AlgoRitmo Literacies in Gaming: Leveraging Chicanx Praxis to Reimagine AI Systems

• In Event: Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Role Playing, and Embodied Escape: (Re)Imagining Learning in the Peripheries of Play

Abstract

Objectives
English and Language Arts educators have long interrogated how to meaningfully engage with Latinx/Latine/Chicanx young people and their literacies, texts, cultural practices, and funds of knowledge (Gutiérrez, Bien, et al., 2011; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Moll, Amanti, et al., 1992). In an age of proliferated AI/ML and other automated systems in everyday activity, a continued examination of AI literacy development is necessary; specifically, in ways that expand understandings of the social and cultural implications of AI, including its impact on racial inequalities, power dynamics, and cultural expressions (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). As such, this paper draws on Chicanx feminist and speculative epistemologies to broaden a conceptualization of young people's relationships with AI—specifically through collaborative videogame play—and how they, through the development of agentic stances, texts, and other artifacts, can harness AI for world-making and social transformation to potentially subvert the tool’s biased mechanisms.

Theoretical Perspectives
We leverage lenses of nepantla and border consciousness (Anzaldúa, 1987) and rasquachismo (Ybarra-Frausto, 1991) to examine AI literacy development, theorizing how Chicanx knowledge production and cultural practice can expand young people's relationships with AI through gameplay. We draw on analyses and findings from the Learning To Transform (LiTT) Video Gaming Lab to highlight the role-play of an intergenerational group of non-dominant youth, educators, and researchers within the context of a virtual city in Grand Theft Auto V. In particular, we illuminate how Chicanx praxis—decolonized approaches to inquiry, reflection, and world-building—facilitated opportunities to jointly identify and resolve socio-political dilemmas through the production of texts within and outside video games, and through pedagogies of play and the speculative imagination (see Authors, 2022a).

Methods and Data Sources
Our Social Design Based Study (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) draws from ethnographic analysis of participation in a videogame learning ecology. Participants included 10 undergraduate pre-service teachers and 10 high school students from schools in Latinx communities. The data sources were triangulated using two main processes: (1) analysis of collaborative activity between teachers and youth in video games, and (2) the generation of open-ended and focused thematic codings (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Dyson & Genishi, 2005) of observational field notes, writing, and interviews.

Findings and Significance
We advance the notion of AlgoRitmo Literacies, to highlight the ingenuity of youth and educators as they used a tool called Character AI to author lore emerging within a virtual city called LiTT City. We identify these literacies as marked by: 1) Posing questions of AI to complexify enduring social dilemmas that do not have definitive answers (e.g., racism, homophobia,, etc); 2) articulations of healthy skepticism towards the white and cis-heteropatriarchal hegemony of technology; 3) narrative movidas (Espinoza et al, 2018) that offer alternate Chicanx futurities; and 4) the repurposing of AI tools towards collective mobilization. We provide examples of how Chicanx communities subvert ideologies embedded in AI through creative and ingenious interventions in video games and the construction of cyborg Chicanx subjectivities (Author, 2023a). This paper offers implications for how educators across content areas can leverage gaming, and AI tools, toward consequential literacy development.

Authors

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Edward Rivero, Teachers College, Columbia University