Ctrl+Alt+Resist: Digital protest and speculative activism in videogaming ecologies

• In Event: Unsilencing the Past, Regifting the Present, and Manifesting Unforgettable Futures: Multiliteracies, Entertainment, and Popular Culture

Abstract

Schools are becoming inundated with technology and more often than not, the technological innovations that emerge in schools are one-size-fits all solutions to educational inequities (Sims, 2017) that do not center the lived experiences of non-dominant young people (Engeström, 1991; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). These solutions further entrench oppressive systems rather than solve them (Benjamin, 2019). Moreover, the everyday digital practices of young people, such as video game play, are not often valued as consequential for meaning-making. In spite of these deficit discourses, this paper extends previous examinations (Gee, 2003; Gray, 2020; Rivero & Gutiérrez, 2019; Steinkuehler & Williams, 2006) of the possibilities of leveraging video game ecologies as sites of robust learning by centering the speculative practices of young people as they engage in socio-political analysis and critique. In particular, this study illuminates how non-dominant youth imagine new social futures within the context of online video game play, opening up possibilities for how activism, civic identity, and solidarity are being negotiated and rearticulated in youths’ everyday digital practices. As such, I argue that online gaming practices can highlight the desires, dreams, and yearnings of young people as they contend with and speculate on society’s most vexing dilemmas, such as racism and police brutality.

To explore these emergent forms of agency, what I call speculative activism (Authors), I analyzed the online gaming practices of a group of Black and Brown youth as they organized a memorial to George Floyd and staged a protest against police violence on Grand Theft Auto V at the same time as the in-person protests that occurred around the world on June 7, 2020. Participants included approximately 30 young people from a diverse range of backgrounds and nationalities. This study draws on four hours of this live streamed event, including the conversations that took place during the game play, as well as the live text chat on YouTube. Video and audio data were analyzed and reduced into activity logs (Erickson, 2006) and codes were developed inductively (Bogdan and Biklen, 1997). In particular, I focused on how the young people negotiated contestations that emerged across their participation during the video game play.

Goodwin’s (2007) participation frameworks helped illuminate the epistemic, moral, and affective stances that participants engaged in as they developed a new digital, social, and imaginary world. Through the analysis of the microprocesses of multiple types of interactions in video game play, this study shows how young people developed speculative activist stances as they contended with, ruptured, and re-imagined mainstream notions of activism. Here, young people imagined beyond today’s inequities (Garcia & Mirra, 2023). In doing so, the young people developed fugitive and abolitionist imaginaries and practices that remixed technology, resistance, and social relations, thereby re-articulating the possibilities of video game play, collaboration, and activism toward consequential forms of learning. This study offers implications for the design of learning environments that leverage video game play as a central site for the development of sociopolitical action and critique.

Author

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis