The MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative in 2006 to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. They believe that answers to these questions are critical to developing educational and other social institutions that can meet the needs of this and future generations. The initiative is both marshaling what is already known about the field and seeding innovation for continued growth.

As part of the MacArthur Foundation’s initiative, the University of Wisconsin and the Advanced Academic Distributed Learning Co-Lab in Madison received two major grants. Both grants were to the members of the Games, Learning, and Society Group (GLS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with Prof. James Paul Gee as PI. The first grant (Gamestar Mechanic) involves designing and assessing software and curricular that help young people learn about game design. The second grant (A Productive Approach to Learning and Media Literacy through Video Games and Simulations) funds basic research and proof of concept implementations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gamestar Mechanic
(Wisconsin leads: Elisabeth Hayes, James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, Alex Games; New York leads: Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman, Robert Torres).

Gamestar Mechanic is a collaboration between a highly innovative game company—the Gamelab in New York—and the Games, Learning, and Society (GLS) Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (formerly the GAPPS Group).

Gamestar Mechanic is a game designed to teach young people about game design, with the emphasis on design, not programming. The goal is to help young people—gamers and nongamers—learn what it is like to think about design and to think like a designer.

Game design involves a rich array of knowledge and skills. Knowing how to put together a successful game involves system-based thinking, iterative critical problem solving, art and aesthetics, writing and storytelling, interactive design, game logic and rules, and computer skills. The designer must also be a socio-technical engineer, thinking about how people will interact with the game and how the game will shape both individual, competitive, or collaborative social interaction.

Designers must use complex and technical linguistic and symbolic elements from a variety of domains, at a variety of different levels, and for a variety of different purposes. They must explicate and defend design ideas, describe design issues and player interactions at a meta-level, create and test hypotheses, and reflect on the impact of their games as a distinctive form of media in relation to other media. And each of these involves a melding of technological, social, communicational, and artistic concerns, in the framework of a form of scientific thinking in the broad sense of the term (e.g., hypothesis and theory testing, reflection and revision based on evidence, etc.). Learners are making and thinking about designed complex interactive systems, a characteristic activity in both the media and in science today.

Reflecting on and practicing design in these terms can lead, we believe, to skills that are crucial for success in the modern, high-tech, global world. We live in a world replete with interacting systems—natural and designed—that create complex risks, such as science, market, state, and demographic systems interacting to affect global environmental change. Game design is a but a start in learning to think of complex interactions among variables, people, and technology, but it is also a domain where eventually, through “gamed simulations”, designers can help others reflect on issues of social change and complex interactions among systems.

Gamestar Mechanic is part of larger movement today—a movement of which the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative is very much a leader—that stresses young people as producers, not consumers of knowledge and media. Thanks to modern digital technologies, young people today—if they are willing to put in the effort—can produce media (video, machinima, music, animation, graphic arts, modded games, blogs, wikis, and so forth) at a professional level. They can join robust communities or affinity groups where people’s status is determined by their skills and often their ability to help, teach, and collaborate, not their age, race, gender, or school success.

Such production often leads young people today to become “tech-savvy”, by which we mean technologically skilled, unintimated by technical and technological matters, and able to integrate technology into artistic or social concerns. In turn, such tech-savvy identities are crucial for success and power in the modern world. A real issue arises though of the social distribution of production skills and tech-savvy identities among young people today. Are all children getting these opportunities or only more privileged one? How does gender work in this respect? What if young people today pick up tech-savvy skills and identities primarily out of school? What if schools do not, for the most part, offer kids tech-savvy identities and skills?

Gamestar Mechanic can be viewed as a game about “modding”, as a tool meant to engage young people with a “modding” attitude. “Modding” is the term gamers use for the practice of using the software by which games are made—software today is very often readily available when one buys a game—to modify a game, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in major ways, major enough to constitute a wholly different game. For example, young people at MIT, under the direction of Henry Jenkins, made a game about the American Revolution from the software with which the Dungeon and Dragons game Neverwinter Nights was made. Modding is a quintessential tool that can lead a young person to take on a strong identity as a producer and a tech-savvy individual, almost always today as part of a collaborative effort among a community of modders and players.

The Games, Learning, and Society Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has advocated a productive approach to media literacy that is epitomized in modding and the modding attitude to technologies.

A Productive Approach To Learning And Media Literacy Through Video Games And Simulations

We live in a global and high tech world that relies on science and technical information more than ever in the past . Today, not just professional experts, but “everyday people”, including quite young ones, are producing, not just consuming. Young people today produce more media—more video, animation, journalism, fiction, web sites, videogames, and even baseball statistics—than do “professionals”. And, thanks to modern technologies, they are often doing so at a professional level in terms of both appearance and substance.

