Adrienne Shaw

A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity

Recently, the margins between gaming and feminism have become increasingly contentious (Salter & Blodgett, 2012). This article addresses a cultural moment where masculine gaming culture became aware of and began responding to feminist game scholars by analyzing GamerGate conspiracy documents and social media discussions related to the now infamous “DiGRA fishbowl.” Worries about the opacity of academic practices and a disparaging of feminist knowledge-making practices dominate these documents. By looking at these discussions and practices through the lens of conspiracy theories (Fenster, 2008; Hofstadter, 1952) and counterknowledge (Fiske, 1994) we consider the broader meaning of GamerGates attention to academia.

Measuring Game Engagement: Multiple Methods and Construct Complexity

Background. Engagement has been identified as a crucial component of learning in games research. However, the conceptualization and operationalization of engagement vary widely in the literature. Many valuable approaches illuminate ways in which presence, flow, arousal, participation, and other concepts constitute or contribute to engagement. However, few studies examine multiple conceptualizations of engagement in the same project. Method. This article discusses the results of two experiments that measure engagement in five different ways: survey self-report, content analyses of player videos, electro-dermal activity, mouse movements, and game click logs. We examine the relationships among these measures and assess how they are affected by the technical characteristics of a 30-minute, custom-built, educational game: use of a customized character, level of narrative complexity, and level of art complexity. Results. We found that the five measures of engagement correlated in limited ways, and that they revealed substantially different relationships with game characteristics. We conclude that engagement as a construct is more complex than is captured in any of these measures individually and that using multiple methods to assess engagement can illuminate aspects of engagement not detectable by a single method of measurement.

Rethinking Game Studies: A case study approach to video game play and identification

The video game play of individuals, in particular those who game alone, is rarely studied outside of effects based research or autoethnographic explorations. Rather than focus on gaming groups and gaming fans, this study situates the analysis of video game play with the individual, solitary player. There were three main goals in this project. The first was to see how video game play fits within the lives and media diets of those who do not identify as hardcore video game fans. The second was to interrogate the hardcore/casual and social/solitary gaming divides that define much popular understanding of video game play. The final goal was to investigate the process of identification in video games in a qualitative manner. While a small-scale pilot study, the methodology discussed herein should be useful in future research on video game audiences and identification.

Serious Efforts at Bias Reduction: The Effects of Digital Games and Avatar Customization on Three Cognitive Biases

As research on serious games continues to grow, we investigate the efficacy of digital games to train enhanced decision making through understanding cognitive biases. This study investigates the ability of a 30-minute digital game as compared with a 30-minute video to teach people how to recognize and mitigate three cognitive biases: fundamental attribution error, confirmation bias, and bias blind spot. We investigate the effects of character customization on learning outcomes as compared with an assigned character. We use interviews to understand the qualitative differences between the conditions. Experimental results suggest that the game was more effective at teaching and mitigating cognitive biases than was the training video. Although interviews suggest players liked avatar customization, results of the experiment indicate that avatar customization had no significant effect on learning outcomes. This research provides information future designers can use to choose the best medium and affordances for the most effective learning outcomes on cognitive processes.

