The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning by Katie Salen

The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning Reviews

• 
  Johnny

  This stimulating book of essays emphasizes the positive potential of playing games almost to the exclusion of the negative. To be sure, hats are tipped to the negatives; this is not a group of scholars in denial. The Ecology of Games simply recognizes that games have received enough negative print and has elected to deal with the positive aspects of games as learning laboratories and attitude modifiers as opposed to games as a national threat. Indeed, the threat-filled literature (and media) targeting video games as anti-social forces must remind one of similar rants against comics, television, rock music, film, and earlier role-playing games. As I perpetually remind my students, note that the early adopting audience for each of those earlier targets was (you guessed it) adolescents—pre-teens and teenagers forming a threatening cultural coalition against parents who failed to understand these important icons in the “new” culture. As a result, I found The Ecology of Games to be a welcome and insightful collection of observations, theories, and possibilities.
  
  In the introduction, an intriguing quotation captured my attention (and the thoughts of several days). Quoting from an article in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, the article reads: “The meaning of knowing today has ‘shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find it and use it.’” (p. 5) Problem-solving, making connections, learning to sift and evaluate data, and finding ways to present a coherent story from the data are vital to the learning and surviving experience today. Naturally, we realize that all of the digital mnemonics we use in order to be able to jump over this memorization and repetition phase might be disastrous in the event of that dark future where we lose the whole information infrastructure, but we live in the world of the given not the “might be” and need to maximize that. [Of course, this reviewer still tries to teach basic theories “just in case” we lose the global database and still keeps his analog database in “book” form as much as possible.]
  
  I also appreciated Salen’s ideas in the opening essay on expanding Will Wright’s two key moments in recognizing successful game design. According to Will, the first key moment is “Can I try it?” (p. 11) It’s a good sign when an observer wants to become a participant. Again, according to the SimCity designer, the second key moment is “Can I save it?” (p. 12) which means that the participant has become a creator and wants to be able to keep, test, and possibly, improve the game experience. I’ve heard Will share those in conferences, but I especially liked the way that Katie improved on them with the participant become docent (“Can I show you?” (p. 12)) and participant as curator/purveyor of knowledge systems such that new participants/observers would ask, “How did you do that?” (p. 13)
  
  Several aspects of James Gee’s “Learning and Games” caught my attention. One of his ideas was his definition of a Situational Learning Matrix (p. 24), but as he presented it the matrix was too complicated for the typical four quadrant diagram. Upon reflection, I feel like it might be expressed with the x axis suggesting “identity” (both for player and society) and running from “norms” on the “left” to “goals” on the “right” and the y axis would suggest “tools and technologies” (p. 25) so that it runs from “content” on the bottom to “problem-solving” on the top. In this way, the lower left quadrant would emphasize conformity while the upper right quadrant would emphasize problem-solving to accomplish specific goals. I don’t know if that is exactly as Gee would present it, but it seems useful.
  
  Since prior to the introduction of the matrix idea, Gee espouses a series of principles that would agree with my interpretation, I believe my suggestion is fair. Those principles are:
  1) Humans store experiences best when they are related to GOALS;
  2) Stored experiences are most useful when they are INTERPRETED;
  3) People learn best from immediate FEEDBACK;
  4) People need to apply their previous experiences in order to “debug” their interpretations; and
  5) It is efficient for people to learn from the experiences of other people. (p. 21)
  
  Building upon that, Gee points out that models and modeling are important aspects of learning (and foundational for gaming) in order that experiences can be explored (usually through interrogation) and allow them to be used for problem-solving (p. 30). More importantly, he elucidates, “But, from a learning perspective, what is important about video games is not interactivity per se, but the fact that in many games players come to feel a sense of agency or ownership. In a video game, players make things happen; they don’t just consume what the “author” (game designer) has placed before them. In good games players feel that their actions or decisions—not just the designer’s actions or decisions—co-create the world they are in and shape the experiences they are having.” (p. 35)
  
  The next essay dealt with hours upon hours of “ethnographic” video recording of children and teenagers at play, as well as interviews with the participants. On one occasion, the researchers observed a sister helping a brother playing a video game and helping the same brother with homework. In the video game, even when the sister didn’t know what should be done, she would look in the documentation and make suggestions to try to help her brother. In helping with his math homework, she would read in the textbook but refused to make suggestions because she said she didn’t know anything about the mathematical process. In the game, she was willing to read and suggest even without prior knowledge; in the homework, she was unwilling to take a risk. (p. 58)
  
  Most interesting to me were the anecdotes about cheating. One player was so well-known for cheating that all of the other kids assumed that he was cheating—even when he showed them his controller before the races and when he allowed other players to use codes where he hadn’t (pp. 53-54). I plan to use the anecdote to illustrate the relationship between “cheating” in games and Kant’s categorical imperatives. On the same subject, I was also fascinated by two girls and their approaches to Zoo Tycoon. One of them was so much more invested in creating a good design that she thought nothing of cheating in order to get more money to add pretty, but non-functional adornments to her zoo. The other refused to cheat in the scenarios, but acted entirely counter to her usual relationship with animals by reducing every decision to the “bottom line.” The former played similar to the way she approached life, looking for opportunities to inject her aesthetic perspective into the game (p. 56). The latter insisted that she would never act the way she played the game in real life (p. 60). I was intrigued, however, by the urban African-American youth who used cheats in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas so that he could design cars without having to go through the missions but played the game in order to accomplish anti-social behavior only when he was playing with his peers (p. 175).
  