It is essential, though, to realize that the new—new media and technologies—does not remove the old. Print literacy and traditional school-based skills do not disappear; they do not become any less important, but, rather, they change their place in the new ecology of learning and knowledge in society. Indeed, young people today do more reading and writing than they ever have—witness the vast proliferation of fan fiction on the Internet—but do it in new as well as old ways.

So there are two goals: making kids tech-savvy and, at the same time, ensuring they master the linguistic and cognitive skills associated with the academic content areas of schooling. Our research is based on our belief that we can build linguistic, cognitive, and tech-savvy skills for today’s less privileged children through centers of expertise involving productive uses of new digital technologies, including video games and related simulation technologies.

We build these centers of expertise in a two-pronged approach centered around, first, young people’s emerging popular cultural interests, such as their video games, and, second, around adult-like professional practices (e.g., urban planning, journalism, engineering) in which children today can fruitfully engage thanks to modern technologies. At the same time, we intend to build these centers of expertise in settings that will eventually put pressure on schools for much deeper reform.

Our key goal is to help build a new academic field—a field devoted to Digital Games and Learning. To do this, however, we need to instantiate our ideas in actual “proof of concept” interventions. Each of our projects speaks to the same basic themes; they are each intended to contribute to the same overall theory, a theory which will offer foundations for a field of Digital Games and Learning.

Commercial Games: History (lead: Kurt Squire)
This project is built around an intensive summer program and a yearlong after-school program using historically-themed games like Civilization. Participants don’t just play these games, they learn to modify (“mod”) them so that they both understand how the game design behind each game models history, but also understand how models of history can be formed and debated.

Urban Ecology (lead: David Shaffer)
This project is developing Urban Ecology, a game in which middle school students role-play as professional urban planners to redesign their neighborhood and in the process understand the science and civics of urban ecology. This game (and the Science.net one below) is based around the concept of “epistemic games”, that is games that get learners to think, value, and act like professionals.

Environmental Detectives (lead: Kurt Squire)
This project studies the potential of augmented reality games on handhelds (ARGHs)—games built using GPS enabled handheld computers—to develop productive approaches to media literacy. Specifically, we develop and test tools and resources that enable teachers and students to adapt an ARGH called “Environmental Detectives” in which players collaboratively solve public health and environmental problems in their neighborhoods. We are developing, as well, a community–run website with materials, supports, resources, and game downloads to support the use of Environmental Detectives and other ARGHs.

Science.net (lead: David Shaffer)
This project is developing Science.net, a game in which players become journalists reporting on scientific and technological developments and the impact of those developments on their community. Players investigate, write, and produce stories for an online science newsmagazine in collaboration with expert journalists.

Tech-Savvy Girls (lead: Elisabeth Hayes)
This project is designing an out-of-school program that uses sophisticated computer games, such as massively multiplayer online worlds (like World of Warcraft and Second Life), to build tech-savvy skills, knowledge, and identities among middle-school-age girls. We know that some youth are “digital natives,” acquiring such abilities and identities through access to complex technologies in the home and other non-school settings, with the support of parents and peers. During early adolescence, girls are particularly prone to lose interest in certain computer-related practices such as gaming that are crucial for further development of technological abilities, including formal study of computer science. This project focuses on identifying the various trajectories of becoming “tech-savvy” associated with computer and video gaming. Secondly, building on this information, the project explores how out-of-school girls’ clubs can be designed to build girls’ tech-savvy skills, knowledge, and identities.

Knowledge Communities in Online Gaming Worlds (lead: Constance Steinkuehler)
No effort to build knowledge and practice aimed at the development of media literacy would be complete without attention to the potential of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). MMOGs are simulated worlds played online that allow individuals to interact, through their digital characters or “avatars”, not only with the designed environment in which activities take place, but also with other individuals’ avatars as well. Such media represent the most advanced environments for collaboration and community building, sitting at a crossroads between “new frontiers” (with fully functioning emergent and self-sustaining cultures that exhibit sociological and educational characteristics of their own) and “collaborative game spaces” (allowing joint play). This project seeks to explore the diverse ways in which MMOGs can serve as contexts for the development of a productive approach to media literacy.

Non-game media and connections to Chicago and MIT (lead: Erica Halverson)
This project explores how non-game media fit into our productive approach to media literacy. This project seeks first to study the design principles involved in other performance–based learning environments, including live performances (such as theatre, performance art, music), fantasy sports, video production and documentaries, MMOG, and digital storytelling. The project is piloting a program to put these design principles into action by building performance-based learning environments for urban adolescents.

Games for Leadership and Change (lead: Richard Halverson)
This project is exploring the use of games to introduce educational leaders to fundamental principles and theories of school and institutional leadership through simulated worlds in which these leaders have to enact, assess, and transform these principles and theories. The project is also exploring the use of such video games not just for learning, but as tools for engaging with research and assessment in the area of educational leadership. Video games turn out to be good tools with which to think through the implications of and connections among different educational principles and theories.