Jennifer Jenson

Gender, Simulation, and Gaming: Research Review and Redirections

This review of gender and gameplay research over the past three decades documents a set of persistent methodological repetitions that have systematically impeded its progress since the inception of this trajectory of research. The first is, in fact, a refusal to consider gender at all: Conflating gender with sex impedes possibilities to identify nonstereotypical engagements by girls and women. Second is the persistent attempt to identify sex-specific “patterns” of play and play preferences “characteristic” of girls and women mainly to support and promote these in the name of “gender equity,” whether in women’s involvement in the game industry as designers, in the development and marketing of “games for girls,” or the access and uses of digital games for education, training, and entertainment. Third, it is found that “gender” is an issue in research studies only long enough to dismiss it as a significant variable, which in turn makes any deeper critical interrogation unproductive.

Teaching Multimodal and Digital Literacy in L2 Settings: New Literacies, New Basics, New Pedagogies

Globalization and digitization have reshaped the communication landscape, affecting how and with whom we communicate, and deeply altering the terrain of language and literacy education. As children in urban contexts become socialized into communities of increasing cultural and communicational connectivity, complexity, and convergence (Jenkins, 2004), and funding for specialist second language (L2) support declines, classrooms have become linguistically heterogeneous spaces where every teacher is a teacher of L2 learners. This article has two purposes: The first is to give an overview of the concept of multimodal literacies, which utilize diverse media to represent visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and tactile dimensions of communication in addition to traditional written and oral forms (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009a). Since the New London Groups manifesto on multiliteracies in 1996, which merged language and literacy education agendas in L2 teaching, language arts, media literacy, and cultural studies, new basics have developed that apply to all classrooms and all learners. Second, this article reviews and reports on innovative pedagogical approaches to multimodal literacies involving L2 learners. These are grounded theoretically (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009a, 2009b; Kress, 2003, 2010; New London Group, 1996) and epistemologically (de Castell & Jenson, 2003; Gee, 2009, 2010; Kellner, 2004; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003, 2006).

Girls@Play: An ethnographic study of gender and digital gameplay

This paper reports on findings from a three-year, Canadian federally funded research project entitled “Education, Gender and Gaming” in which we documented the play practices of girls and boys playing console-based games. We show, in particular, how many of the presumptions and assumptions about “girls playing games” simply do not hold over time, or given a particular context. We therefore attempt to show how our research practices and methodologies help to shape what we have thus far taken as “evidence” or “facts” about gender and illustrate how some of those presumptions might not necessarily hold over time or given different contexts.

'Turn it in': technological challenges to academic ethics

In this paper we explore the gritty terrain of academic dis/honesty as it is currently being reformulated through new technological affordances. We examine in depth the purchasing of technologically enabled plagiarism detection ‘services’ by higher education institutions in an effort to better understand underlying assumptions about epistemology, learning and cognition in a digitally (re)mediated ‘knowledge economy.’ In particular we argue that questions of intellectual property are today largely driven by new economies of knowledge privileging strategically self-interested individualism, and aimed at private accumulation of knowledge ‘capital’ whose exchange value drives a corresponding call for the policing of those boundaries. Such conceptions and motivations, we argue, promote a misperception that imitation and appropriation are no longer educationally ‘of value,’ and divert our attention away from far more urgent investigations into the ways in which new technological tools are changing what we know and how we know.

Alienated Playbour Relations of Production in EVE Online

This article explores the play practices of EVE Online industrialists: those primarily responsible for generating the materials and equipment that drive the game’s robust economy. Applying the concept of “immaterial labor” to this underattended aspect of the EVE community, we consider the range of communicative and informational artifacts and activities industrialists enact in support of their involvement in the game—work that happens both in game and crucially outside of it. Moving past the increasingly anachronistic distinctions between digitally mediated labor and leisure, in game and out of game, we examine the relations of production in which these players are situated: to other EVE players, in-game corporations, the game’s developer, and the broader digital economy. Seen from this perspective, we consider the extent to which EVE both ideologically and economically supports the extension of capital into increasing aspects of our everyday lives—a “game” in which many play, but few win.

Disavowing ‘That Guy’: Identity construction and massively multiplayer online game players

Using Goffman’s ‘keys and frames’ as an analytical framework, this article explores depictions of massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) players in newspaper coverage, popular media (South Park and The Big Bang Theory), and Web-based productions (The Guild and Pure Pwnage) and player reactions to these largely stereotypical portrayals. Following this discussion, we present data from a longitudinal study of MMOG players, focusing on our study’s unintentional provoking of participants to react to (and ultimately reject) these stereotypes in their survey responses. We argue this is of particular interest to researchers studying MMOG players or members of other heavily satirized communities, as these stereotypes influence the ways study participants practice identity management and frame their own gaming practices, even in the context of an academic study that was explicitly not about addiction or the negative effects of digital game play.

The Avatar Affordances Framework: Mapping Affordances and Design Trends in Character Creation Interfaces

Avatar customization is available in many games, but as yet there is no analytical framework capable of enabling systematic comparison between games. To investigate this issue, we present our novel analytical framework, referred to as the Avatar Affordances Framework. To model the framework, we analyze the character creation interfaces of 20 games. We focus in particular on the different ways gender and ethnicity are presented to players. Preliminary analysis reveals that many popular games have socially exclusive values, and that high fidelity character creation interfaces are no exception. The framework itself offers a more comprehensive tool than previous (e.g., count-based) approaches to investigating self-representation issues in character creation interfaces.

Short Cuts and Extended Techniques: Rethinking Relations between Technology and Educational Theory.

Abstract Building upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory (ANT) for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces the novel positions of creative capacity and participation that emerging media may enable. Whereas traditional theories of educational technology tend to focus on the harmonization of new technologies with extant curricular goals and educational practices, an educational theory of technology looks to novel forms of technologically-mediated learning experience—from production pedagogies to role play in the virtual—to make visible the surprising relations, techniques, and opportunities that emerging media, and their attendant social contexts, may offer educational research.

Producing alternative gender orders: a critical look at girls and gaming

ABSTRACT This article examine some of the ways in which girls are discursively set up as subordinate in relation to boys and men by and within the digital games industry and culture at large, and how they push back on these imposed subjects positions when engaging in media production (game development) under both regular and inverse conditions. Expanding on our previous research on gender and game play, this project explores how the hegemonic discourses of female participation in games culture are taken up by girls who want to make their own digital games. We employ a poststructural understanding of gender and power as fluid and produced through and within social relations to demonstrate how participants are not helpless victims of subjection. Rather, these girls are active in the construction of their own subjectivities, leveraging different aspects of their identity and/or exercising an institutionally sanctioned (albeit temporary) autonomy to resist discursive positioning.

From Simulation to Imitation: Controllers, Corporeality, and Mimetic Play

Background We contend that a conceptual conflation of simulation and imitation persists at the heart of claims for the power of game-based simulations for learning. Recent changes in controller-technologies and gaming systems, we argue, make this conflation of concepts more readily apparent, and its significant educational implications more evident. Aim This article examines the evolution in controller technologies of imitation that support players’ embodied competence, rather than players’ ability to simulate such competence. Digital gameplay undergoes an epistemological shift when player and game interactions are no longer restricted to simulations of actions on a screen, but instead support embodied imitation as a central element of gameplay. We interrogate the distinctive meanings and affordances of simulation and imitation and offer a critical conceptual strategy for refining, and indeed redefining, what counts as learning in and from digital games. Method We draw upon actor-network theory to identify what is educationally significant about the digitally mediated learning ecologies enabled by imitation-based gaming consoles and controllers. Actor-network theory helps us discern relations between human actors and technical artifacts, illuminating the complex inter-dependencies and inter-actions of the socio-technical support networks too long overlooked in androcentric theories of human action and cognitive psychology. Conclusion By articulating distinctions between simulation and imitation, we show how imitative practices afforded by mimetic game controllers and next-generation motion-capture technologies offer a different picture of learning through playing digital games, and suggest novel and productive avenues for research and educational practice.