Two Takes on Gee’s “Regime of Competence” in Games, Learning & Society

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

Abstract

The decades since Gee’s (2003) What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy have opened opportunities for critically evaluating claims made about games and learning. This paper offers one such critical appraisal of the book’s “Regime of Competence” principle, which Gee (2003) and his source, diSessa (2000), use to describe a kind of optimal zone of challenge in learning. Synthesizing traditions of games criticism, discursive genealogy, and qualitative methods, this paper explores an expanded framing of Gee and diSessa’s formulation - one that goes beyond individual learning and offers a more socially-situated view of what studying games can offer to educationists.

The first framing of this paper accepts Gee’s (2003) conceptualization of the Regime of Competence (RoCA) at face value. Drawing on earlier work by diSessa (2000), Gee asserts that in good videogames and good learning situations, “The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as challenging but not “undoable.” (Gee, 2003, l.1362). This is similar to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), typically understood as a theoretical range where a learner is able to perform, but only with support from a more knowledgeable other, such as a peer or teacher (APA, 2023).

A contrasting definition of the Regime of Competence (RoCB), however, comes from the scholarship on Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1999). In this formulation, the concept of the RoC shifts from an individual to a communal focus: “Within such a regime, knowing…can be defined as what would be recognized as competent participation in a practice” (Wenger, 1999, p. 137). In this sense, the situated meaning of RoC becomes an epistemological examination of how a practice comes to be recognized as knowledge, or competence, in the first place.

As we will show, each of these framings changes what the insights revealed by research on games and learning.

Moving from a discursive genealogy (Foucault, Rabineau, & Rose, 2003) of the concept of the RoC, we draw on Bogost’s (2015) approach to games criticism to explore two counterexamples to the RoCA formulation: Dwarf Fortress, which is known for espousing the philosophy “Losing is fun,” and Stardew Valley, emblematic of the genre of “cozy games.” Then, we turn to Erickson’s (1986) logic of interpretive analysis to explore the varied RoCs invoked as middle school students design games of their own with the context of formal schooling. We sample from observational and artifactual data collected in a prior study conducted across several 8th grade science classrooms (Author, 2024).

From the lens of games criticism, we argue that the RoCA formulation may be further contextualized by the agency of the learner/player and the aesthetic experience they seek. We further assert that viewing games from an RoCB perspective yields insights into how individuals come to see themselves as part of a given community. Our examination of students’ game design experiences demonstrates how learners must negotiate diverse RoCs as they seek recognition in the world.

Authors

• Earl Aguilera, California State University - East Bay

• Kaylee Allison Laub, University of California - Santa Barbara