Y, de las conclusiones;

Lancaster University

This paper will draw on the concept of Cultural Objecthood (Bennett 2005) to trace the translation of digital games into educational contexts. It will introduce research focusing on the new game forms that may emerge through dialogue between games developers and educators and specifically with this paper, the role of policy reports.

This paper will open with a brief introduction to the varied uses of gaming and the grouping of these uses within the emerging field of serious gaming. After detailing this field broadly, the educational uses of digital games will be addressed specifically in relation to the 2006 Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) report Unlimited Learning. Addressing the potential uses of games in education through a report is to recognize the multiple stakeholders involved in shaping and developing this potential. This paper will suggest how regimes of objecthood may shape the emergence of new forms of games. In this sense, this research is seeking to address the emergence and associated implications of the meeting of diverse game development and educational agendas.

The multiplicities of digital games

It is well beyond the scope of this paper to offer a survey of historical or even contemporary instances of game development, artifacts and practices. Rather, the most cursory examination of our homes, the things in our hands and our time online reveals the proliferation of game platforms. This statement itself requires clarification given the varied definitions offered for a ‘game’. As a brief example of the complex dynamics through which digital gaming technologies arise, the following comments from Ralph Baer, lead developer on the first home video console the 1972 Magnanox Odyssey, are revealing:

the question of how to make use of home TV sets, other than watching over-the-air programmes, had been bothering me since the early sixties. There are well over 100 million TV sets in the US alone in 1965. The idea of attaching some device to even a small fraction of that many TV sets was a pretty powerful incentive for coming up with something, anything, on which people might actually want to spend their money (Baer, cited in Haddon 1988: 65).

The emergence of the home video console was not as a revolutionary new technology but in relation to existing, embedded entertainment devices. This crossing over of games onto multiple platforms can be seen through games on mobiles and televisions. The interconnections of gaming and everyday life are generative and manifest in multiple and diverse objects and practices. To trace some of the specific relations I am focusing on in my research, I will now introduce serious gaming.

Serious gaming

The term serious gaming came into usage in around 2004 and signalled the use of games for ‘purposes beyond education’. Serious games organisations have been established, notably in the USA, Japan and the UK. The Serious Games Initiative was founded at the Woodrow

Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C. As their website details the initiative begun

helping the area of ‘serious games’ emerge into an organized industry of developers and development studios skilled at using cutting-edge entertainment technologies to solve problems in areas as diverse as education, health-care, national defense, homeland security, analytics, corporate management and more

(Serious Games Initiative: online).

Serious gaming as outlined by the Serious Games Initiative brings together entertainment technologies and a broad range of concerns. With regard to education the Unlimited Learning

outlines the meeting of the two in stating the Serious Games development community ‘creates and promotes interactive products for commercial distribution that adapt the entertainment paradigm from the entertainment games industry with training and learning from educational paradigms’ (2006: 39).

The Teaching with Games project through drawing on ‘empirical evidence and examining the real-world use of selected commercial titles in schools’ (Sandford et al. 2006: 6) sought to explore commercial games in formal educational settings. Futurelab are a ‘not-for-profit organisation […] pioneering ways of using new technologies to enrich and transform the learning experience’. The partners for this report alongside Futurelab were: the Interactive Software Federation of Europe who ‘represent the interests of the interactive software’; Take Two Interactive Software, ‘a global publisher and developer of entertainment software and accessories’; Microsoft, and Electronic Arts, ‘the world’s leading interactive entertainment software company’1. The project selected three case study games The Sims 2, Knights of Honor and RollerCoaster Tycoon 3.

The focus in Teaching with Games is on the adaptability and affordances for these games in learning contexts. Further to this, these learning contexts may iteratively shape game design and development. This is to recognise that whilst potential lies with games to ‘offer a powerful learning tool’ that motivates in order to ‘‘make learning fun’’ (ELSPA 2006: 14), these contexts may equally inform existing commercial games development practices and lead to hybrid games that are inscribed with the agenda and approaches of various diverse stakeholders. My own research adopts Bennett’s concept of cultural objecthood to explore this relationship. Bennett’s focus is ‘on the operations of cultural institutions in producing distinctive kinds of objecthood understood as a product of the arrangements of objects that they effect’, and he asks, ‘what kinds of complex inner organisations do objects acquire from their insertion in different regimes of objecthood?’ (2005: 8). This can be re-stated to say, cultural institutions arrange objects that can be understood as distinctive kinds of objecthoods. In this sense, the cultural institutions are regimes of objecthood. This framework helps bring to the fore and frame my research focus on the particular games that may be shaped by different contexts or institutions, or what we can now identify as regimes of objecthood.

The regime of objecthood that has been introduced in this paper is the meeting of education contexts and game developers. What is also vital in exploring the emergence of new game

1

These descriptions are taken from http://www.futurelab.org.uk/research/teachingwithgames.htm (accessed April 2007).

forms are the means by which these games are inserted in this framework. In this instance policy reports and documentation. Two primary research issues may be identified, the first asks how particular reports play a part in forming regimes of object, and the second asks, how the arrangements of games these regimes effect shape particular games and game design practices and suggest potential games.

