Transformational Play: Why Educators Should Care About Games

Sasha Barab · Melissa Gresalfi · Adam Ingram-Goble · Patrick Pettyjohn · Charlene Volk · Caro Williams · Maria Solomou · Ed Gentry

Thu., June 11, 11:00–12:30, Inn Wisconsin (2nd floor, East/Southeast)

Games have become one of the most popular forms of entertainment in our society. Beyond their entertainment value, games, unlike any other form of curricular medium, can offer learners entire worlds that are intentionally designed as problematic situations that require the player to understand and apply disciplinary content. In the games we design, the disciplinary content of schools becomes tools for transforming virtual worlds. And, instead of being students memorizing facts, students playing our games are transformed into scientists, reporters, and mathematicians. It is this potential to provide contexts that legitimize content and person that makes games such a powerful curriculum.

The developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) argued that through play one can act "a head above himself" (p. 74). In a similar vein, the play theorist Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975) stated that games allow us to stretch who we are into other selves, taking on problems and acting in ways that we do not have the opportunity to do in the real world. The games that we design go beyond establishing engaging roles for children, and additionally narratize disciplinary content while requiring the player to use disciplinary knowledge to meaningfully transform the game world. It is through the choices that one makes, and the way these choices impact the game world, that one builds insights into the value and meaning of disciplinary content as well as themselves as the kind of person who makes such choices.

In the games we design, it is the opportunity for transformation that makes them so powerful as a 21st Century curriculum. Consistent with Dewey’s (1938) notion of a transactive curriculum, through game play one both transforms (through the application of disciplinary understandings) and is transformed (as one’s game character evolves and they can take on more challenging tasks) by the virtual world. Transformational play describes a strategy for situating the learner and curricular content within a play context. Specifically, transformational play involves positioning students as active protagonists who interact with game characters and virtual environments to identify and solve personally meaningful problems.

Designing for transformational play involves experientially situating students and concepts within a virtual world that (1) binds content with person by creating legitimate dilemmas that can only be resolved by accurately engaging disciplinary formalisms; (2) binds person with context by positioning players as agents-of-change whose intentional actions have impact on the context and storyline; and (3) binds context with content by highlighting the consequentiality of one's actions through contexts that change in response to students' decisions. Our work has primarily taken place as part of the Quest Atlantis multi-user virtual environment (Quest Atlantis), which supports over 15,000 children worldwide. Consistent with our design-based research methodology, we will share design and implementation stories of four game worlds (one focused on mathematics, science, language arts, and social studies), each of which has gone through multiple iterations as informed by empirical data and our evolving theoretical framework. Beyond providing insight into a particular design, collectively these will be used to illuminate our theory of transformational play (see http://inkido.indiana.edu/barabwe).