Gaming Fluencies: Pathways into Participatory Culture in a Community Design Studio

Many recent efforts to promote new literacies involve the promotion of creative media production as a way to foster youth’s literate engagement with digital media. Those interested in gaming literacies view game design as a way to engage youth in reflective and critical reading of the gaming culture. In this paper, we propose the concept of “gaming fluencies” to promote game design as a context in which youth not only learn to read but also to produce digital media in creative ways. Gaming fluencies also present the added benefit of addressing equity issues of participation in the new media literacy landscape. We report on an ethnographic study that documented urban youth producing digital games in a community technology center. Our analyses focus on an archive of 643 game designs collected over a 24-month period, selecting a random sample to identify evidence of creative and technical dimensions in game designs. In addition, we highlight three case studies of game designs to identify different pathways into the participatory culture. Our goal is to illustrate how gaming fluencies allow for a wide range of designs, provide low thresholds and high ceilings for complex projects, and make room for creative expression. In our discussion, we address how gaming fluencies represent a complementary pathway for learning and participation in today’s media culture

Safeguarding Play in Virtual Worlds: Designs and Perspectives on Tween Player Participation in Community Management

Managing problematic interactions in online communities has been a challenge since the days of early text-based, multi-user environments. Research in this area has mostly focused on adults and older teens. In this article, we examine the interactions and commentaries of tween players in Whyville.net, a virtual world with (at the time of the study) more than 1.5 million registered players ages 8–16. To understand how tween players define problematic behavior and what they observe in their own community, we draw from an archive of online postings to Whyville’s newspaper. The postings cover the period from 2000 to 2009 and consist almost entirely of player-generated content. Complementing these tween writings are observations of an after school gaming club in which, over a period of three months, about 20 youth players ages 9–12 met almost daily to play for an hour on Whyville.net. We highlight one particular incident observed in the gaming club because it illustrates how club members dealt with problematic behavior experienced online. Finally, we address the challenges and opportunities that tween player participation in community management presents for managing online behavior and player safety