project outcomes
Publications:
Apperley, T., Beavis, C., Bradford, C. O'Mara, J. and Walsh, C. (2008). Researching Kids and Videogames: Games, Game Play and Literacy in the Twenty First Century, Proceedings, The [player] conference, August 26-29, 2008 IT University of Copenhagen, pp.4-29.
Walsh, C. S., and Apperely, T. (in press). Gaming capital: Rethinking literacy. Changing Climates: Education for sustainable futures- proceedings of the 2008 AARE Conference Papers 2008, AARE, Brisbane.
Walsh, C. S., and Apperely, T. (2008) Researching digital game players: Gameplay and gaming capital. IADIS International Conference Gaming 2008: Design for engaging experience and social interaction Amsterdam, The Netherlands 25 - 27 July 2008, pp. 257-260.
Conference Presentations
Australasian Children's Literature Association for Research, Wellington NZ (June 2008)
Playing at bullying: Virtual reality and concepts of play
Clare Bradford
Australian Association for the Teaching of English, Adelaide (July 2008
Symposium - Literacy and computer games in the digital world of the twenty first century: Year 1.
Catherine Beavis, Amanda Gutierrez, Tom Apperley
IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, Amsterdam (July 2008)
Researching Digital Game Players: Gaming Capital and Literacy Education
Christopher Walsh, Thomas Apperley
The [Player] Conference, Center for Computer Games Research, Copenhagen (August, 2008)
Researching Kids and Computer games: games, game play and literacy in the twenty first century.
Catherine Beavis, Thomas Apperley, Clare Bradford and Christopher Walsh.
Television and the National Conference, Melbourne (November, 2008)
Recruiting Audiences: Television, Console Games, and Global Identities
Thomas Apperley
Australian Association for Research in Education, Brisbane (Nov/Dec 2008)
Symposium – Gameplay, gameplayers and gaming capital: Exploring intersections between games, education and adolescent subjectivities in virtual worlds
QUT/Deakin Symposium: Deep Magic: The lure and reality of digital environments
Paper 3: Educating Jimmy: Games, Learning and Bully
Clare Bradford
Abstracts
Australasian Children's Literature Association for Research, Wellington NZ (June 2008)
Playing at bullying: Virtual reality and concepts of play
Clare Bradford
The videogame Bully (also known as Canis Canem Edit) has attracted criticism since its launch in 2006, being most commonly accused of training and encouraging young people to engage in bullying behaviour. This paper explores concepts of play as they relate to video games, with a focus on Bully and the world of Bullworth Academy, the boarding school where Jimmy, the protagonist, is deposited by his uncaring mother and stepfather. Drawing on the writing of Roger Caillois, Johan Huizinga and Jean Baudrillard, I consider how play relates to the 'real world', applying these ideas to Bully and the gameplay it engenders and using my own experience of playing the game to explore how it engages with the player's experience of narrative elements, visual cues and cultural references. I argue that criticism of Bully (based, for the most part, on second-hand accounts of the game) has failed to take into account the hyperreality of the game's world, its satirical and ironic mode of representation, and its potential for player agency. These strategies produce effects of defamiliarisation which are calculated to encourage players to reflect on the relationships between Bully and the real-world contexts in which bullying occurs.
Australian Association for the Teaching of English, Adelaide (July 2008)
Literacy and computer games in the digital world of the twenty first century: Year 1.
Catherine Beavis, Amanda Gutierrez, Thomas Apperley
This panel presents three perspectives on the first year of the ARC funded research project: literacy in the digital world of the twenty first century: Learning from computer games. The project is based at Deakin University, Victoria, and is undertaken in partnership with the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English, the Department of Education and Early Childhood (Victoria) and the Australian Association for the Moving Image. The project has a threefold focus: on computer games as text; on the literacies and literate practices young people are engaged in as they play computer games in their out of school lives, and the ways that intersects with and shapes their sense of identity and community in the globalised world; and on the development of teaching approaches and a professional development model for working with and learning from computer games in the English classroom. The presenters will discuss (i) why literacy and computer games? new texts, new literacies, young people and curriculum (Catherine Beavis) (ii) developing school research partnerships with schools and the profession (Amanda Gutierrez) (iii) game playing practices and preferences of young Victorians: survey results of young people's game playing preferences and practices in the research schools (Thomas Apperley) Each speaker will present for 20 minutes, with discussion time to follow.
IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, Amsterdam (July 2008)
Researching Digital Game Players: Gaming Capital and Literacy Education
Christopher Walsh, Thomas Apperley
This project explores the gaming capital and literacies of adolescent digital game players in their leisure time to inform curricula design. In order to build upon text-based paradigms of students’ video game play, this research utilises an ethnographic approach that presents a nuanced and multifarious framework. This study combines, and then draws upon both quantitative and qualitative methods; a large longitudinal survey sample, narrative analysis of popular games, interviews and participant observation over three years. In this article we suggest strategies for researching and teaching about these digital spaces through collaboration with high school teachers and cultural and educational institutions. This presents a play and player centred approach to researching gaming capital in educational contexts that posits researching video games be grounded in the practices of game players.
Television and the National Conference, Melbourne (November 2008)
Recruiting Audiences: Television, Console Games, and Global Identities
Tom Apperley
Since the mid-90s football (soccer in the Australian context) has been a key part of what Scott Lash and Celia Lury (2007) describe as the ‘global culture industry’. They state: ‘As an object of the global culture industry, football extends its network through media outreach… …through the recruitment of other objects’ (2007: 55). The television is a key node in football’s recruitment of objects. It also aggregates the scope of football by expanding the potential audience, while simultaneously establishing a kind of authenticity to the game as a global event through real-time, live broadcast across the globe.This paper will explore two aspects of the expansion of football’s network: the licensing of the FIFA franchise to videogame producers, and the expansion of football into the Australian audience. The paper suggests that these two areas of ‘recruitment’ are related, and that together they iterate the importance of television in the process of the global cultural industries media outreach. Supported with data from a survey administered to 400 students at four high schools in Melbourne, Australia and eight group interviews with students the paper will explore how through television console games youth negotiate a sense of place. The focus will be on the perceptions of and enjoyment found in sports games, and how games like 2006 FIFA World Cup (2006,EA Canada), NBA Live 07 (2006, EA Canada), and AFL Premiership 07 (2007, IR Gurus), are used by the survey respondents to think through notions of identity in relation to the global.
Australian Association for Research in Education, Brisbane (Nov/Dec 2008)
Symposium
Gameplay, gameplayers and gaming capital: Exploring intersections between games, education and adolescent subjectivities in virtual worlds
Drawing on the ARC funded project: Literacy in the Digital World of the Twenty First Century: Learning from Computer Games, this panel confronts a key paradox in contemporary education that posits that many of the skills demanded for the increasingly technological and changing work place are not being learned in schools; rather they are being learned through youth’s ‘engagement’ in virtual worlds. This presentation investigates a number of aspects of intersections between young people, games and education, including the role of videogames in adolescents’ lives, the ways in which games might be incorporated into curriculum, and young players’ development of a critical vocabulary to talk about their subjectivity in the game world. It explores the relationship between their actions and the repertoire of potential actions and anticipated and unanticipated outcomes in virtual worlds. Deeper understandings of what gameplay actions entail we believe will have implications for curriculum and pedagogy . An important aspect of the project is the collaborative classroom based research exploring the implications of game play for constructions of literacy and English curriculum. We hypothesise that learning more about how adolescents interact with videogames (computer, console and hand-held) has the capacity to provide insights to strengthen teaching and to increase engagement for students currently disinterested or marginalized. Presentations in this symposium draw on the notion of gaming capital (Consalvo, 2007), exploring it as a platform for social ties and dialogues about knowledge and differentiations about different qualities and sources of knowledge and action, on multimodal conceptions of literacy, and on models for professional development and pedagogy around literacy and technology. The notion of gaming capital suggests a reciprocal learning and collaboration where gameplayers interpret information from paratexts. This supports the idea that the skills (reading, designing, negotiating, researching, analyzing, evaluating, teaching, learning, etc.) that they are experiencing through gameplay, may powerfully prepare them for the kinds of future literacies and knowledge making strategies they will need. This project suggests approaches to education (primarily literacy and English curricula) that might enable it to benefit from examining youths’ engagement with gameplay and gaming capital to make teaching and learning increasingly relevant to their experiences outside of school.
Paper 1: Research Methodologies in creative practice
Catherine Beavis
This project brings together a team from Deakin University, the Research and Innovation section of the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEE&CD), the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English (VATE) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). The team is working with four schools and sixteen teachers to develop ideas about how adolescents use video games and how this might inform the inclusion of games and related texts into the English curriculum. In order to explore the role that videogames play in the lives of students', to reflect on how these experiences could be utilized in the classroom, and initiate experimental projects utilizing games in the classroom, the project developed a multipronged research method drawing on three particular methodologies, quantitative, in the form of a survey, and two qualitative methods – ethnography and action research. Of the qualitative methods, ethnography will be primarily used to gather information about the role of games in students' lives, while action research will be used in partnership with the educators in the schools to develop short projects for use in the classroom that would demonstrate how computer and videogames could be effectively incorporated into the literacy curriculum.
