Speculative Pedagogies in Video Gameplay: Designing for New Social Futures in Collaborative Worldmaking (Poster 9)

• In Event: Designing for Racial Justice Through Speculative Pedagogies: Learning to Build Liberatory Futures

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 to center the imagination and ingenuity in everyday practices (Authors, 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 increasingly being recognized as sites for robust meaning making (Authors, 2022; Gutiérrez et al., 2019), literacy development (Gee, 2007), and complex negotiations over historically produced power structures (Gray, 2014; Leonard, 2003; Shaw, 2012). Linking learning and play has been a project emerging across the traditions of history and culture (Huizinga, 1938) and sociocultural psychology (Vygotsky, 1967). We are aligned with the positions proposed by these and other scholars, arguing that play and the playful imagination open up possibilities, new horizons, and readily create opportunities for what could be in our immediate and far future. Herein lies the connection between play and temporality, more precisely the speculative. We take a concerted sociopolitical take on the role of play in the design of consequential learning that is future-oriented, specifically for learners from nondominant (racialized, gendered, dispossessed) communities.

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. 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
This paper highlights examples of speculative pedagogical practices as observed in networked video game play that we believe have important implications for how educators can use video games and other play-based practices in their classrooms. By integrating video gaming practices and/or ecologies, educators can design for new possibilities in worldmaking that build across academic disciplinary domains, foster equitable relationships, and support young people and adults in learning how to wrestle with enduring questions that our society faces.

In our work we have observed activity across three areas: speculative relationality, speculative complexity, and transdisciplinary worldmaking. Our claim is that the tools and participation frameworks of our designed gaming ecology mediated these proleptic practices—organizing learning toward an undefined future and the crafting of a world that centers the hopes and desires of Black, Brown, Queer and other nondominant communities.

Authors

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder