Expansive Genres of Play: Getting Serious About Game Genres for the Design of Future Learning Environments
Game studies researchers have struggled with definitions of genre, defaulting to definitions that highlight game content and interaction differences. These categorizations focus on the feature-based nature of games and are not particularly useful for educ
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Expansive Genres of Play: Getting Serious About Game Genres for the Design of Future Learning Environments Brad Mehlenbacher and Christopher Kampe This chapter explores the many discussions of genre within game studies, focusing on how current definitions of genre de-emphasize an aspect of gaming we find very relevant to the goals of educators interested in innovative learning environments in instruction. In particular, we are motivated to introduce “pedagogies of engagement” into our classrooms, activities that stress the importance of learner effort, emphasize learner–instructor interaction, provide authentic learning opportunities, and stimulate collaborative social engagement (Smith et al. 2005). Thus, when we imagine how games can be involved in education, we think about the social activities and texts that are taking place and being produced around the games themselves (Squire 2008; Young et al. 2012). We situate these community and industry-driven productions within a
B. Mehlenbacher () Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA C. Kampe Program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA © The Author(s) 2017 C.R. Miller, A.R. Kelly (eds.), Emerging Genres in New Media Environments, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40295-6_6
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larger socio-ecological system of game development. To further our argument, we draw on contemporary genre studies, borrowing the notion of paratext from Genette (1997) and others (Gray 2010 Stanitzek 2005), and aligning game activities with genre systems and genre sets (Bazerman 2003; Berkenkotter 2001) to offer a strong contrast to game studies definitions of genre. We contend that a rhetorical conception of genre allows us to broaden our understanding of games, such that they become aspects of an environment and community where player participation, creativity, and learning occur. We then offer a description of one game that works as an exemplar in its dynamic engagement of players in building narrative objects that extend and co-produce a rich, engaging learning world: This War of Mine. We then discuss the implications for game and genre studies and educational research on games. Ultimately we suggest that educators should be more concerned with the temporally sensitive community-driven work surrounding a game than with the formal content of the game itself.
GAMES IN EDUCATION Educators and educational institutions love games. The contemporary currency of student engagement, in fact, appears to be in all things “gamified” (Dicheva et al. 2015). If we can transform our subject matters into scenarios that involve winning, competing, collaborating, and collecting learning “tokens” that indicate progress, we can claim we have harnessed the innovative vision of the 21st century. Indeed, game-based instruction has exhibited success for teaching certain things in certain domains, for example in health education (Kato 2010), in sim
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