What Mobile Phone Gaming Communities Offer Classroom Pedagogies

• In Event: Disrupting Top-Down Curricular Hierarchies Through Fandom and Media Engagement

Abstract

Adolescents spend much time using various applications on their mobile phones. Even in many school settings, researchers have noted that mobile phone use is widespread and frequent, particularly with regards to youth playing mobile games (Garcia, 2017). One of the most popular mobile game genres is war games. War games include applications where players assemble troops and/or level up heroes to battle other players. As someone who taught high school for 15 years and was a teacher-researcher before moving to teacher education, I noted hundreds of students playing this genre of mobile war games in the hallways, the cafeteria, and in classrooms (Author, 2024). What is so engaging about these games that keeps youth interested in these games? In order to think about what practices teachers might borrow from this kind of gaming context, researchers need to catalog the game mechanics, social practices, literacy practices, and aesthetic elements of these games.
This paper draws on ethnographic research of communities playing mobile war games (Heath & Street, 2008). I spent approximately 1,000 hours playing these kinds of mobile war games. One of the key components of mobile war games is the chat function where players can write public messages. Players have several different groups that they can chat with including both within a single game server and often across servers. During my data collection I used my mobile phone to routinely capture screenshots of all the chat windows. In total I collected approximately 20,000 unique screenshots.
To analyze this large corpus of text data, I used both quantitative and qualitative methods. First, quantitatively, I employed tools from machine learning including topic modeling (Blei, et al., 2003) in order to statistically represent discursive patterns. Creating this statistical topic model illustrated what the gaming community wrote about in the chat in general and on average. Next, I employed qualitative discourse analysis (Gee, 2014) of specific screenshots that my statistical model pointed to as representative of the larger patterns.
Findings demonstrate that players in this community engaged in social action and not only individual gameplay. Instead of seeing game play as a solitary activity, players saw their work as networked and community-driven. They discussed puzzles and problems with each other and collaboratively developed strategies to solve these issues. They engaged with numerical thinking including discussions of probability to game out how best to level up their characters. They used metaphors and analogies to explain complex mathematical algorithms and to teach each other about the underlying reasoning behind their strategies. Similarly, the topic model demonstrated that players used persuasive language and argumentation to convince others of strategies and to broker agreements with other players across teams and servers.
Regarding implications for classroom design, findings highlight the collaborative nature of these mobile gaming communities. Teachers designing classrooms may want to think carefully about how to design units and assignments that actually engage in group worthy projects where youth need to work together toward common goals.

Author

• Scott Storm, University at Albany - SUNY