  More cautionary was the sobering transcript of children “guessing” at the answers to problems in Island of Dr. Brain. Counter to assertions from people like me about how much games improve children’s awareness of the process of problem-solving and enhance their confidence was this confession by a game-playing child, “I have no idea. I’m just guessing. It works!” (p. 107) The author comments: “The focus on external assessment and the linear sequencing of the game encourages an orientation to accomplishing the technical conditions for success rather than deeper exploration of the problem domain.” (p. 107)
  
  In addition, I have always been stimulated by the work of Georgia Tech’s Ian Bogost. The essay in this work (although a reduced form of his major work on procedural rhetoric) was no exception. He rightly differentiated between the purpose of the Animal Crossing Community, a help site built around the popular Nintendo game Animal Crossing, as being focused on the social practices of playing the game as opposed to the social practices represented in the game (p. 119). Of course, he uses this to press his point that cultural and social values are propagated within games but notes that these are rarely critiqued or analyzed. Hence, educators are missing an opportunity.
  
  Therefore, he posits that those activities which the gamer is allowed to do within the rules constraints of the game form the “statement” or “meaning” of the game (p. 121). I like his understanding of “procedurality” as referring to the rule-based models by which games represent something (p. 123). I also like his insistence that the “rhetoric” of a game appears whenever one senses that it is making statements about the cultural, social, or material aspects of human experience (p. 123). He particularly emphasizes the nature of rhetoric (throughout its history) as having to do with persuasion (p. 124). So, he defines the persuasive nature of game processes as “procedural rhetoric.” (p. 125) Finally, he demonstrates how that rhetoric demonstrates itself in such games as the agenda-specific The McDonald’s Game from Italy and his own Take Back Illinois game, as well as entertainment-oriented games that either parody a subject (Bully’s take on high school hazing) or explore it (Spore’s take on astro-biology).
  
  Clearly the worst essay in the volume was “The Power of Play: The Portrayal and Performance of Race in Video Games.” Not only was it rife with factual errors such as the claim that Mario was the first humanoid character portrayed in a video game (p. 143). I guess I must have misunderstood the representation of Pitfall Harry in the eponymous Atari 2600 cartridge and the characters in Temple of Apshai may have been crudely pixilated, but they were definitely humanoid. Further, when the authors made their claim that blacks and Latinos were only presented as athletic or villainous (based strictly on the Top 10 games on an inclusive number of consoles including the GameBoy and the Dreamcast), they neglected to mention that at least a third of those Top 10 games across those platforms were sports games (p. 145). Gee, wonder why the blacks and Latinos were presented as athletic? I did like the characterization of some of the worst offenders of racial stereotypes (Was I the only one who thought Interplay’s Kingpin was the worst of the lot?) as “digital minstrelsy” or the high-tech version of the old “blackface” minstrel shows where “white” actors would pretend to be black (p. 148), but the characterization isn’t entirely fair.
  
  The only other essay that really worked for me was Kurt Squire’s article on open-ended gaming and education. The essay begins by introducing a taxonomy of types of games: targeted (relatively short games built around specific concepts (p. 168)), epistemic (games designed around a specific goal where players assume specific professional rules (p. 169)), differentiated (games where players assume different roles and support each other because the players have access to different data (p. 169)), and open-ended (commercial games that may require hundreds of hours of investment). It was interesting to read his observations about using the same targeted game, Supercharged!, with both M.I.T. students and secondary school students. The former perceived the game as a crutch for students who couldn’t understand equations while the latter readily gravitated to the game (and improved test scores, as well) (p. 169). It was also important to see that, in Squire’s ethnographic observations of game players in the differentiated and open-ended games, players had no problems adopting fictional roles (whether university age or secondary school age) (p. 170).
  
  “As other game researchers have reported, revealing one’s gaming experience seems like an important step in gaining trust with gamers around games that are socially marginalized.” (pp. 176-177) While this seems somewhat obvious, it was still an important idea to me. I was intrigued by another observation that young, urban blacks considers Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to present a false sense of economic mobility and they fear that it sends an erroneous signal to white gamers that blacks may not be industrious enough to take advantage of this perceived economic mobility (p. 177). With such observations, Squire gives two important take-away ideas: 1) open-ended games teach a wider variety of skills and content than readily fit into standard curricula (p. 182) and 2) games rarely change ethical perspectives (p. 182). There is also a great diagram on learning game design on p. 187.
  
  While, as with any anthology of essays, the material was uneven with regard to my needs, The Ecology of Games is a valuable tool for anyone who wants to read research and theories about game play. The Ecology of Games is focused on video games, but I personally think it is important for understanding games in general.
  
• 
  Kars

  Bought this mainly for the articles by Bogost and McGonigal (which you can find for free online as well). Both are solid pieces of writing on ways in which games can be used beyond entertainment that I figured were worth having in dead-tree format.
• 
  Earl Cousins

  A selection of essays by various authors that makes some interesting comparisons.