Books Authored/Edited/Translated
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Book Title |
Games, Leadership and Learning in Virtual Environments |
| Editors |
C.A. DeCoursey, Dean A. F. Gui (English Language Centre) |
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Publisher |
Inter-Disciplinary Press |
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Year of Publication |
2016 |
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ISBN |
9781848884519 |
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Introduction From the very first Atari game that accidentally made its way into the hands of thousands who spent hours glued to analogue TV screens bouncing a static ball back and forth between players, to revivalist attempts at targeting specific demographics like the LGBT communities, gaming in all its protean forms has forever attracted humankind to the technological and other-worldly possibilities of this cyber-frontier. In addition to the rebirth of gaming companies, games themselves have transcended from the first-person controlled environments of Dungeons and Dragons, to the subscription-based, massively multiplayer online environments of World of Warcraft, to the current educational fashion of MOOCs. The potential for research into these mediums, especially the very interesting concept of how the personality of the human user influences the avatar selection and behavioural interaction in the virtual arena, and the storytelling and community-building opportunities in these mediums is explored by our authors in this stream of ELVW. Virtual worlds are among the most sophisticated of learning platforms in the world today. As a part of massively-multiplayer and other gaming worlds, their immersive properties lead players to tune out input from the physical world, creating a sense of presence in-world, and leading players to invest in customised self-representations, but also in sets of characters, co-constructed narratives, and the building of locales and worlds. These underwrite avatars’ real-time synchronous interactions. Together with the reproduction of realistic physical properties within virtual environments, the navigation of virtual worlds offers sophisticated potentials for learning and recreation. The reader will notice four themes which spread across the chapters in this section to some degree or another: 1) narratives; 2) communities of practice; 3) community and personal identity reflected through the virtual environment; and 4) user autonomy in creativity and learning through gaming. The seemingly-infinite possibilities in the gaming universe afford hours of gaming pleasure, many sleepless nights, the consumption of financial resources, Twinkies and Red Bull, extracting and applying tactical knowledge, the building of in-world communities, and the claiming of virtual victories (which more often than not translate into very physical sensations of victories for the in-world gamer). Sometimes villainised for the aggressive behaviour that is brought into the physical world or as the reason for the lethargy and instant-gratification associated with today’s generation, gaming has also been lauded for giving teenagers a safe alternative to their evenings and weekends, the noticeable reduction of incidents involving school bullying and petty crimes, and being gateways to critical thinking, practical problem solving , and learner autonomy in information-gathering and processing. Yet serious investigations into gaming environments and their potential for reflecting society and exposing possible solutions to society’s ailments did not take root until the mid-1990’s, although the gaming industry itself, globally in 2002, was estimated at $27 billion, growing at 20 percent annually in the United States alone, surpassing record / music, movie box office, and home video sales industries. The potential of virtual environments to act as conduits for educational tools to aid in the learning process is no longer contested. In the ongoing debate as to whether it is or is not a gaming environment, there is no question that environments such as Second Life, and similar online collaborative peer-to-peer distributed learning networks, are powerful learning and social networking applications. They that allow for educational collaboration between gamers and nom-gamers alike. Furthermore, teachers engaging in social networking through technology must undergo a paradigm shift in order to be a part of the communities of practice that they preach to their students. Aspects of this shift include pedagogy, networking, literacy, heuristics, formality, transfer, directionality, ownership, sharing, and classification. Platforms like Second Life become communities of practice where the macro communities of the physical world transition to the macro communities of the virtual world, and this is where the many micro communities surface, resulting from the interactions between avatars and the virtual environment, where unintentional and subconscious tributes to our communities and to ourselves are erected in our honour, sometimes obvious, sometimes not so obvious landmarks and sign posts which when mediated can guide us in a nexus of practice to become self-aware, to improve society, and, as noted by Mau and Nicholas, to ‘play hard, but to work even harder’ when the virtual environment is momentarily left behind, and our physical avatars must enter the physical environment once more. Virtual environments are a versatile and exciting media. In education, virtual worlds offer a means to deliver subject teaching across the humanities, social