Gaming Grad School: Using Social Media and Play

to Explore the Role of Technology in Community

Juli James
Applied Project for the Master of Arts in Communication Studies
May 6, 2010

“In every job that must be done there is an element of fun.”

- Mary Poppins

“A game is a particular way of looking at something, anything.”

- Clark C. Abt

“The creative mind plays with the object it loves.”

- Carl Jung
Introduction Client: MACS
Why MACS?
Purpose

• Design Purpose

• Tailor ICTs for this community

• Play with technology in community

Reality is broken.
Game designers can fix it.
James Carey on Reality
“Reality is not a given, not humanly independent of language... Rather, reality is
brought into existence, is produced, by communication--by, in short, the
construction apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms.”

Communication As Culture: Essays on Media and Society

Playing with Advocacy

• Huizinga on Play:
“Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity,
quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious,” but at the
same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly... It is processed within
its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in
an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groups which tend to
surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the
common world by disguise or other means.”

• The MACS reality and the magic circle

MACS
Community

• Communities of Practice from Wenger, White and Smith

• The Domain

• The Community

• The Practice

• Digital Habitats
Technology

• ICTs ubiquitous in reality at large

• Training advocates to go out into this reality

• Digital Media and Learning (DML) on Participatory Culture

“...a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic
engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and
some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most
experienced is passed along to novices.”
Key Skills for the Future Advocates
DML Key Skills

• Play • Collective Intelligence

• Performance • Judgement

• Simulation • Transmedia Navigation

• Appropriation • Networking

• Multitasking • Negotiation

• Distributed Cognition
Mcgonigal’s SEHIs
Urgent optimism + Weaving social fabric + Blissful opportunity + Epic meaning
= Super Empowered Hopeful Individuals

“Gamers are trained to believe they can win.”

Technology and Social
Pew Internet and American Life Project
Isolation
All of this applied to MACS = Gaming Grad School
The Advocate’s
Playground
Integrated Tutorial
Advocate Net
Let the games begin
Level 1 (aka: 1st Fall Semester)

• Down the rabbit hole

• MACS ARG
Level 2: 2nd Fall Semester

• Tri-Advocate Tournament

• Classes competing against each other

• Introduces and populates the Advocacy Wiki

• Blog Carnival
Final Level

• Comprehensive Exams

• Thesis

• Applied Project

• End Boss = Committee

EPIC
WIN: Degree
Badge
Unlocked
Limitations

• Perceptions and legitimacy

• Participation

• Limited playtesting for this iteration of the design

• Sustainability
The role of technology in community

Juli Sara Curtis

**this line could be xbl,

Facebook or Twitter
In the classroom.
Relationship not
augmented by ICTs Outside of the
classroom.
Distance between us, Relationship
physically small. augmented by ICTs.
Virtually expansive. Distance between us,
physically large.
Virtually, we are
connected. Juli
Conclusion: When we connect, we win.

• Supports a diverse community

• Fosters increased connection

• Augments how students connect with the notion of advocacy

• Reinforces building the identity of advocate

• Creates a record of the MACS culture and narrative

Game Over
Questions?
 References
• Carey, J. (1992). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. New York: Routledge.   

• de Souza e Silva, A., & Sutko, D. M. . (2008). Playing life and living play: how hybrid reality games reframe space,
play and the ordinary. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(5), 447-465.

• Hampton, Keith, & et al. (2009) Social isolation and new technology: How the Internet and mobile phones impact
American’s social networks. Pew Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved April 21, 2009, from http://
www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/18--Social-Isolation-and-New-Technology.aspx.

• Jenkins, H., & et al. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st
century. Project New Media Literacies. Retrieved November 10, 2009, from http://newmedialiteracies.org/.

• McGonigal, J. (n.d.). Gaming can make a better world | Video on TED.com. TED: Ideas worth spreading.
Retrieved March 31, 2010, from http://www.ted.com/talks/
jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

• Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2003). Rules of play: game design fundamentals. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. !

• Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2006). The game design reader : a rules of play anthology. Cambridge Mass.: MIT
Press. !

• Wenger, E., White, N., & Smith, J. D. (2009). Digital habitats: stewarding technology for communities (1st ed.).
Portland OR: CPsquare.