Queer technologies: affordances, affect, ambivalence

What happens when we consider communication technologies as having sex and gender, when we queer media architectures and circuitry? Larry Gross and others have productively investigated the conditions in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people appear, how they are represented, and what they are allowed to do—or not (Becker, 2006; Benshoff & Griffin, 2006; Gross, 2001; Russo, 1987; Walters, 2001, among many others). Scholars have also investigated the increasingly complex intersections of LGBTQ production and reception in contemporary mediaspheres (Gamson, 1999; Henderson, 2013; Ng, 2013; Sender, 2004; Shaw, 2015). This work has been fundamental to understanding the changing conditions of both mediated sexuality and everyday experience: in much of the world it is no longer possible to grow up as a person with same-sex desires or whose gender identity does not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth and believe oneself to be “the only one.” Yet LGBTQ media scholarship often treats the medium of delivery—television, radio, film, the internet, and so on—as neutral, universal, or presumptively masculine. Inspired by queer investigations of technology in other disciplines such as gender studies and the history of science (see, for example, Chun, 2006, 2011; Haraway, 1991; Nakamura, 2012; Nguyen, 2003), we invited scholarship that moves beyond representation and consumption towards a third framework for understanding intersections among gender, sexuality, and media. How can queer theory and queer methodologies complicate our understanding of communication technologies, their structures and uses, and the cultural and political implications of these? And how can queer technologies and their uses inform debates about affect, temporality, and publics? This Critical Studies in Media Communication special issue collects new scholarship that addresses queer media ontologies and practices, as well as the limits of queer possibility, across a wide range of media: television, music, zines, video games, mobile applications, and online spaces. Together, the authors consider how LGBTQ representations and reception are shaped by technological affordances and constraints. These articles are connected by a web that spans queer engagements with mainstream media to form “counterpublics” (Warner, 2002); queer affect and its relationships to mediated spatiality and temporality; technological affordances for thwarting heteronormative and masculinist technologies, as well as the limits of these affordances; and the shifting meanings of production and reception through new technological practices. Most of the articles address US–based media, a happenstance of submissions despite our efforts to cast a wider net. The collection considers the intersectionality of queer experiences: of gender and gender identity, sexual identifications and desires, and productive iterations of queerness with critical race theory and globalization. Each of the papers in this special issue resists the gravitational pull towards heteronormativity and binary thinking in the ways technologies are imagined, narrativized, redesigned, and used. Some of the articles here explicitly or implicitly draw upon the idea of queer affordances of communication technologies. “Affordances” originates from cognitive psychology to describe the “action possibilities” of environments and how people use objects (Gibson, 1979/2015). Psychologists, designers, and others have consolidated the term to describe human–machine

Analytics-Driven Design: Impact and Implications of Team Member Psychological Perspectives on a Serious Games (SGs) Design Framework

The number of educational or serious games (SGs) available to educators has increased in recent years as the cost of game development has been reduced. A benefit of SGs is that they employ not only lesson content but also knowledge contexts where learners can connect information to its context of use with active participation and engagement. This, in turn, improves learners’ ability to recall, integrate, and apply what they learn. Much of the research on game analytics has examined learner in-game trails to build predictive models that identify negative learner actions (e.g., systematic guessing after the fact). However, analytics can also be used in the game design and development phases. Drawing on evidence-centered design (ECD), the chapter outlines ways that analytics can drive the development of scenarios and activities in a game and thus allows SGs to function as contextual apprenticeships, providing robust assessment opportunities. We describe how ECD theory was applied in a project to develop and test a SG that trains people to reduce their reliance on cognitive biases. We describe instances during the design process where our team encountered obstacles due to differing psychological and learning/teaching orientations, a topic rarely explored in the SG or ECD literature. Furthermore, we describe the final analytics-based game design features. We propose an additional element (persona) and how we anticipate incorporating that ECD extension into future projects.

Balancing Play and Formal Training in the Design of Serious Games

This article discusses the design and development of two serious games intended to train people to reduce their reliance on cognitive biases in their decision-making in less than an hour each. In our development process, we found a tension between rich and flexible experimentation and exploration experiences and robust learning experiences that ensured the lesson content was easily understood and recalled. In line with game-based learning research, initial designs were oriented toward exploration and discovery. Analyses of interviews, playtesting, logs, and surveys revealed that many players were frustrated or confused by the interface and content of the more complex games, even when consistent differences between levels of visual detail or narrative complexity were not present. We conclude that teaching complex topics such as cognitive biases to the widest range of learners required reducing the games’ playful and exploratory elements and balancing formal training content with simpler visuals and text.

The Temporal Attentive Observation (TAO) Scale: Development of an Instrument to Assess Attentive Behavior Sequences During Serious Gameplay

The engaging nature of video games has intrigued learning professionals attempting to capture and retain learners’ attention. Designing learning interventions that not only capture the learner’s attention, but also are designed around the natural cycle of attention will be vital for learning. This paper introduces the temporal attentive observation (TAO) instrument, an instrument developed to assess attentive behavior sequences during serious gameplay. We use an established three-step process for developing observational systems that includes identifying the construct, determining validity, and demonstrating practicality criteria. We conclude that the TAO instrument reliably measures attention behaviors where participants’ faces can be recorded during an experiment. Furthermore, we suggest that TAO should be considered as a part of an attention measurement package.