Thursday 4th December 2008 8:00 am
Ito and Bittanti: Genres of Gaming Practice
How do learning outcomes of gaming differ based on the social contexts of play? Researchers discuss the diversity in game play and practice as part of our series from the authors of a forthcoming book on youth new media practice. Findings from a three-year ethnographic study of young people’s use of new media were released last month.
by Mizuko Ito and Matteo Bittanti
What is the role of gaming in the social lives and learning of young people? In our chapter on Gaming, we work towards developing a descriptive framework for understanding game play practice and related learning dynamics by identifying genres of game play practice. These are genres that relate to, but are not fully determined by game genre, but rather a way of understanding how the design and content of a game intersect with the actual situations of play.
Puzzle games are typical of the genre that we identify as “killing time,” where gaming is a largely solitary activity occupying small gaps in the day. By contrast, “hanging out” is a more social genre, where friends and family see gaming as an activity to occupy their social time together in a way similar to board games. “Recreational gaming” is the genre that corresponds most closely to what we think of as core gaming practice-gamers getting together explicitly to game, in LAN parties, in online quests, “DS Fridays” or other contexts where gaming becomes the “sport” and focus for joint activity. Gamers who get more involved in the political and organizational dimensions are engaging in what we call “organizing and mobilizing,” where we see structured social arrangements such as guilds, teams, clans, clubs and more formal LAN parties. Finally, in “augmented game play,” players engage with the wide range of secondary productions that are part of game play, including cheats, fan sites, mods, hacks, walk-throughs, game guides, and various websites blogs and wikis.
By beginning to tease apart these different genres of play, we can also being to understand the different social and learning outcomes of engagement. For example, recreational gaming is often a pathway towards more geeked out engagement with technical expertise and related knowledge networks, whereas hanging out and killing times genres of gaming tend not to be. In order to query the learning outcomes of game play as it plays out kids lives, we need to begin with a recognition of this diversity in game play practice.
Category: Ecology-of-Games
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