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Monday 3rd December 2007 10:00 am

David Shaffer: More Than Who You Are

What does it mean to “become a new kind of person” through playing a game?

In What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, Jim Gee has suggested that every game gives players an opportunity to try on new identities. A game, he points out, is always about a relationship between two different identities: the real-world identity of the player, and the virtual identity of the character or role the player has in the game.

Taking on new identities is a powerful form of learning in general, and it is a particularly powerful form of learning when the characters in the game play roles that are socially-valuable in the real world--but only if the roles are more than just playing around.

Consider, for example, the epistemic game science.net , which I wrote about in How Computer Games Help Children Learn. In science.net. players become journalists, reporting for an online science news magazine. By taking on the role of a reporter in a journalism game, players become people who care about science because it matters in the lives of people; they become people who ask questions, who critique writing, and who think about how to organize ideas.

Players in science.net learn these things because the game helps them acquire what psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius call possible selves.

A possible self is an individual’s ideas about what they might become, would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming.

Possible selves give form to a person’s hopes for mastery, power, status, or belonging and to a person’s fears of incompetence, failure, and rejection. They are images of what we might become, but not generic images. They are images that a particular person has based on his or her own past experiences, hopes, dreams, and worries.

Epistemic games like science.net can give adolescents new possible selves that are based on authentic experiences with innovative thinking that matter in the world. Adolescents are in the process of learning their place in the larger social world. They are learning to care about issues that matter to society at large, developing expertise and being respected for that expertise. Epistemic games where players see what it might feel like to be a real-world professional can play an important part in this process of development.

But: Epistemic games don’t work if in the game players just feel like professionals. For a game to have positive effects, players also need to have a chance to practice the real world skills, knowledge, values and ways of thinking that professionals use.

What our studies of science.net - and other epistemic games - show is that getting players to take on the identity of a professional is relatively easy: Get someone to tell them they are a professional. Give them a badge of office or prop of the profession. Let them do something that they expect a professional to do, and learn to do something they didn’t know a professional did. And then let someone they know (a peer, or a parent) see them as a professional.

What makes this new identity powerful, though, is that it is linked to the skills, knowledge, values, and epistemology of a profession.

So, sure, something like two-thirds of the players who finish playing science.net feel like a journalist. But about the same number start the game feeling that way! What makes the game a good learning experience is that these players still felt like journalists even though they come to understand how complex and difficult journalism is - and how much more is involved in being a journalist than they first believed.

Epistemic games like science.net are powerful because the possible selves players take away from them are not just about feeling like a professional. They are based on an authentic experience of becoming a professional in game form.

Do all games--or even all learning games--work like epistemic games? Of course not. Nor should they.

But what an epistemic game like science.net shows is that while developing new identities in a game is an important part of learning, it also matters whether or not that identity is tied to the kinds of skills, knowledge, values and ways of thinking that matter in the world.

Editor’s Note: See Jim Gee’s thematic overview & index for more posts in this seven-part series on digital learning and identity.

Category: Ecology-of-Games, Identity

Tags: epistemic-games

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