The Platform Principle: A Sociomaterial Perspective on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy

• In Event: Revisiting James Paul Gee’s “What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy”: Critical Perspectives for the 21st Century

Abstract

In his influential book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (2003), James Paul Gee identified thirty-six learning principles that were present in the design of effective video games. These principles have had a significant impact on educational research and practice, informing how scholars and educators understand the role played by such factors as identity (Bacalja, 2020), systems thinking (Emihovich, 2024), and affinity groups (DeLuca, 2018) in shaping young people’s literacy practices and learning experiences with video games. In this conceptual paper, we argue that developments in the architecture of video games since Gee’s writing have inaugurated a new principle through which the others Gee outlines are now refracted: the platform principle.

Twenty years ago, Gee primarily used the term “platform” to index the hardware on which games are played — e.g., a computer versus a Nintendo console. However, over time the word has taken on more capacious meanings, with scholars in interdisciplinary fields like media studies, platform studies, and science and technology studies recognizing “the platform” as a predominant structure of networked culture (Gillespie, 2010). Central to such studies is the insight that platforms, including gaming platforms, are not neutral tools, but dynamic sociomaterial systems. Their technical facets (e.g., algorithms, interfaces, code) are always already tethered not only to their observable uses but also to the political-economic interests of their developers (van Dijck, 2021). In this way, platforms are best understood not, as Gee implies, as a stable backdrop on which the cultural practice of gaming unfolds but as a living relation between computing infrastructures and the social activities they underwrite.

This sociomaterial perspective brings into relief the profound shifts that the medium of video games has undergone in the years since Gee’s writing. To play video games today means interfacing with algorithmically powered advertising (Hussain et al., 2021), adaptive virtual worlds (Schut, 2017), microtransactions (Joseph, 2021), and surveillance practices (O’Donnell, 2014). Not incidental, such features are fundamental to both the design of contemporary video games and the business models according to which the gaming industry now operates. That is, they are the materialization of the platform logics that structure video games and the experiences they enable and govern.

In light of these developments, we suggest that education research cannot treat Gee’s learning principles apart from their intermediation by “the platform principle,” where learning—both in video games as well as in today’s increasingly platformized classrooms—is understood as a sociomaterial practice that is powerfully shaped by digital infrastructures and the commercial imperatives that animate them. To develop this argument, we examine a selection of Gee’s learning principles, including the Achievement Principle, the Identity Principle, and the Affinity Group Principle, showing how the Platform Principle refracts each one through the prism of platformization. We show how the Platform Principle invites us to revisit and rethink, not negate, Gee’s work in response to platformization. It prompts us to think about what it means for video games to ‘teach’ and for people to ‘learn’ by playing them.

Authors

• Bradley Robinson, Texas State University

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University

• William Wright, University of Georgia