Paper 2: 'Experts on the 'field': redefining the literacy boundaries'.
Catherine Beavis and Amanda Gutierrez
The challenges posed to conventional notions of literacy by contemporary forms such as computer games have far reaching implications for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, and for the ways in which school subjects such as English are conceptualized. While curriculum guidelines urge the inclusion and study of electronic or digital texts, there is little practical guidance as to how this might be undertaken, nor what the consequences might be of taking features such as the multimodal and interactive features of ICT-based texts and engagement with them seriously. Drawing on the ARC funded project: Literacy in the Digital World of the Twenty First Century: Learning from Computer Games, this paper presents two case studies of teachers exploring different aspects of literacy and computer games in an all boys secondary school. The paper provides an account of the curriculum units they devised, the issues they addressed, student participation and response, and questions that arise in relation to how literacy is constructed, in what ways the units conform to and push the boundaries of what constitutes English curriculum. The first follows the popularity of online sporting games, specifically AFL, and the kinds of literacy ‘knowledge banks’ required to become experts at these games. The topic provides the opportunity to examine the ways in which the game sits within a layered set of related texts and media contexts, the way knowledge and literacy are spread across contexts, and the kinds of synthesizing and judgements made in the course of ‘play.’ Discussion of the unit highlights the ways in which students read across texts, what interactivity looks like in this context, together with questions around students identity formation and how the game influences their decision making processes. In the same school the second teacher is using the gaming experiences of an early years student in a middle years classroom to enable them to reflect on their own early experiences of gaming and how it relates to their current experiences, thus allowing them to reflect on the design of games for particular audiences and the skills demanded as these games change to meet these audiences needs. In providing the opportunity for students to use and reflect on the kinds of literacy texts and practices generated around computer games, the units also provide a valuable site for exploring possibilities for playful and analytic games-based pedagogy and curriculum.
Paper 3: Paratexts Avatars, action and adolescent subjectivities
Christopher S. Walsh, Thomas Apperley & Paul Byrne
This paper presents a project involving students from a suburban high school in Melbourne and their experience with the ‘paratext’ Game On! at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The Game On! exhibit—the largest curated collection of videogames in the world—chronicles their development from their pre-commercial experimental origins to their contemporary status as a multibillion dollar global industry. The exhibition was chosen as the catalyst for a project designed to fulfil the needs of students as well as the demands of the English curriculum. The paper outlines games curriculum ideas through the design of a games portfolio where year 8 students integrated writing, reading, speaking, listening and design activities around gameplay. The cohort of students this project reports on has—in the past—been disinterested with the traditional print-based literacy. This collaboration between university researchers and a teacher-researcher refocuses teaching and learning around the paratexts and gameplay of gaming as well as gameplay. As student-researchers engaging in fieldwork, students reported on the games played, the aesthetics of the avatar, the actions available to the avatar, and the space of the game. The process was chronological, starting with simple games. We felt students would be able to develop an understanding of the increasing complexity of more recent and contemporary games while developing a metalanguage to discuss their experience, space, actions and interactions in the gamespace. This nexus between character, in the form of avatar, the actions available to it, and the virtual space that the actions take place, is central to understanding gameplayer subjectivities in the gameworld. The data students gathered forms the starting point for their own gaming portfolios, whose development will proceed around the paratextual (Consalvo, 2007), elements of gaming: reviews, FAQs, walkthroughs, YouTube videos, gaming magazines, strategy guides, etc. What this paper argues, is that in the context of videogames, the adolescent players understanding of the act of gameplay is mediated as they traverse the virtual world. The concern for literacy in and around gaming is in the paratexts, as they have central resonance in adolescents’ lifeworlds. Furthermore, they offer a metalanguage for understanding the experience of gameplay, and thus offer us a tool for investigating and researching the game player.
