Relationship Gaming and Identity: Stephanie and Josh

Abstract

Composition teachers spend a lot of time reflecting on their students’ identities and the ways in which those identities are or are not expressed, stifled,encouraged, or developed in and around the composition classroom. It is unlikely, however, that many of us think much about whether our students play video games or not and even less likely that we wonder why, or how, or to what ends. Nonetheless, as James Paul Gee (2003) observes in his study of video gaming as a learning environment, the semiotic domains of video games “encourage people new to them to take on and play with new identities” (p. 51). Games require both “taking on a new identity and forming bridges from one’s old identities to the new one” (p. 51). As reflective practitioners in the mode of Hillocks (1995), striving to meet students at Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development,” composition teachers may find student gaming interests and practices useful in the construction of “environments for active learning” (pp. 54–55), spaces where students can share their experiences of gaming to develop insights that they might not reach on their own.

Video games recruit identities and encourage identity work and reflection on identities in clear and powerful ways.

(James Paul Gee, 2003)