Refocusing on particular aspects of participation and play in relation to each other shifts the horizons of my inquiry somewhat. Some of the works on games and education outlined earlier are a long way from the ideas that I want to interrogate. There are, though, other areas that are worth exploring with these refocused ideas in mind, especially those which examine participation in a playful way, and play in a participatory way.
2.7.1 Participatory culture and games
Bateman (2017) argues that ‘artefactual’ readings of games as playful objects are incomplete, and that understanding games involves examining ‘play as practice’; the ways in which players participate in communities, which necessarily include designers even when they are not in direct contact with players. This also includes ‘lineages of play’ (Bateman, 2017: 6), through which prior experiences of play affect current ones. The
implication of this is that all players have a history, and that their participation will depend upon this. Reflecting this idea, there is an approach to play in video games which highlights the concept of participation. Indeed, many of the works in this category treat the idea of participation far more critically than those examining participation in HE.
Players can also participate in different ways within the context of a specific game, and there are a number of approaches which examine the idea of ‘playstyles’ in order to understand how players interact with the rules of the game and each other. Bartle (1996) provides a particularly influential example, developing a taxonomy of four players (‘Achievers’, ‘Socialisers’, ‘Explorers’ and ‘Killers’) who respond to the game world and other players in different ways and who are motivated by different elements of the play experience. Given this, he identifies specific design principles which might ensure that games appeal to particular types of player. This is reminiscent of Kolb’s (1984) influential concept of learning styles, which builds upon a constructivist idea of experiential learning to identify particular ways in which people learn from different experiences. Kolb stresses that this does not imply that individuals only learn in one way, but in practice there has been a danger of reducing learners to a particular style. Where playstyles and learning styles have been linked in literature with the goal of designing educational games that will ‘work’ for specific learners (Heeter, 2008) it is worrying that this may limit the experiences that individuals have in games and learning rather than expand their experiences.
Beyond the idea of ‘playstyles’, other authors build upon Jenkins (1992), who develops the idea of ‘fandom’ as a participatory community in which members both consume popular culture and appropriate it as a site for creativity. This idea of participatory culture has influenced works where authors act as player-ethnographers within specific communities of players. Pearce (2009) examines the ‘communities of play’ formed within a MMORPG, in which players produce new experiences, even beyond the confines of the game in the real world. Taylor (2017: 114) also treats video game players as producers,
especially in the role of ‘auxiliary tools’ like websites, forums and guides, which may not be counted as ‘official’ participation by games designers, but which are central for the players that do use them. Steinkuehler (2006) demonstrates that player communities also transform games through practice more generally, often resulting in emergent behaviours that are not intended or foreseen by designers. Massanari (2015) takes a similar approach to the online community Reddit, and demonstrates that users are playful in their participation whilst subverting and inverting this sense of play through taking advantage of the flexibility of the system’s rules. These ideas link back to De Koven’s (2013) idea of ‘changing the game’; through their participation, fans of these works move beyond the consumer paradigm and instead appropriate the contexts they are a part of. At the same time, the separation between contexts starts to blur as participants see less of a division between games and their ‘real lives’. Jenkins and colleagues (2006) revisit some of these ideas and how they might be applied to media education specifically, arguing that education in the 21st century needs to involve the sorts of pooled knowledge, negotiation
and play that occur in participatory culture.
2.7.2 Academic and political play
Another way to approach the question is to examine works which have attempted to frame the university as an inherently playful space. Carnes (2015) traces university pedagogy back to the Socratic dialogue, and argues that the contemporary university experience is impoverished by a lack of play in teaching, though ultimately this is used to argue for a fairly conventional educational game. At a deeper level, Farrelly (2013) connects play to the development of democratic values, going on to evoke Dewey in arguing that a true humanities education would focus on participatory playful activities in order to inculcate these values.
In both of these cases, of course, there is a set of academic values that are being assumed. Academics are, ideally, like Socrates in that they are playful, critical and democratic in their approach. This has echoes of utopianism, to the extent that these authors could be accused of reinforcing the ‘ivory tower’ attitude that causes problems in participation in the first place. Having said this, these works connect to the thread of utopianism that crops up frequently in works on play. For many play scholars, including Suits (1978) and De Koven (2013), play is a utopian activity which actively brings about a perfect world. McKenna (2001) studies models of utopias, and suggests a distinction between static ‘end-state’ and dynamic ‘process’ models. It might be argued that the utopias that both play scholars and educationalists argue for are process ones. At the very least, these utopias require sustained collaborative participation in order to exist. Once more play and participation are intertwined through a focus on building political communities which transform the world.
Coming full circle and reincorporating play and games, Aaen and Nørgård (2015) develop the concept of ‘participatory academic communities’ which incorporate many of the ideas outlined in this section. Their approach to the design of a postgraduate course incorporates a critical moral purpose, an understanding of the difference between ‘genres’ of participation, and an experimental, playful mode of engagement, all of which extend beyond the classroom and the university. This has echoes of Nixon (2009), whose argument about universities as institutions claims that they need to recover the ‘rich unpredictability of learning’ (p.11) in order to become places that promote and sustain freedom. This type of approach seems to be the practical outcome of the definitions developed through a critical approach to play and participation in HE.