CSS: General | Presentation CSS: General | Presentation
KymBuchanan.org > Playful Interest Bridging >
April 26, 2005
Course: CEP 957 Learning in Complex Domains
Instructor: Rand Spiro, PhD
Michigan State University; East Lansing, Michigan, USA
Kym Buchanan (Email: buchan56 AT msu.edu)
Home page: KymBuchanan.org
This essay explores choice, identity, consent, immersion, and meta-contextual awareness in play and learning, especially in persistent alternate worlds. Real cases are used to illustrate principles. Authors of such worlds are urged to design for risk-taking, and to remain flexible in their beliefs about play and role-play.
I would like to talk about the complexity of play and identity. Play is often placed opposite work; to be playful is to not be serious. Yet there are good reasons to believe that play can be a powerful way to achieve meaningful work and serious goals. Teaching and learning can be playful activities. Specifically, there is a growing belief that digital games may be effective tools for education. I want to understand how to design compelling, educational games. To achieve that understanding, and as a goal unto itself, I want to understand play, and how identity changes through play.
Play is a complex idea: it won't yield to a simple definition or example. If art is such that "I know it when I see it," play is such that "I know it when I do it." For complex ideas like play, it's better to use both principles and cases to construct understanding (Shulman, 1992). I'll use several cases to illustrate the identity-changing power of play.
I have some bins in my bedroom, for pre-sorting laundry. When I take off my socks, I can simply place them in the correct bin. Or I can stand by the door and toss my socks across the room, as if playing basketball. The same activity can simply be a task, or an act of play. Once I commit to playing, I'm disappointed if I miss, and happy when I "sink a throw."
As Case 1 illustrates, play is about choice: I choose to make a game out of a chore. By choosing to participate in this fleeting fantasy, I am marginally immersed in an alternate context: basketball. Choice plays a dual role in play: I choose to engage in play, and by immersion in play, I have new choices, or my choices take on new meaning.
Play can be as simple as laundry basketball or Solitaire. But I'm going to talk about one of the most complex forms of play: multiplayer role-play in persistent alternate worlds. Why? In such a world, play can be an especially powerful vehicle for learning. In such a world, the fantasy can be enduring and the immersion deep.
Such a world is persistent because it's a single, shared game. It's accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Player actions can have permanent effects: if I offend another player, there is no reset button or saved game to undo my action. Such a world is alternate because it's a fully-realized place distinct from the "real" world. It may have its own geography, ecology, history, and culture. It's populated by players' avatars (major characters) and non-player characters (supporting characters, who may be computer-controlled). It has an over-arching story, greater than any single avatar's personal adventures.
Choice and immersion have a different nature when I am no longer the sole author of play. When someone else authors a context for play and invites me in, my choice to participate is a form of consent. I agree to abide by the rules, allusions, and other ingredients of the context. For example, in worlds inspired by Tolkien's Middle Earth, dwarves have certain racial characteristics. If I play as a dwarf, I must abide by these affordances and constraints. Without consent, there can be no immersion, no suspension of disbelief. With greater consent, there can be greater immersion. If I embrace the characteristics, culture, and mannerisms of a dwarf, I will probably feel more like a resident of the world, and less like a visitor. The first step is agreeing with "Let's pretend...."
Games based in persistent alternate worlds are sometimes called role-playing games. This is because avatars often form teams or parties to interact with the world together, and each avatar plays a role in the party's success (e.g., fighter, magic user, thief). This role becomes the foundation for a player's in-game identity: what I can do partly defines who I am. And therein lies the main idea of this essay: I can change my identity through play, because play changes what I can do. Such change may be temporary, if "it's just a game." But in my experience, such change can also be permanent and surprisingly far-reaching. What I like doing and who I like being can influence me far beyond the game. In this way, role-play is also identity-play.
Playing roles is inextricable from identity. When my abilities or roles change, in a game or in my career, my identity also changes. The process of education is partly about developing and changing identities. While becoming a high school teacher, I had to negotiate my teaching identity (Agee, 2004; Britzman, 2003). It was a negotiation because I had to mediate many pressures, including my university preparation, mentor teacher, memories as a student, and my goals. More recently, I've been negotiating my identity as an educational researcher. Pressures include my professors, the communities of scholarship I want to be part of, and ongoing debates (e.g., quantitative v. qualitative methods). If I was member of a minority, my identity would put me at risk of stereotype susceptibility (Ambady et al., 2001). As a self-identified "gamer," I face stereotypes and ignorance about my subculture.
