Project Technical Data |
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Our Gamers Move to the Classrooms |
The intersection between videogames and education has gained a great deal of traction in recent two decades. The idea that, as Gee (2003) argued, there is much to learn about video games in education has inspired scholars all over to think about the idea of gamification (McGonigal, 2011), or bringing principles from video games into educational settings. Recent efforts have explored gamification in everyday life (Burke, 2014), teaching (Farber, 2018; Garcia & Niemeyer, 2018), and even second language teaching (Reinhardt, 2019). Gamification, as James Gee recently stated (Mora et al., 2020), will help shape both the present and the future of education.
However, even with all these breakthroughs, there is one missing element in these conversations: The embodied experiences of gamers who are becoming teachers, but not from a participant perspective, but from their own research experiences. This paper brings together the experiences of our research team, which includes hardcore, semipro, and professional gamers (as well as a gamer mom!), in an effort to provide a counter-proposal to traditional views of gamification. This paper extends an ongoing duoethnographic (Sawyer & Norris, 2013) exercise involving our research team to consider the importance of a more in-depth look at the perspective of gamers becoming teachers (Authors, 2019) and what that means for the new instructional practices we may encounter in the post-pandemic world. |
Questioning Gamification |
This paper proposes a different view of gamification and gamifying as two events that happen in our classrooms. The traditional view of gamification, one present in some of the existing literature (e.g., Beavis, et al, 2017; Kapp, 2012; Kim, et al, 2018; McGonigal, 2011; Reinhardt, 2019) tends to focus on the games themselves. As Eusse (2017) explained, “Gamification seeks to understand gaming as something more than just a method of momentary entertainment. It is the possibility of seeing games as a method of learning and teaching something in the modern day and context” (Defining the Term, pa. 1). Eusse also elaborated that
Gamifying refers to understanding the gaming background as a tool to rethink and improve language teaching. It entails bringing to the classroom the set of skills that a gamer develops and the composition of gaming. It is necessary to understand the gaming identity as an instrument to overcome students' lack of interest. (Defining the Term, pa. 1) |
Gamification and the Gamer Ethos |
What we propose in this paper instead is a paradigm shift, where we refocalize our discussion of gamification to the process of “gamifying” (Mazo-Parra & Sánchez-Rodas, 2021) as a gamer-centered affair. As Mazo-Parra and Sánchez-Rodas (2021a) explained,
In the process of gamification, the person in charge of directing the activity should understand the game beforehand and realize which parts of the game can be useful for the lesson. These games perhaps were not conceived with this purpose but the art of gamification is to research and give it this kind of use in certain circumstances. (Defining the term, pa. 2) This revisited view of gamification and gamifying helps decenter the conversation from outward resources (i.e., the game) to inward resources (i.e., the gamer’s experience and skills) and how we can extrapolate them to create spaces where the class itself becomes gamified, not by adding games for their sake but adding life experiences and behaviors akin to a game.
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Academic Presentations
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Although the project is just gaining traction, we have already shared our first ideas elsewhere:
2019
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