Constance Steinkuehler

The Mangle of Play

In this essay, I discuss the ways in which, in the context of Lineage, the game that’s actually played by participants is not the game that designers originally had in mind, but rather one that is the outcome of an interactively stabilized (Pickering, 1995) “mangle of practice” of designers, players, in-game currency farmers, and broader social norms.

Why Game (Culture) Studies Now

Games are an extremely valuable context for the study of cognition as inter(action) in the social and material world. They provide a representational trace of both individual and collective activity and how it changes over time, enabling the researcher to unpack the bidirectional influence of self and society. As both designed object and emergent culture, g/Games (a) consist of overlapping well-defined problems enveloped in ill-defined problems that render their solutions meaningful; (b) function as naturally occurring, selfsustaining, indigenous versions of online learning communities; and (c) simultaneously function as both culture and cultural object—as microcosms for studying the emergence, maintenance, transformation, and even collapse of online affinity groups and as talkaboutable objects that function as tokens in public conversations of broader societal issues within contemporary offline society. In this article, the author unpacks each of these claims in the context of the massively multiplayer online games.

Mystery at the museum: a collaborative game for museum education

Through an iterative design process involving museum educators, learning scientists and technologists, and drawing upon our previous experiences in handheld game design and a growing body of knowledge on learning through gaming, we designed an interactive mystery game called Mystery at the Museum (the High Tech Whodunnit), which was designed for synchronous play of groups of parents and children over a two to three hour period. The primary design goals were to engage visitors more deeply in the museum, engage visitors more broadly across museum exhibits, and encourage collaboration between visitors. The feedback from the participants suggested that the combination of depth and breadth was engaging and effective in encouraging them to think about the museums exhibits. The roles that were an integral part of the game turned out to be extremely effective in engaging pairs of participants with one another. Feedback from parents was quite positive in terms of how they felt it engaged them and their children. These results suggest that further explorations of technology-based museum experiences of this type are wholly appropriate.

Video Games and Digital Literacies.

Todays youth are situated in a complex information ecology that includes video games and print texts. At the basic level, video game play itself is a form of digital literacy practice. If we widen our focus from the “individual player + technology” to the online communities that play them, we find that video games also lie at the nexus of a complex constellation of literacy practice. Because video games are an area of passionate interest for many young people (particularly males), they are one place where you can see what students that may not perform well in literacy-related courses are actually capable of—not because gaming is such an exceptional interest area, but because it is such a common one.

Cracking the Resource Nut with Distributed Problem-Based Learning in Secondary Teacher Education

In this article, we focus on the features and functions of the STEP pbl system that enable us to support novice tutors and thereby address the human resource challenge that implementing a PBL course in a typical undergraduate setting poses. We describe the activities that students in our course engage in and present preliminary findings from our first trial of the system. We then describe our strategies for distributing the functions of the tutor based on the first trial and previous course implementations. We conclude with a description of the research methodology we are using to shepherd our site development efforts.

Digital literacies for the disengaged: creating after school contexts to support boys' game‐based literacy skills

Purpose – This paper aims to reviews the structure and format of an after school incubator program that leverages online games for literacy learning, particularly for adolescent males. It also aims to describe its dual function as both quasi‐natural context and design experiment laboratory and to discuss some early findings that illustrate the kinds of literacy practices the authors are beginning to see within their homegrown community to date.Design/methodology/approach – For the past year, the authors have been engaging game‐loving boys in digital and print literacy practices, not by playing matchmaker between them and those game communities that engage in such practices naturally, but by growing such a community of their own. Following the lead of other games‐based educational programs and known characteristics of game‐related indigenous online communities, the design encourages distributed expertise and collective intelligence in place of standardization and peer‐to‐peer learning in the form of modeli...

Critical Ethical Reasoning and Role-Play

Role-playing games provide a particularly fruitful environment for the development of critical, ethical reasoning skills, a core component in developing a citizenry capable of fully participating in a cosmopolitan, democratic society. In this study, ethnographic interview participants recount particularly engaging ethical situations in their own game play. Through their responses, thematic trends develop that help us identify key elements in games that provide opportunities for the development of these crucial skills.

Collective Information Literacy in Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

This article explores the forms of information literacy that arise in commercial entertainment games like World of Warcraft. Using examples culled from eight months of online ethnographic data, the authors detail the forms of information literacy that arise as a regular part of in-game social interaction, emphasizing (ironically) the intellectual nature of such purportedly ‘barren’ forms of play and highlighting the ways in which such practices help redefine the current model of what constitutes information literacy by bringing the collective and collaborative nature of such practices to the fore. Implications for future research are also discussed.

The STEP environment for distributed problem-based learning on the World Wide Web

Successful elementary and secondary educational reform requires analogous reform in teacher education; however, the standard undergraduate setting in schools of education poses considerable obstacles. In this paper, we describe the STEP environment for distributed problem-based learning (www.eSTEPweb.org), which represents one of many efforts to create a viable model for teacher education reform. Here, we describe our approach to creating a socio-technical infrastructure designed to help foster a knowledge-building community among preservice teachers, practicing teachers, and instructional staff. We highlight the online environment that supports student and staff coursework in the learning sciences component of a secondary teacher education curriculum.

Massively multiplayer online games & education: an outline of research

For those with a vested interest in online technologies for learning, the knowledge and skills that constitute successful participation in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) places them squarely among the most promising new digital technologies to date. In this paper, I broadly outline the qualitative results of a two and a half year cognitive ethnography of the MMO Lineage and describe the current trajectory of research we are now pursuing, based on those findings: (a) the empirical investigation of focused research questions in order to document and analyze those core practices that constitute gameplay in virtual worlds, and (b) the development of educational activities for after school clubs that capitalize on those capacities found throughout our research. This essay concludes with a reflection on the multiple relationships between games and education, highlighting the potential for such technologies to transform not only the means of education but also perhaps the goals.