In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids' Lives
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, (2007)DOI: 10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.041
Abstract
The focus of this chapter is on how young people learn to play video games. We have approached this question ethnographically, studying young people playing in their own homes among friends and family. The primary data analyzed for the chapter are videorecordings of play from two perspectives—in-game and in-room—which we synchronized into a single side-by-side video record. By looking at in-room actions along with in-game actions, the chapter expands on a separate worlds view that holds video games as a world apart from the rest of kids' lives. Our case material shows instead how game play is quite tangled up with young people's lives, including relations with siblings and parents, patterns of learning at home and school, as well their own imagined futures. Our analysis also documents a remarkable diversity of what we call learning arrangements that young people create among themselves while playing together.