Paper 4: “...in a different world”: designing, making and playing computer games
Joanne O’Mara
In an early project interview, a student described the experience of playing computer games as being ‘in a different world'. The student was from a regional Catholic boys college and he and his fellow interviewees from the same school positioned game playing as a central part of their out-of-school lives. This paper presents the case study of these boys’ teacher working with a Year Eight class, and the Year Eight boys' descriptions of their experiences in interview and through dramatic representation. The teacher builds on their interest and engagement with games and works with them to design and make their own computer games. The software used, Game Maker, is designed so that users can easily develop quite sophisticated games with graphics without having to use complex programming languages. This enables the students to focus on designing and making their game rather than the operational aspect of learning to use the program. The paper addresses the question of ‘How might game making fit into the twenty-first century curriculum for subject English?’ This question is considered with attention given to Kress's (2000) call for English curriculum to become a curriculum of design and Misson and Morgan’s (2006) assertion of the importance of the conjunction of critical literacy and the aesthetic in English. The experience of bringing the worlds of the classroom and the worlds of the games together is investigated using Green’s (1997) ‘3D’ model of literacy, considering how the cultural, critical and operational aspects of literacy come together in this classroom and how the students describe and understand these aspects of their experience in the game playing and making space. The students’ descriptions and understandings of their experiences in these worlds that they inhabit is also considered in light of the worlds that they choose to create when given the chance to construct their own game; how they explore these worlds through the dramatic world; and how they use the features of the software to bring their ideas about the game to life. This work provides the opportunity to examine how designing and making games fits into the curriculum, and how the teacher and his students describe their learning from this experience.
Paper 5: Gaming capital: Rethinking literacy
Christopher S. Walsh & Thomas Apperley
In rethinking literacy education in light of unprecedented technological change, this paper reports on adolescent gamers and their accumulation of gaming capital. This is in opposition to more pervasive assumptions about gaming as mindless entertainment, learning simulations, ideological tools and interactive mediums for the masses. We see the need to research the medium of games in their entirety, exploring their uniqueness as a medium—while at the same time—making connections to a wider media ecology (Fuller, 2005) that includes more than the games themselves. This media ecology of videogames is demonstrated in part by the ‘paratextual’ (Consalvo, 2007) industries that support game play, production and design. The ‘paratext’ is central to gaming capital in creating individual and group systems of distinction within gaming culture. Because we understand videogames as actions across social fields enacted through the actions of players or ‘operators’ on software, we also deem it necessary to understand both the operator and machines’ diegetic and non-diegetic actions (Galloway, 2006). This distinction allows us to think about games as more than texts, literacy practices and narratives, which highlights games’ significance in technoclture as systems (Salen, 2008), procedures (Bogost, 2007), algorithms (Galloway, 2006; Wark, 2007), configurations and code (Lessig, 2000; Manovich, 2000). In conclusion we provide a series of interview questions developed to uncover adolescents’ gaming capital. We also propose a heuristic to map a players’ total volume of gaming capital to better understand how gaming capital establishes trajectories of exchange between cultural and economic capitals and its implications for literacy education.
QUT/Deakin Symposium: Deep Magic: The lure and reality of digital environments
Paper 3: Educating Jimmy: Games, Learning and Bully
Clare Bradford
The videogame Bully (Rockstar Vancouver), also known as Canis Canem Edit, has attracted sharp criticism since its 2006 launch. In Australia it has been allocated an M rating, a decision challenged by Parenting Australia and the Australian Education Union on the grounds that the rating MA15+ is preferable because of the game's alleged violence and promotion of bullying. In an article in The Age (17/4/08) the AEU president Angelo Gavrielatos is quoted as saying that ‘teachers worldwide were vehemently opposed to the game and the union had joined a coalition of eight teacher organisations from countries such as South Korea, the United States and Britain denouncing its release.’ This paper considers two aspects of the game’s approach to teaching and learning: its representation of education; and how it positions players as learners. My discussion of representational aspects of the game considers its reliance on intertextual allusions and its deployment of a hyperrealistic mode which both draws players into its setting and scenarios, and provides for what Darko Suvin, referring to science fiction, describes as ‘cognitive estrangement’. I argue that the effect of these strategies is to distance players from the game in a way which promotes analysis and reflection while Bully simultaneously engages players actively in pursuing its challenges and storylines. In the second part of the paper I draw on Pelletier and Oliver’s (2006) proposal that a situated, case-based focus allows for investigation into what and how players learn from videogames. As an example of such a case-based investigation I track my own video-recorded play in two episodes of Bully, exploring the three components of what Pelletier and Oliver describe as the activity system of games: the decisions I took regarding one or more of the activities involved in the game; actions I performed so as to contribute to these activities; and operations which contributed to actions and which were routine or automatic. This framework allows for analysis of the kinds of learning the game involved, and the effects of the knowledge and experience of the player. My analysis focuses specifically on the extent to which Bully teaches or rewards values associated with interactions between characters in selected episodes. That is, I consider how Bully treats bullying in these episodes: how behaviours and strategies are rewarded and how the game teaches players to conceptualise relations of power and control.