Game Play as Cultural-Historical Activity

Game Play as Cultural-Historical Activity

In the previous section, I suggested how games might be used to address a variety of issues of concern to social studies educators. To be sure, these critiques of contemporary social studies education have not developed in a theoretical vacuum; rather, they have grown out a broader concern in recent educational research regarding students’ inability to use information supposedly learned in school in their daily activities (Gardner, 1991; Resnick, 1987) based, according to the recent literature, on two main factors: the contextually impoverished nature of most learning environments (Salomon, 1993), and the severance of school activities from legitimate participation in social practices (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Such concerns are grounded in constructivist notions of knowing and learning, notions that are historically rooted in the pragmatic philosophy of Dewey (1938; c.f. Duffy & Cunningham, 1996).

For the purposes of this dissertation, learning is conceptualized as participation in activity (Lave & Wenger, 1991). From this perspective, knowing is not the assimilation or absorption of information but rather an emergent, situated phenomena constructed from moment to moment and indelibly tied to local immediate goals, constraints, and contexts (Whitson, 1997). From this perspective, knowing and doing are inextricably linked. As Dewey (1929) argues, “We are so accustomed to the separation of knowledge from doing and making that we fail to recognize how it controls our conceptions of mind, of consciousness and of reflective inquiry” (p. 22). From this perspective, concepts are tools created for and constituted by the processes of every day activity (Barab, Hay, Barnett & Squire, 2000). So too from this perspective, examining learning becomes less a process of measuring isolated facts and skills in highly controlled laboratory settings, and more a matter of examining how humans actually perform in rich, authentic, purposeful contexts.

Game-Based Activity

The few researchers who have studied patterns of game consumption in everyday contexts report results that some may find surprising. In 1985, Mitchell gave twenty families new Atari 2600 gaming consoles and found that game systems had positive impact on family interactions. Most families played the game systems together, using the game as a mediating artifact for shared leisure activity. Instead of leading to poor school performance or strained family interactions, video games were a positive force on family interactions, “reminiscent of days of Monopoly, checkers, card games, and jigsaw puzzles” (Mitchell, 1985, p.134). Indeed, most game designers acknowledge that digital game playing is fundamentally and thoroughly social. With roots in board games, face-to-face role-playing games, sports, and arcades, many games are conceptualized by designers from their very inception in terms of “memorable moments” that can be shared with other players (Jenkins, in press; Salen & Zimmerman, 2003). Again, video game play is more than simply a human-machine interaction; such play is embedded in social and cultural interactions that are perhaps more important in determining the type of activity – hence, learning– that emerges than the game itself.

Examining cultural-historical activity in dynamic settings demands that researchers recognize and capture the cultural patterns operating in a given learning environment and query how such patterns mediate experience. Therefore, in this dissertation, I explore not only how the game Civilization III functions as a tool mediating players’ understandings of social/historical phenomena but also (and just as crucially) how the context of game play affects the learning that occurs. Perhaps an example scenario illustrates this best: Imagine a situation where a student playing Civilization III is struggling to develop her civilization and, toward that end, decides to attack another civilization. As a researcher, I am very interested in understanding the player’s experience with Civilization as a designed object, particularly in how she experiences the events happening within the game, how she reflects on these experiences, and what, if any, consequences this activity has on her understanding of how and why nations wage war. At the same time, however, the student’s local culture will mediate what understandings she makes of her in-game experiences – what meaning they are ascribed – perhaps by eschewing global military domination or by encouraging victory at whatever cost. One might also imagine how, ideally, a reflective community of inquiry might arise within the classroom in which students are encouraged to use the game self-consciously as a means of exploring and reflecting on social phenomena constantly on-going dialog with the teacher and their peers.