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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Games are not only forms of documentation, communication, expression, and play but critical sites and technologies for learning. Indeed, as research illustrates, games not only further the development of domain-specific knowledge but also provide the designed constraints - analog or digital - rendered necessary to learn specific practices. Moving beyond the content/context divide (Squire, 2006), this proposed symposium brings together a group of researchers from three different institutions to reimagine learning in the peripheries of play. Thinking with an array of diverse theories - from cultural studies and interaction analysis to narratology and critical geography - presenters examine how the designed landscapes and environments of gaming (e.g., videogames, role-playing games, immersive escape rooms) serve as mediational resources and palimpsests that foster and advance consequential learning.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Media, Culture, and Learning

Chair

• Kyle P. Smith, University of Michigan

Papers

• AlgoRitmo Literacies in Gaming: Leveraging Chicanx Praxis to Reimagine AI Systems - Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis; José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder; Edward Rivero, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Playing Differently Together: Examining How Divergent Paraplay Mediated Co-Authorship in a Virtual Role-Playing Community - Alex Corbitt, Syracuse University

• “I Think the Story Is the Game?” Examining Play and Story as Infrastructures of Interaction - Jon M. Wargo, University of Michigan

Discussant

• Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University