Role- or identity-play is a potentially powerful vehicle for learning. For example, reciprocal teaching is a strategy of supporting learners as they adopt some of the roles of the teacher (e.g., checking for understanding) (Palincsar & Brown, 1984). It's an effective strategy because it invites learners to "share cognitive responsibility for the task at hand" (Palincsar & Herrenkohl, 2002). Vygotsky and social learning theory both emphasize the power of role-playing to facilitate learning (Vygotsky, 1978; Miller, 1993). To wit: learners use tools (especially language) and opportunities to play roles to gain the knowledge and skills of the community. As learners play their roles better, they become more influential in the discourse and practices of the community. For example, an inservice workshop can be an opportunity for teachers to practice using a new technology, to practice the role of "technology user." If the context is both compelling and educative, the teachers' identities may permanently change (i.e., they will use the technology in their classrooms). Much depends on whether participants consent to the temporary identity change; when I teach a workshop, I want teachers to self-identify as capable of using the technology. More broadly, educators want learners to adopt incremental views of ability (instead of unchanging, entity views) (Brophy, 2004, p. 60). That's why I read The Little Engine that Could to my daughter ("I think I can. I think I can.").
Play gives people license to temporarily change their identities. As a recreational activity, persistent alternate worlds are filled with players practicing the roles like artist, explorer, hero, or leader. Such worlds foster a "fluidity of users' identity" (Dede, 1996, p. 168). If the world is both compelling and educative, this fluidity can facilitate valuable learning goals. There are at least three important ingredients: consent, immersion, and meta-contextual awareness.
Identity-play begins with consent. With greater consent, greater identity fluidity and subsequent identity change is possible. Consent depends on trust. In a persistent alternate world, players are asked to trust the world author(s) and the other players. The invitation is not just to play in the world, but to play a character in the world, to become immersed and hence vulnerable. In education, this is constructivism versus constructionism: the former is about building internal understanding; the latter is about also building something external as an intermediary process (Jonassen, Myers, & McKillop, 1996). Constructionism depends on investment in the external activity: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Multiplayer role-playing games invite investment in something external. A character can be more than game-related attributes and statistics; a character can be a dramatic persona, a fictional individual with mannerisms, aspirations, fears, and more. In mythology, an avatar is a projection of a god. In role-play, an avatar is a projection of a player. Both kinds of avatars can have human qualities, and affect those they interact with in human ways. But whereas a lone author controls every aspect of a fiction novel, role-play is a process of co-construction (and maybe co-constructionism). As Case 2 illustrates, co-construction is no place for "frustrated novelist syndrome," i.e., a player who refuses to respect others' right to choose. Players expect this right to be respected, in exchange for their consent.
Most multiplayer role-playing games include the command emote. Players emote to describe their characters actions, and have vast freedom in such actions. But like many players, I seldom give consent for another player to emote my character's experiences. Another player might write, "Fezzik throws a punch at you." Then I have the choice to write, "Kymothy reels in pain as the blow connects," or "Kymothy dodges aside with uncanny grace," or a thousand other possible reactions. But I would object if this choice were taken away, e.g., "Fezzik throws a punch at you, and you reel in pain as the blow connects."
In role-play, players deliberately seek out others to engage in identity negotiation (although most probably don't think of it such terms). By choosing to interact with other avatars, players accept external pressures on their in-game identities, just as I accepted external pressures when I enrolled in a PhD program. In a rich role-playing scene, a player has certain goals for his or her avatar: a trajectory from the avatar's background through the present to the future. A goal may be as simple as forming a party to explore a new area, or as complex as maintaining or deepening a relationship between avatars (and by extension, their players).
Role-playing scenes are seldom a "blank slate:" besides their different goals, avatars bring different backgrounds, abilities, and roles, and players tacitly bring their own, different backgrounds and abilities. For example, an experienced role-player may be more sensitive to the issues in Case 2, and perhaps more cunning in mediating such constraints. To be clear, negotiating pressures and mediating constraints is a significant part of the enjoyment. As Case 3 illustrates, players may even impose extra constraints on themselves in pursuit of more tense, dramatic, or otherwise enjoyable role-play.
In most role-playing games I prefer to play the same kind of avatar, an archetype I call the Stalwart Knight. I've grown comfortable and proficient in his mannerisms, etiquette, and ethics. So I play him well, just as a character actor excels by perpetually re-inventing the same archetype. Each iteration of the Knight adheres to the same code of honor (e.g., "Protect the innocent... Keep your sword sharp and oiled, but don't scour it to breaking..."). These are self-imposed constraints. I get greater challenge and enjoyment out of playing the Stalwart Knight, because I have to negotiate more pressures on his identity. But such negotiation also makes some choices easier, as when my Knight see an innocent in danger.
