“Here’s My Shootorial!”: The Scaffolding of Game Design on Kongregate

Sean Duncan

Wed., June 10, 3:30–4:30, Inn Wisconsin (2nd floor, East/Southeast)

In this state of global economic crisis, the stakes are high for education researchers to address new and innovative approaches to managing complex systems, working with other learners, and designing new forms of engagement in a variety of meaningful settings. The rise of so–called “Web 2.0” (O’Reilly, 2005) has proliferated a number of means for “everyday” users of the Internet to interact with one another, produce, and share content (e.g., videos, images, fan fiction, multimodal artifacts), and collaborate on complex projects (e.g., open source projects; Lessig, 2004). At the same time, global videogame culture has developed a new generation of gamers who are eager to move beyond playing into developing their own games — constructing game modifications or “mods” (e.g., Steinkuehler & Johnson, 2009; Wright, Boria, & Briedenbach, 2002) and even elaborate instructional materials to support game modding (Squire & Giovanetto, 2008). In this presentation, I will present a multi–level analysis of a specific intersection between these “Web 2.0” sites and productive gaming communities, focusing on activities and tools within the Adobe Flash game portal Kongregate.

The present analysis will focus on Kongregate’s community as seen through player and designer interactions within the site’s online discussion forums. First, I will present content analyses (Mayring, 2000), characterizing the forms of “design thinking” (New London Group, 1996) within collaborations on Kongregate — that is, when players critique and iterate games on the site, how can we best classify the design practices that are enacted by participants in the discussions? Next, I will present selected discourse analyses (Gee, 2006) of exchanges within the discussion forums, focusing on questions which help to reveal a given design activity’s larger social and cultural context, for example, how does the development of a “designer identity” evolve through participation in discussions within the Kongregate community? Finally, I will elaborate the means by which Kongregate explicitly scaffolds learning of game design, game development, and Adobe Flash/Actionscript programming through its “Kongregate Labs” game design tutorials and contests.

Through detailed look at Kongregate Labs, I aim to show that design practices evolve as a consequence of interaction between a community and the tools provided to facilitate design (e.g., Kongregate Labs’ tutorials or “shootorials”). I assess the forms of support provided for budding game designers from social status to financial incentives via monetary rewards. That is, I suggest that understanding the means by which this site explicitly scaffolds game design learning through specific tools on the site may help us to understand how informal design spaces (Duncan, 2008) operate in the era of commercial “Web 2.0” sites. I argue that understanding the roles of both human and designed elements of a learning environment (e.g., Leander & Lovvorn, 2006) supports the development of robust theories of informal learning. For, while Gee (2004) correctly points out that these “affinity spaces” around games can provide valuable learning environments outside of school, it is incumbent upon learning researchers to further specify exactly how and why this occurs in interactions with popular media.

References

Duncan, S. C. (2008, June). Toward a taxonomy of gamer forums. Poster presented at Games+Learning+Society 4.0, Madison, WI.

Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. London: Routledge.

Gee, J. P. (2006). An introduction to Discourse analysis: Theory and method. (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Leander, K., & Lovvorn, J. (2006). Literacy networks: Following the circulation of texts, bodies, and objects in the schooling and online gaming of one youth. Cognition and Instruction 23(3), 291–340.

Lessig, L. (2004). Free culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York: Penguin.

Mayring, P. (2000). Qualitative content analysis. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(2). Retrieved from http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1089/2385

New London Group (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92.

O'Reilly, T. (2005, September 30). What Is Web 2.0. O’Reilly. Retrieved from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Squire, K. & Giovanetto, L. (2008). The higher education of gaming, E-Learning, 5(1), 2–28.

Steinkuehler, C. & Johnson, B. Z. (2009). Computational literacy in online games: The social life of a mod. The International Journal of Gaming and Computer Mediated Simulations, 1(1), 53–65.

Wright, T., Boria, E., and Briedenbach, P. (2002). Creative player actions in FPS on-line video games: Playing Counter-Strike. Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, 2(2). Retrieved from http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/wright