Gender Matters: Literacy, Learning, and Gaming in One American Family

Abstract

In his book What Video Games Teach Us about Literacy James Paul Gee (2003) focuses on video games as a semiotic domain, which he defines as “any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meaning” (p. 18). By thinking about video games as a semiotic domain, Gee (2003) focuses our attention on a practice that is of increasing importance and centrality to many literacy learners’ lives, arguing that “people need to be able to learn to be literate in new semiotic domains throughout their lives. If our modern, global, high-tech, and science-driven world does anything, it certainly gives rise to new semiotic domains and transforms old ones at an ever faster rate” (p. 19). As a parent of video game-playing children as well as a writing researcher and teacher, I believe Gee (2003) is right when he argues that good video games “operate with—that is, they build into their designs and encourage—good principles of learning, principles that are better than those in many of our skill-and-drill, back-to-basics, test-them-until-they-drop schools” (p. 205) (which is not to say that all video games do this—Gee carefully points out that his claims are about good video games). Gee offers a validation for what children know and experience outside formal educational settings, evidence of the need for thinking about the relationship between nonacademic and academic lives, and a strong articulation of how media shape literacy experiences now.² But as a parent of female video gamers, I found myself thinking about the meaningful and significant ways gender is intimately tied to learning (Gilligan, 1983), literacy (Finders, 1997), and video games (see below). Gee (2003) acknowledges this connection: “Two issues have taken up the vast majority of writing about video games: violence (i.e., shooting and killing in games, depictions of violence) and gender (i.e., whether and how much girls play, whether and how video games depict women poorly).

Learning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them.

(Gee, 2003, p. 207)¹

I asked some of the girls if they play video games and why they were not participating. Every girl I asked said they did play video games at home and that they did not participate in electronics day mostly because the boys were too competitive and said things to them like, “You don’t know how to play,” “Let me do that hard part for you,” This is a boy thing,” “Only boys can play.”

(Meghan Huot)

Some guys just assume the girls don’t want to play—i experienced that last year when i was at a guy’s house with 2 guys and they played some of the old old games on the first nintendo system and didn’t even invite me to play, when those are some of my favorite games.

(Emily Huot)