Soft Modding

James Paul Gee

Thu., June 11, 9:00–10:30, Great Hall (4th floor, Central)

Modding is often viewed as the real “value added” for skills development and learning in videogames. Yet we have looked only one type of modding, that is, forms of building new software, whether this be a new skate park in Tony Hawk or a damage meter in World of Warcraft. We have missed what I will call “soft modding”. By this, I mean modding that uses so-called “soft skills” — skills recruiting emotional intelligence — to build rules of socio-emotional play and organize a community around it. In this presentation, I analyze one core example of such modding and argue that soft modding will be a key aspect of games for learning, if and when we want to get serious about going beyond skill-and-drill in our schools and other educational sites.