The research approaches: first question

John Kirriemuir, reflecting on the spate of recent reports, including the two mentioned in this paper, suggests:

the end result is usually a glossy report, containing lots of pictures of school kids studiously gathered around on a PC. It looks good, though perhaps not as realistic as pictures of 11 year olds sneakily enjoying Grand Theft Auto which their game- illiterate parents purchased for them, or indulging in ‘happy slapping’ which their mates film on their mobiles, then upload onto YouTube (2007: online).

He further suggests, ‘these reports do not help move the research agenda on […] only research and research funding can do that’ (2007). These comments take on a further dimension when recognising that Kirriemuir is one of the authors of the ELPSA report. In response to these comments it may seem a questionable move to explore how these reports play a significant role in forming regimes of objecthood. The aim of fostering such regimes is stated explicitly by Lord Puttnam in the foreword to Unlimited learning where he identified the report as ‘an important step in beginning the challenging and exciting process of developing potentially powerful new partnerships between the games industry and education’ (2006: a). In following Kirriemuir and informal conversations with those in education, the reach of these reports may be limited beyond the hopes expressed by Lord Puttnam. In turn I focus on these reports as part of my research rather, to draw out the stakeholders seeking to shape this field and as a means to ask what is at stake and how may games within education develop subsequently?

As Bennett states, ‘social collectives of various kinds are organized through the positions that such collectives take up in relation to each other’, and further to this, distinctive kinds of work are made possible (2005: 8). To analyze these reports is to see that particular regimes are advocated, particular solutions and trajectories and collaborations put forth. Beyond the steps these reports take in moving the research agenda in relation to games being used in classroom, they represent the wider affiliations that may have implications for the use of games in education. Given the involvement of organisations such as the Department for Skills and Education, Microsoft and Electronic Arts in past reports and the continued ‘Police Academy sequels’ (Kirriemuir, 2007: online) and release of further reports, these reports serve to identify existing and potential interests and collaborations, or ‘regimes of objecthood’.

The research approaches: second question

The second broad research question takes as its focus the games that emerge from particular regimes. This question seeks to speak back to the reports. Whilst the reports advocate dialogue and collaboration between educators and game developers, this research asks ‘how do such collaborations operate and work?’ and with the pivotal point between these different parties being the games themselves, ‘how can existing games be usefully employed in classrooms?’. So far this has lead to a number of suggestions, including ‘lite’ versions of

where there is potential for the games industry ‘to develop an attractive, low cost, solution’ (2004: 27) is illustrative of the new game forms around which commercial games and education sectors may meet. ‘Lite’ versions would ‘have all unnecessary content removed [thus providing ‘immediacy of learning’]’ and also, for example ‘allow users to save at regular intervals’ (2004: 26-27). The emergence of lite games would signal the coming together of commercial games and education sectors through objects.

Further to the example of ‘lite’ versions of games, my research focuses on the practices and exchanges that take place and point towards new forms of games. The focus is both on the adaptation of existing commercial games and the design of bespoke games. This research has involved contacting a games development studio involved in adapting dance mats for teaching in primary schools and conducting interviews detailing the testing and refinement process they went through in schools. Further research has involved contacting a design studio creating online content for BBC Jam and tracing the educational and design influences informing these games.

Egenfeldt-Nielsen in his ‘Overview of research in the educational use of video games’ suggests, ‘to see the educational use of computer games as a homogenous field is not beneficial – for a start, there are different teaching forms and edutainment genres that will benefit different educational goals’ (2006: 206). Acknowledging this requires that case studies are contextualised clearly and situated within broader developments in relation to education and serious gaming. The need for careful contextualisation highlights how these two research questions come together in significant ways. Bennett draws on Serres (1982) to note ‘the role that the stabilisation of objects plays in the constitution of social relations’ (2005: 8, following Serres 1982: 224-34). In relation to games then, this suggests and emphasizes that games arising out of cross sector collaborations can become the means through which ongoing collaborations can form. From this perspective the complex and interweaving relationships between educators, game developers and policy makers (amongst others) that form the changing regimes of objecthood arranging games into diverse settings and contexts, are instrumental in the potential of the digital games medium.

References

Bennett, T. (2005) ‘Civic laboratories: museums, cultural objecthood, and the governance of the social’ CRESC Working Paper Series. Milton Keynes: CRESC, The Open University. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S. (2006) ‘Overview of research on the educational use of video games’,

Digital Kompetanse 1(3), pp. 184-213.

ELSPA (2006) Unlimited learning: Computer and Video Games in the learning landscape, available at

http://www.elspa.com/assets/files/u/unlimitedlearningtheroleofcomputerandvideogamesint_3 44.pdf (accessed December 2006).

Haddon, L. (1988) ‘Electronic and Computer Games’, Screen 29 (2), pp. 52-73.

Kirriemuir, J. and McFarlane, A. (2004) ‘Literature Review in Games and Learning’, Futurelab: online.

Kirriemuir, J. (2007) ‘Groundhog Day for Games for Learning’, in Hard Core, available at http://www.digra.org/hardcore/hc13 (accessed March 2008).

Sandford, R., Uliesak, M., Facer, K. and Rudd, T. (2006) Teaching with Games. Futurelab: online.

Serious Games Initiative (online) ‘About’, available at

Work Narratives and Boundaries Management of Family and