Consent can be a complex choice. A player may choose to forfeit his or her avatar's choice, e.g., by agreeing to be enslaved by another avatar. Later, the player may grow dissatisfied with the resulting role-play, and reject the in-game relationship. Many disputes between players arise from a conflict of expectations about what the players consented to. In its simplest form, this is the schoolyard exchange: "Bang! You're dead!" "No, you missed."
Since role-play is co-construction, avatar roles and identities are always open to interpretation and re-interpretation, to iteration and improvisation. Some educators view teaching as a similar form of improvisation, because just like role-play, "what makes teaching rewarding is the autonomy and creativity" (Sawyer, 2004). As a teacher or a role-player, I give others choices and invite them to immerse themselves in new, creative, co-constructive experiences.
As a co-constructive activity, role-play has been described as participatory theater, collective storytelling, and consensual hallucination. Like improv theater, role-play is about accepting the choices of the world author(s) and other players, and trying to build on them. Role-play requires a suspension of disbelief. When I immerse myself in role-play, I enter a Magic Circle, an Empty Space, an alternate place. My wife acted in high school, and the drama teacher hung a sign: "Leave it at the door." Role-play is about leaving behind parts of my identity: my abilities, background, even ethics, to accept new or changed parts. If I feel threatened as a player, I will hesitate or hold back. Immersion is about surrendering to an experience, and surrender can be hard.
To respect consent and encourage surrender, persistent alternate worlds usually distinguish between In-Character (IC) and Out-of-Character (OOC) speech and actions. Many world authors and players believe that OOC concerns always trump IC concerns. For example, no avatar should be forced into an IC scene if the player is uncomfortable OOC. I am not my avatar, although influence flows both ways. My IC identity is strongly influenced by my OOC identity (e.g., the Stalwart Knight's code of honor is not far from my own), and as a player I experience at least some of the pressures and emotions my avatar feels. After all, if my avatar triumphs in the game, he didn't do it on his own. Immersion in a world, especially experiencing a sense of place (not just game-ness), increases the power of vicarious experience to influence my OOC identity. Ideally, "The impression is that of being inside an artificial reality rather than looking through a computer monitor 'window' into a synthetic environment: the equivalent of diving rather than riding in a glass-bottomed boat" (Dede, 1996, p. 171). Immersion and autonomy are a powerful combination for learning (Foreman, 2003; Squire & Barab, 2004). Case 4 illustrates one small way immersion can lead to significant OOC feedback: we can become who we pretend to be.
I played a dwarf priest named Kymothy for several years. I made choices to age Kymothy over time: gray in his beard, less energy, and a pair of wire-rim spectacles. The spectacles became a valuable prop for emoting: Kymothy would peer through his spectacles, adjust them, polish them, etc. After about a year of this, I was diagnosed with astigmatism and started wearing glasses. In a way, I was already accustomed to this, because "we" had been wearing spectacles for months.
In the face of such potentially powerful feedback, players depend on a "circuit breaker." When experiencing IC failure or disappointment, players can tell themselves it's just a game. Many games even include random or semi-random elements, effectively giving players an external scapegoat: "The dice just rolled poorly." (Players are less likely to distance themselves from success.) Of course, players don't want the game to be completely random: they want their choices to actually be a negotiation of pressures. Constructivism emphasizes giving learners meaningful choices, else learning won't be "a creative improvisational process" (Sawyer, 2004).
When I say it's just a game, I know I'm deluding myself a little. Through immersion I may leave behind parts of my identity, but I don't completely surrender myself. I have a meta-level awareness of context: I'm making choices in an alternate world, and simultaneously, I'm playing a game. This meta-contextual awareness is worth developing. For example, Peter Elbow urges scholars to practice methodological believing: to pretend they agree with another scholar's viewpoint in order to better appreciate it (Elbow, 1986). As an English teacher, I taught my students to make predictions and question the author, to both experience in the story and to analyze their experience.
Sometimes meta-awareness is inappropriately forced upon players, as when other players "break character" and behave in an OOC fashion when and where they should be behaving IC. Meta-awareness can itself be a choice: in Case 5, a player wasn't certain he wanted to experience meta-awareness. Increased meta-awareness can even be accidental, as in Case 6.
Long before September 11, 2001, I had been co-authoring a role-playing game in which the avatars battled international terrorists. So it made sense (to me) to weave the attack on the World Trade Center into the alternate world of the game; I even hoped it might help my players and I deal with the aftermath. It certainly fit with the themes and narrative trajectory of the game thus far. One of my players was uncomfortable with the inclusion. Partly he wanted our alternate world to remain escapist. Yet, if we treated the tragedy with appropriate gravity, he could see value in "playing through" our thoughts and feelings. In the end, our alternate world included the attack.
