the Critical and Affective Potentials of Playful Literacies (Table 11)

Abstract

A key strand of our research has explored how affective pedagogies and playful literacies can resist the neoliberal capture of young people’s video gaming practices in formal and informal learning contexts. Through our work with the Giga-Games Camp (GGC), a series of week-long video game design sponsored by a university in the southeastern U.S., we observed—and experienced—the joy, movement, and creativity that can emerge when educators commit to the intrinsic value of pointless play and directionless design. Led by Brenner and Theodore’s (2002) concept of actually existing neoliberalism and Boldt’s (2021) notion of vitality rights, we have conceptualized this ethical orientation as a move towards actually existing vitality rights, which speaks to how nourishing youthful vitality can organically puncture and deflate the neoliberal affects that suffuse so much of contemporary formal and informal education (Authors, 2023).

While the GGC was undoubtedly shaped by a set of historical and institutional forces that explicitly and implicitly situated video games in relation to economic productivity, it was still a summer camp—no quizzes, no mandated curriculum, and no standardized tests. It was a pedagogical blank canvas, and while we had little say in the its size and shape, we could paint as wildly as we liked.

It was while working to make sense of such pedagogical privilege that we encountered Boluk and Lemieux’s (2017) work on metagaming. Though admittedly somewhat far afield from educational studies, we found ourselves wondering whether and how pedagogy might be generatively conceived as a metagaming practice for nurturing playful literacies, and this is the provocation we bring to this round table session. For Boluk and Lemieux, “metagames are where and when games happen…a messy circle that both constrains games and makes them possible in the first place” (p. 15). Metagames effect a mutation in games, shifting them away from media commodities and towards such practices as streaming, creating, cheating, hacking, and so on. Metagames can therefore subvert “the sensory and political economies of those technologies responsible for the privatization of play” (p. 4) by disrupting the logics of a game.

Pedagogy, we suggest, may be understood as a metagaming practice in relation to playful literacies. While the games young people often play—and sometimes, though less often, make—in schools are often legitimized in the service of future-proof STEM learning, we wonder how students, educators, and scholars may collaborate to develop and enact the kinds of pedagogical metagaming practices that can rupture the commodification and subjugation of play. For our presentation, we will further describe our thinking about pedagogical metagames, share our metagaming pedagogical practices from the GGC, and invite round-table conversation—itself a metagaming pedagogical practice—about pedagogical futures for playful literacies.

Authors

• Bradley Robinson, Texas State University

• William Wright, University of Georgia