On Sept 25 at 10am Pacific Daylight Time, Arturo Cortez will discuss their recent work on video games as media for development. Arturo has offered both a video of a recent talk on this topic and an article. Please engage at least one of these materials as a basis for your comments/questions.
To provide a window into the processes, Arturo introduces the Learning To Transform (LiTT) Video Gaming Lab, a social design-based experiment that builds models for equity-centered educator and student learning through the design of deeper relationships between informal and formal educational environments. In the video, a talk at the University of California Irvine, Arturo provides the history of this research project, as well as a theory of learning that animates the larger design of the project. In the article, they provides a framework, drawing on young people’s video gaming practices, to understand how the play, the imagination, and everyday collaboraction provide contexts for robust sociopolitical meaning making and action.
If you’d like to attend, please email lchcmike@gmail.com a Zoom link will be sent prior to the meeting. Please also send any feedback, comments or questions.
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This is a procedural contribution, not substantive to the discussion. I wasn’t getting notices via email of these posts until Mike directed me to the “Subscribe” option that is just above and to the left of the comment box I’m typing in right now. Once I clicked it, I started getting notices of new posts.
The impression that I have is that all the video games that Arturo has been discussing
are violent dystopian worlds. This context must be taken in consideration. For example.
Grand Theft Auto is notoriously vile and violent – there is a video clip (a ‘snuf’ to use gang
slang) in GTA 3 where a prostitute is shot after sex in the backseat of a car. Aren’t the
avatars, typically gang members and usually Hispanic or black males. Surely, this perpetuates a racial stereotype. I am sure there are avatars who are white guys (probably ex-cons). This is an ‘underworld’.
Artin used the term ‘kids’ to refer to people who play videogames. And in fact, there are
many children who have been playing GTA for decades, as well as adults. In 2003,
GTA 3 was the most popular videogame for second graders at my local Catholic elementary school (it was the ‘rage’). Few parents that I talked to realized what was in
the game of GTA – the title of the game should have been a red flag – stealing cars
(a felony) became a game. And now carjackings really have become a game for under aged minors as in Tik Tok’s Hyundai-Kia Challenge.
Hijacking cars, prostitution, and murdering people are the basic themes in GTA –
to refer to this as imaginative play requires expanding our vocabulary to introduce
a new term (perhaps Dark Play).
What if the LGBT+ community integrated themselves into videogames like The Sims or Fortnite? Would those gaming communities be more accepting of alternative lifestyles?
If hate speech was used against the LGBT+ community playing The Sims or Fortnite
that would really be noteworthy. In contrast,Grand Theft Auto is all about verbal and
physical violence.
Thank you, Francine (EDIT: sorry for not knowing this was you instead of Larry), for your comments. I think your analysis of GTA is spot on and what initially drew me to the work of young people in how they play this game. In particular, as I discuss in the JFS piece and below in response to Antti’s question, GTA and other games do not need to be played as the designers’ originally intended. In fact, this aspect of game play is what I think is ingenious. In the Journal of Futures Studies piece that is attached, we actually see young people engaging in The Sims in very radical ways that promote opportunities to engage in activism digitally. In addition, in the talk that I gave to UC, Irvine, I spotlight an example of how a group of queer and trans players engage in new forms of role play in the context of GTA that serve to challenge homophobic and transphobic practices in game play. In my view, these types of practices may serve as opportunities for young people to challenge hate speech in games, while trying to adhere to the community guidelines. More importantly, these examples show me that young people are already re-imagining game play, challenging ideologies that they, as non-dominant people, experience in real life (IRL), as well as in game play. While GTA is indeed dystopian, young people are teaching us that the game does not need to be played as it is and perhaps more fruitfully, real life does not need to be “played” in the way we have inherited it. Ideologies can be tinkered with. In fact, many of the young people we work with often suggest that the narratives, while oftentimes may be satirical, reference real life. What we are trying to do is support young people in engaging in critical social analysis of these texts (i.e., video games) and to re-imagine them. Indeed, if we encouraged young people to just play the games as they are, it could be suggested that we are lauding the themes and tropes evidenced in them. That is not the case, as I describe in the article and the video that are linked above. The power, in our view, is in re-imagining games and their narratives, while saturating young people in leveraging texts like Dr. Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology or even Edward Said. After all, racism, homophobia, transphobia, gender-based oppression, ableism, and other forms of oppression are present in non-dominant people’s lives. We are supporting the young people we work with in tinkering with these ideologies, as they make sense of critical social theory, through everyday activity. Our hope is that they will continue to critically analyze their play and to create new games, storylines, practices, and tools that inspire new generations. Hope that helps!
Thank you Arturo for sharing your awesome work, and everyone for the very fruitful discussion. I am currently exploring a similar topic around supporting youth in reimagining their lifeworlds and public activity systems. In my past and ongoing work with concrete utopias, I have noticed that it is quite difficult to envision alternatives to existing practices especially if the alternatives are to be enacted. Therefore, I am interested in exploring various modes of expression of the imagined possibilities, such as arts education, or AI, etc. Arturo – Id like to hear your reflections on how this sort of gaming and programming environment acts as a specific kind of re-mediation of the youth imagination, as contrasted to other, perhaps more traditional modes, such as arts. In what ways is this this different from the work with drama methods in the Migrant Student Leadership Institute, by Kris Gutierrez and colleagues?