sciences and sciences, through experiential, hands-on training, with new possibilities for tracking and assessment. Virtual environments also offer some of the pleasure of games, while avoiding the pitfalls of MOOCs. Learners in many fields gain from realistic simulations of field-specific situations. As a vehicle for formative learning, virtual worlds offer learners, as individuals and in groups, multiple opportunities to explore operational and situational meanings of classroom input. By enacting various roles, and playing scenarios in various ways, they integrate subject knowledge with real-time interactions. Reviewing, discussing and replaying the scenario helps them think critically, resulting in better decision-making in the actual workplace. For these reasons, virtual worlds are extensively used in medicine and nursing, business and management, the sciences, social work and counselling, and many other fields where integrating theoretical knowledge with skills is desirable. At this time, developments in haptics and kinesics pioneered in gaming are poised to redesign our experiences of the world wide web, and to make 3D, interactive environments the worldwide norm. In the first part of this volume, four chapters employ diverse methods and perspectives to understand gameplay and players. Simon Evans, in ‘Virtual Selves, Research Perspectives: Exploring the Role and Implications for Taking the “Insider Perspective” in Virtual Worlds Research,’ attempts to craft a ‘Player Taxonomy’ for Second Life, defining how the various identities activities embody might negotiate a user’s experience of a virtual environment, and subsequently reflect a transformed Self once re-immersed in off-world society. Applying both Symbolic Interaction and Activity Theory to his study, the reader is informed that the Self is equally as swayed by context, emerges from context, and on becoming an object of Self-observation also becomes Self-aware. One taxonomical category, incidentally, suggests that the user may be a ‘gamer’ that identifies Second Life as a conventional, no-stakes game, delivering activities that are at once overt (such as vampirism) and covert (such as ‘alts’ or alterative / multiple avatars operated by the same user). The insider perspective on the formation of virtual selves through symbolic and cultural interactions informs his understanding of the primary place of participants’ own self-understandings of the characters they create and the activities their avatars undertake, in virtual worlds. While ‘An Exploratory Study of Jungian Personality Traits of Second Life Residents’ does not approach the virtual world as ‘gaming environment,’ in her ‘unique’ study, Nancy Tavares-Jones does explore the impact of a student user’s personality type on participation in Second Life activities with other virtual residents (reflection of the self in the immersive space), applying Carl Jung’s typology of personality preferences via the three dichotomous scales of 1) attitude towards the world (extraversion and introversion); 2) function: sensing and intuition (hands-on experience and theoretical possibilities, respectively); and 3) function: thinking and feeling (decision-making based on logical rules and achieving both internal and external harmony, respectively); and 4) a fourth dichotomy proposed by Briggs and Myers: judging and perceiving (coming to a close on projects and open-ended processes, respectively). Consequently, the exercises that teachers are posthumously expected to develop for their students become the narratives in a community of practice whereby the true Self determines virtual world participation, in turn determining – guiding – the teacher in customised learning activities for all personality preferences. Exploring avatar character through the Majors Personality Type Inventoryä helps explain why some students thrive, where other students struggle, to learn in virtual environments. Participation and communication styles are key in these processes. Martin Hennig’s chapter, ‘Storytelling, Rules and Society in Modern MMORPGs’, investigates MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) as ludic, narrative, and social rooms: in-world gaming is bound by both game factors, and player interaction with the gaming landscape and with other players. Invoking socially-structured (World of Warcraft) and narrative structured (The Secret World, Star Wars: The Old Republic) game worlds, Hennig posits the extent to which either user anonymity influences in-world behaviour that is divergent from the off-world norm or in-world socialisation is limited by the ludic and narrative parameters ascribed to it by its designers and developers By thus employing theories of play and narratives he traces complex story contents embedded within game structures, where boundaries between stories and their domestic and social contexts are unclear. This leads to a consideration of whether the social interactions remain defined within the ludic and narrative conventions of the virtual game. In sum, socially structured game worlds are user-defined, closed environments, grounded in references to physical realities; whereas narrative-structured game worlds are interactive, story-driven, player-progression spaces, also informed by illusion dispelling, but respectively via references to popular culture. Heidi Mau and Cheryl L. Nicholas’ work, ‘Virtual Life after ‘Game Over’: Living in Post-Narrative Play’, considers the way in which social interactions are characterised by the mood of intervening actors within the context of The Sims 2 DS. Positive social interaction – impressing, cheering up, calming down, restraining, and romancing – is significant for both guests of Strangetown Hotel and WKH local residents to avoid ‘descend[ing] into a [negative] psycho-social state.’ Additionally, paradoxes untenable in physical worlds which circumnavigate virtual worlds create spaces where we might discover and critically explore how we make sense of the world within the utopian-esque framework of the game narrative. In this way, they explore game narratives as a vehicle for experiential learning, analysing goals structure, and revealing hegemonies of labour and consumption not found in the construction activities of the first game version of the series. They find that the game structures amplify hegemonies of overlabour and over-consumption, and critique the reflection of post-industrial working malaise within games. In the second part of this volume, six chapters consider applications, issues and uses of virtual worlds in leadership and learning. Jim Gritton offers a small-scale and in-depth study of virtual worlds as a new paradigm in leadership development in his chapter, ‘It’s Leadership Development, Jim, but Not as We Know It’. In particular, he explores four key themes, autonomy, control, motivation and interaction. Focus group discussions explore issues and development activities and how the emerging themes fit to various explanatory paradigms. The chapter includes in-depth meditation on the utility of 2x2 matrices, the challenges of their development, and some limitations. Thomas Edwards problematises the widespread uptake of virtual environments within tertiary education, arguing they must not get ahead of understanding what students learn from their immersive, meta-carnate experiences in his contribution, ‘Virtual Worlds in Undergraduate Education: Just another Useful Tool, or a Doorway to a New Style of Learning’. He uses the transformative learning paradigm to explore what meaning students made of the facts, when faced with disorienting dilemmas, in a therapeutic setting. Antonio Santos uses learning theories to explore intricacies of the transfer of learning from classroom to daily life. His chapter shows how 3D immersive virtual worlds offer new ways of operationalizing this crucial transfer. He also offers an instructional methodology to foster the process, exploring the use of learning communities towards this end. Paul Jerry explores ethical issues arising within particular methodological approaches to research into virtual worlds in the field of education. These arise from anthropological dimensions of students as virtual persons taking up various roles, with a double identity as avatar and as real person. His chapter, ‘Issues in Ethics and Methods in Virtual World Research’, addresses significant questions about what researchers study, how and why. Dean A. F. Gui and Andrew Northern envision designs of self-access language learning centres, constructed and deployed through three MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) environments: World of Warcraft (subscription-based gaming world), Unity 3D (gaming engine), and Second Life (3D object-building and -scripting virtual world). In their chapter, ‘Proposing a Virtual Self-Access Language Centre Design Framework for Massively Multi-User Online Environments,’ the authors consider the relatively unchartered territory of building autonomous language-learning spaces for Hong Kong tertiary level students via MMO gaming and gaming-possible landscapes. In light of the loyal, interactive, problem-solving and goal-oriented communities of practice already canvassed throughout these spaces, the researcher-participants suggest that the various affordances of each call for differing approaches to design (for instance, the building of a Guild house SAC with an ensuing formation of a related Guild in World of Warcraft), creativity, safety, interaction, content, stimulation, and collaboration. Christina DeCoursey addresses the complexities of attitudes towards three new media, computer games, apps and multi-user virtual environments in her chapter, ‘Prior Bias and Transformative Learning in the Global Computing Middle Class: Appraising Attitudes towards Games, Apps and MUVEs’. The uptake of ubiquitous computing is uneven. Teachers with post-graduate degrees represent a leading edge of computing literacy, though they focus more on their own transformation than transferring newly acquired skills to their professional context. Their attitudes indicate that virtual environments offer the best potential for genuine engagement and transformative learning. The chapters in this volume offer sophisticated discussions and applications of methods, platforms, theorists, and affordances. They raise specific concerns, in areas such as method, ethics, social interactions and epistemological impacts, reflecting the engagement of this community of scholarship, and making this volume a situated and dynamic view of an area which is developing rapidly, and is continuing to transform teaching, learning and play. We trust that it will rapidly become well-thumbed, slightly grubby, and well-underlined, as the wider community of scholars, gamers, developers, philosophers and others put it to the purpose for which it is intended.
Table of Contents 1. Introduction -C.A. DeCoursey and Dean A.F. Gui Part I Games and Narratives Part II Leading and Learning
* Owners of respective book covers are credited. Book covers are for reference only. FH is unable to accept responsibility of any inaccurate information. |
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