One my favorite avatars was a grim vigilante called the Crimson Gargoyle, who was trying to redeem himself after working for the Russian Mafia. The Gargoyle was part of superhero group called the Cascade Champions. The other avatars were less dark-and-gritty. At one point, the Champions confronted the Gargoyle's former employers. The Gargoyle argued for killing the mobsters, to prevent them from hurting anyone ever again. The other avatars were taken aback by this attitude; my fellow players had imported their sense of mainstream/cinematic superhero norms, in which villains typically only die by accident or suicide. We all became acutely aware of the meta-context of the game, e.g., Did we want to explore OOC issues like capital punishment, or was this "just a game?"
In the resulting debate, one avatar argued that capital punishment may be ethical in principle, but the justice system is fallible. The Gargoyle argued that he had personally witnessed the mobsters' villainy, so there was no chance of executing an innocent person, and so on. Fundamentally, my fellow players weren't sure they had consented to or would surrender to a certain kind of world, story, or game. No one was outraged, however, because no real human life was on the line. This and other episodes give me a deep appreciation of the power of role-play. By adopting the "masks" of avatars, players can have an IC conversation about meaningful, contentious OOC issue. The safety of a mask/avatar is even greater over the Internet, and may foster greater risk-taking (Dede, 1996).
Play is about choice, and choice is about risk. Through consent and immersion, play can change identity and choice, and hence risk. From the perspective of constructivism, risk is critical to learning. From the perspective of role-play, risk is important to enjoyment. Thus, authors of persistent alternate worlds, especially worlds for teaching and learning, should design for risk-taking. Two promising strategies are designing for emergence and designing for community.
Emergent gameplay is semi-planned or unplanned. For example, the designers of Doom included "back blast" on the rocket launcher to simulate an explosion. Clever players discovered they could use the back blast to "rocket jump" upwards and backwards; this sometimes gave them access to places they weren't supposed to reach. Players, as human beings, are wonderfully inventive in this way. World authors shouldn't try to force players to behave specific ways. Rather, role-play is richer when it can emerge through iteration and improvisation (and potential OOC identity changes are greater with rich role-play). A world need not be designed for adventure, drama, or comedy; it can be designed for any/all. Designing an alternate world is about giving players a stage and props, not a script. A little nudge may be OK, but beware of trading player autonomy for the sake of plot. This is a constructivist approach: do not give learners one "official" map of a domain. Rather, let them criss-cross and revisit the space on their own, so that their learning is neither brittle nor simplistic (Spiro et al., 1987). The designer's role in authoring a space for role-play is more "guide on the side" than "sage on the stage." Frustrated novelists ultimately make for frustrated players. "As in all constructivist learning, centralized, top-down planning fails in [persistent alternate worlds], because users prefer to design their own culture and artifacts" (Dede, 1996, p. 167).
Players' urge to design their own culture suggests a second strategy for risk-fostering: design for community. Community helps transform a space into place: an alternate world is only digital trees and rocks until avatars feel and behave like residents. In a classroom, a sense of learning community fosters greater risk-taking (and thus greater learning) among students (Brophy, 2004). Learners and role-players are more likely to take risks if the sting of mistakes is softened by a supportive community. In a persistent alternate world, this is especially critical for new players, or newbies. Experienced players should be encouraged and rewarded for welcoming newbies and helping them learn how to play. Another problematic population is anti-social players. World authors should be thoughtful, planful, and clear about the social contract they offer. Will offensive OOC behavior be curtailed via norms, or rules enforcement? At what point (if ever) should a player be forcefully ejected from the world? Will enforcement and "deportation" be top-down, or democratic? The answers to these questions aren't simple, and may vary based on the purpose of the world. A useful touchstone is always pairing responsibility and authority. Don't give a player responsibility for something with also giving authority. For example, don't ask players to police themselves without giving them the means to do so. (In a persistent alternate world, this is often player-empowering software code.) And don't give players authority without also demanding they exercise it responsibly.
The ideas in this essay are synergistically interrelated: choice, identity, consent, immersion, meta-contextual awareness, and risk-taking. The entanglements reflect the daunting complexity of identity-change, and learning as a form of identity-change. Fortunately, I don't need a tight set of principles or a few general cases to author persistent alternate worlds. Rather, like an anthropologist who makes herself receptive to the human experiences she observes (Behar, 1996), world authors can experience a process of deep personal investment and vulnerability. One meaning of immersion is moving from the shallow water to the deep. An experienced swimmer respects water's fickle nature, and doesn't think himself completely in control. As an educator, if I ask a learner to take risks while negotiating an identity as an online learner (and beyond), I must be willing to take risks myself. I must ever be ready to revise my designs and curb my ego, in order to protect the fickle potential of co-construction.
Created by Kym Buchanan | http://KymBuchanan.org | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