Thank you, Antti, for your thoughtful questions and comments. I always love building and thinking with you. I think what our program offers is an opportunity to leverage multiple tools and practices to cultivate a new way of participating in gaming worlds. Whereas many games offer pre-determined narratives that often reify racist, homophobic, transphobic, and other forms of oppression, we offer opportunities to push on the designers’ intentions and to play games in ways they were not intended. In particular, through role play, young people are able to tinker with the pre-existing narratives and to create new storylines, to dream their way out of the racist tropes, as an example. In the context of the article, we describe how young people held a memorial and protest for George Floyd in the context of Grand Theft Auto. They role played these scenarios and engaged in new forms of activism, digitally. We draw inspiration from this example in our work with high schoolers because we think it provides them with opportunities to tinker with ideologies and to re-imagine new ways of participating as coders, hackers, and dreamers in the context of their everyday activity. In this case, we encourage them to play de-code and re-code the game. In our view, many games index harmful systems of oppression and we try and provide them opportunities to collectively imagine what new worlds could exist if we were to re-imagine these virtual worlds. In this context, any change to the virtual world must be collectively imagined and tied to a storyline. For example, students once imagined what new kinds of economies, practices, clothing, and ways of life might exist had Columbus not landed in the Americas. They created scenarios and role played narratives that drew on the supernatural preventing Columbus’ arrival. This opened up possibilities for dreaming with youth about what could have been, spurring research about pre-columbian ways of life and imagining how they might flourish in the 21st century. What I think this offers is a way of enacting out your imagination collectively, drawing on a range of resources, but always rooted in an orientation toward what could be. As for MSLI, our program draws a lot of inspiration on supporting young people in collectively dreaming about their participation in a range of new futures, as college students, as programmers, as actors, and even as content creators. I would love to hear more from other colleagues about these connections!
One big idea that I took from the discussion and background materials was that play (organized play?, or is all play, organ-ized?) can be an effective way to deal with double-binds. Question: Did G. Bateson, who studied both double binds and play, articulate this idea/practice??
Absolutely! That is the originator! I first learned about it from Mariana Pacheco’s piece on everyday resistance, who appropriated it from Engeström, who appropriated it from Bateson. The genealogy is so key here! Thanks for bringing up!
Where does Engestrom suggest that a double bind can be solved through play? I know his discussion from Learning by Expanding but I do not see it there. I will check Pacheco. Thanks for the ref.
Excellent discussion! I see games as rule-bound and play as that zone where rules are challenged, yet the game goes on. Games and play are metaphorical stand ins for real violence, war, etc. Perhaps a rehearsal for the real thing? In which case, it matters very much what is being imagined. I might ask what we know about the ways in which gaming prepares gamers for life outside the game.
Hence Game Theory, Henry? or perhaps its qualitative cousin the Dramatic Metaphor as a methodology for understanding the dynamics of intersectionality, Henry.
PS- I got notification of your comment in my email!! Hooray! we appear to be subscribed in this discussion.
This is in response to the discussion on rules; imaginative or symbolic play can also have its rules. For example, Vygotsky explicitly stated that in role play children’s activities are determined by the rules that come with the roles, e.g., in pretending to be a doctor, the rules of play are determined by the doctor role.
(the system seems to be working, Mike.) artin
Only for some, Artin. We have at least one failure that I have been informed of. I look forward to digging deeper into the issues we have before us.
Well said, Artin. And in so far as the child is acting the role, they are subordinating their behavior to those rules and behaving in a facsimile of an adult professional. Some cognitive achievement! TWO heads taller, almost.
Just a test of the system.
Mike,
Yes I was thinking about game theory and war games. I like your pointing to theater as well. Vygotsky was very interested in dramatic play in cognitive and social development. Professional wrestling is interesting vis a vis dramaticality, which is how Trump entered American politics.
Sorry to say that I am not getting email notifications of comments on CP. Otherwise, the discussion is great.
A test of the system.
I found the answer to my own question: Its in the section,” How does the new come into the world?” (a Solomon Rushdie question too) from Learning by Expanding. pp164-165 in the blue covered old 1987 version.
To me it seems that both Arturo’s gamers and MSLI share the goal of allowing to participants to feel transformative agency, to be empowered, to change way people treat each other. Both draw upon the Dramatic Metaphor
Arturo, this is absolutely brilliant work! It is such a wonderful thing to see people playing with and encouraging children to play with ideologies, particularly when that play involves tinkering and messing with oppressive ideologies that rule the times and places in which we live, even if those places are “virtual” (as if they aren’t real!). This kind of play that you are pointing to involves opening up cracks of possibility in the armament, openings to (a) possible world(s).
Here’s to hoping that these young people (and you? and us?) will be able to wriggle their(/our) way into some of those cracks to set off some charges whose consequences will resound with us here IRL.
Thanks again to you and to all the youth that you work with for this wonderfully remarkable and potentially world-changing work!
Did I miss something? I didn’t see anything about children being engaged with video gaming in Arturo’s presentation .Going back to my earlier comment, Grand Theft Auto is not a game for ‘children’, although many children as young as seven years of age do play it. Does anyone want to take up the opposing argument that children should be vicariously experiencing violence, drug trafficking, and sex trafficking? Is the idea of age appropriate activities for children a colonialist, Victorian mind set that has been imposed on non-Western societies?
Francine,
When we first launched the seminar on Imagination and Creativity in the works of Vygotsky, I thought that an important issue to raise was the MISUSE of the imagination. I asked the question yesterday about the ways in which gaming might prepare gamers for life outside the game. Arturo’s research on gaming is exactly the kind of work that brings together in a timely way so many important issues of social justice and artificial intelligence. This isn’t ivory tower research, for sure. Your ethical concerns, social justice concerns for children and women, broaden the relevance of Arturo’s work. I find it interesting that the moderator of the gaming that Arturo recorded and analyzed was a woman. This looks like a double bind to me.