From Game Literacies to Peace Literacies: The Perspective Rooms Protocol

• In Event: Virtual Roundtable Session 3
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Innovative Approaches to Learning and Teaching: Peace Literacies, Cross-Cultural Engagement, and Teacher Mentoring

Proposal

Video games now command more attention than other media among youth (Bain & Company, 2023), while “learning poverty” remains severe (World Bank et al., 2022). Prior work links games to active learning and literacies (Gee, 2003), participatory culture (Jenkins, 2009), communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), literacy-as-social-practice (Street, 1984), and communal problem-solving in MMOs (Steinkuehler & Duncan, 2008). This roundtable pivots from game literacies to peace literacies, defined as the discourse and cooperation routines—perspective-taking, fair-process talk, willingness for future contact—that support social cohesion in classrooms.
We offer a conceptual/theoretical contribution for ICT4D: a design synthesis translating online game community practices (wikis, forums, guild norms) into a minimal classroom routine, the Perspective Rooms Protocol (PRP)—a build → visit → debrief sequence. Learners co-design a “room of everyday life” (e.g., getting to school, mealtime), host peers from another group to complete an asymmetric task, then debrief using paraphrase-before-reply and negotiated fairness. PRP is platform-agnostic (digital or paper analog twin) and safety-by-design (consent/privacy checks, opt-outs, no traumatic content, data minimization/no names stored). The work targets multilingual, resource-constrained contexts (e.g., urban schools in South Africa; refugee-hosting classrooms in Jordan; rural India with intermittent connectivity).

RESEARCH QUESTIONS (CONCEPTUAL):
1. Which online community practices map plausibly to peace literacies, and under what conditions?
2. How can these be expressed as design patterns and assembled into a constraints-first protocol (PRP)?
3. Which lightweight evaluation signals (e.g., brief pre/post perspective-taking pulse, counts of help-given/received, two-sentence reflections) are credible without invasive data?

THEORY OF CHANGE (COMPACT):
Student authorship of everyday spaces → low-stakes self-disclosure and recognition; asymmetric co-op with equal-status roles → interdependence and help-giving; structured debrief (paraphrase-before-reply, fairness scripts) → perspective-taking and willingness for future contact.

METHODS (CONCEPTUAL SYNTHESIS):
Databases: ACM Digital Library, ERIC, Scopus/Google Scholar; years 2000–2025.
Sample search strings: “MMO guild communication AND cooperation,” “participatory culture wiki AND youth AND literacy.”
Inclusion: relevance to the theory of change; peer-reviewed or widely cited grey literature.
Appraisal: argument transparency + plausibility of mechanism claims.
Coding: Context–Mechanism–Outcome (CMO) extraction.
Synthesis rule: mint a pattern only if observed across ≥2 domains or cases and explainable by a common mechanism. Measurement choices map to mechanisms (e.g., paraphrase count → recognition → perspective-taking).

PROVISIONAL PATTERNS (WITH TRADE-OFFS):
1. Asymmetric Roles, Shared Goal → interdependence and help-giving; trade-off: role prestige can undercut equal status—rotate roles, show capability cues.
2. Paraphrase-Before-Reply → recognition and fewer misreadings; trade-off: slows pace—use timers/turn-limits.
3. Everyday-Life Scope → safety without retraumatization; trade-off: risks trivializing structural harms—address via debrief prompts on context/constraints.

CONTRIBUTION:
We will present an initial theory of change, a compact set of design patterns, and a concise PRP outline, and invite critique on ICT4D-central tensions (inclusion vs. exclusion; surveillance vs. safety; bias vs. ethical design) and on adapting PRP for multilingual or low-bandwidth classrooms. By reframing familiar MMO literacies as peace literacies, the Perspective Rooms Protocol offers a practical, constraints-first pathway for technology to bridge rather than widen divides.

Author

• Arturo Sierra, Harvard Graduate School of Education