In Delwiche’s discussion of his use of the game “Mafia” as a means of “discussing the mechanics of game design” (164), he explains that after playing the game face-to-face, “students attempted to replicate the game within the confines of Second Life. They immediately realized that the virtual world made it almost impossible to play according to the traditional rules. Hashing out design solutions in their web logs, students developed a second version of the game that was quite successful in the on-line environment” (164). Now that we’ve played the game face-to-face, how do you think the game might translate to a digital environment? What challenges do you think Delwiche’s students might have faced in doing so, and what do you think might be lost and/or gained in such a translation?
Delwiche goes on to argue, “Virtual worlds are safe. The player’s avatar may be exposed to an array of in-game dangers, but the human being is never at risk of physical harm” (166). Does our engagement with Leonard’s discussion of games as “something more than entertainment…cultural projects saturated with racialized, gendered, sexualized, and national meaning” complicate in any way our understanding of digital spaces as supposedly safe (83)?
Sticking with Leonard’s article, Leonard, writing in 2006, concludes by asking, “So, why game studies now?” (87), answering his own question by saying, “Because the refusal to engage critically such ‘kid stuff’ has dire consequences, whether with domestic policy debates—more police, more prisons, less welfare—or foreign policy decisions—more bombs, more soldiers, less diplomacy. Video games teach, inform, and control, mandating our development of tools of virtual literacy to expand pedagogies of games as part of a larger discursive turn to (and within) game studies. We need to teach about games because games are teaching so much about us . . . and ‘them’” (87). How might we engage with Leonard’s discussion of the importance of game studies and of the importance of interrogating race and gender in games? Why game studies now—in 2015?
And speaking of games, it seems that today’s readings also make specific arguments about the types of games worth exploring, whether it’s Mortensen’s discussion of WoW and MuDs as spaces that allow for “a kind of gamer creativity” (411), or whether it’s Delwiche’s argument that MMOs make use of situated, collaborative learning due to the centrality of “social interaction, cooperation, and knowledge sharing” in the ways we enjoy them (162). Are there other types of games that might allow for such things?
And finally, Delwiche argues that the implementation of “an MMO-based curriculum should be more than a gimmick…these virtual worlds are used most effectively as a bridge between overlapping communities of practice” (169). How might we work to make the use of games in the classroom non-gimmicky? What kinds of strategies have we and/or can we use to work with games in our classrooms in ways that bridge “communities of practice”?