One example of these new digital media is the video game, now one of the most popular forms of entertainment. In 2003, people devoted more time to playing video games (75 hours on average for the year) than viewing rented videos/DVDs (Dee, 2003). Video games are played on Sony's Playstation 2™, Microsoft's Xbox™, Nintendo's GameBoy™, or Nokia's N-Gage™ and are produced by Electronic Arts, Activision, Atari, Take-Two, THQ, and Konami Most. Electronic Arts, the largest producer, has two games, Madden NFL Football and FIFA Soccer, that each earned more than a billion dollars. The total sales for video games in 2003 was 10 billion dollars—equal to total sales for film/video/DVD’s.

And, for young adult/adolescent males, video games are now the fourth most popular media form after television, radio, and the Internet, now surpassing newspapers and magazines (Mandese, 2004). 18-34 year-old males devote 6 percent and adolescent males devote 15 percent of the time they spend with media each day to playing video games.

In a New York Times Magazine article on video games, Jonathan Dee (2003) divides video games into two basic categories: "fighters"/"shooters" and "God games." The "fighters"/"shooters" are sports/driving games that involve avoid being destroyed by avoiding dangers in real time through the use of point-and click technology. The more violent games have raised issues about their effects on player's attitudes towards and use of violence involved with simulated killing in these games. There has been considerable controversy about the impact of playing these games on adolescents' attitudes towards or actual use of violence, with some charging that playing certain games leads to more violent behavior.

Parents who want information about the content of certain games are provided with a rating on games developed by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB):

• Early Childhood. Content suitable for children ages 3 and over. Contains no violence. Child requires reading skills, fine motor skills and a high level of thinking skills.

• Everyone. Content suitable for persons ages six and older. They may contain minimal violence, some comic mischief (for example, slapstick comedy), or some crude language.

• Teens. Content suitable for persons 13 and older. Contains all the above, plus more animated or realistic violence. May have strong language and/or suggestive themes

• Mature. Content suitable for persons ages 17 and older. These products may include more intense violence or language than products in the Teen category. In addition, these titles may also include mature sexual themes.

• Adult Only. Content suitable only for adults. These products may include graphic depictions of sex and/or violence. Adults Only products are not intended to be sold or rented to persons under the age of 18.

To rate clips of video games according to each of these ratings, click on http://www.fimoculous.com/work.cfm and then click on "video game ratings" (requires RealPlayerOne plugin).

Another issue related to games is the degree to which games are gendered in ways the foster traditional masculine or feminine practices. Many early "shooter" games were assumed to appeal to male adolescents. However, more recent games, particularly simulation games, have a high appeal for females. Henry Jenkins discusses issues of gender and games in "Complete Freedom Of Movement": Video Games As Gendered Play Spaces.

David Leonard, in "Live in your world, play in ours": Race, video games, and consuming the other, discusses the often-stereotyped racial representations in video games.

The gendered and racial representations in games represents a larger interest in the ideological values represented in games. Henry Jenkins and Janet Murray discuss the ways in which the Star Trek games reflect certain values:

While television's Star Trek must appeal to multiple demographic groups to sustain its popularity, the digital market is still predominantly young, male and technically oriented; the content of the Star Trek games reflect that orientation, using technology to facilitate interactions with fictional technologies, and emphasizing combat over conversation.

The ideology of the TV programs is constantly disputed among fans, but Star Trek games necessarily takes sides. The result is a strikingly militaristic conception of the Enterprise, its mission, and its relations to alien cultures. The games also display paternalism, as aliens are most often cast as subjects requiring rescue and assistance, and misogyny, as powerful women are often cast as dangerously duplicitous. No one seems to have hardwired the Prime Directive into these simulated Trek worlds. None of these limitations are intrinsic to the technology; rather, they reflect the current state of the game marketplace and the limitations of corporate understandings of the potential Star Trek audience.

Another genre of games, the "God games," involves players in creating virtual worlds, environments, or communities in ways that best serve the inhabitants. For example, the Atari game, RollerCoaster Tycoon, involves designing amusement parks in ways that avoid accidents for people on the park rides. Another example in the Electronic Art's Sims games requiring players to participate in simulated communities.

In a University of Minnesota Digital Media Center "Tech Talk" program on computer games, Kurtis Scaletta described a popular older game, Myst, in which players can move through a vitual environment and note clues for solving certain puzzles, often by selecting to go through certain secret doors, but largely without interacting with others. In more recent games, such as Siberia, there are more interactions with other characters. Scaletta notes that participating in these games involves some problem-solving skills in which people learn to collect documents or keep maps as tools for navigating through a game.

Scaletta also noted that some of the more recent "shooter" games such as the online version of Quake involves some social skills because players are player with or against each other:

The world is open sourced and the people could create components, they can create new territory, new maps to play the game. And so a lot of young people know how to write the programs to enhance the games. And so the players became involved in changing the landscape of the game and they created new aspects of the world and they ended up forming, because the more experienced players were basically better, they would just enjoy shooting the novices. And it wouldn't be very much fun for a novice to come in and play . . . They started forming self-protective communities of "Let's keep ourselves safe from these predators." So, even though it's an incredibly violent game, it ended up being a lesson in, sort-of, conflict management, whereby working together and forming these communities, people were able to protect themselves.

He also cited the example of the Sims games such as Sims City 3000:

They've simulated everything from running railroads, running empires in the days of the Roman Caesars, building roller coasters, my favorite is a simulation golf course where you build a golf course and you can actually play golf on it against famous golfers with names like Tiger Forest. But it's not a true simulation in that when I use the term simulation, I generally think of it as something that is supposed to be realistic, like a flight simulator, you're actually going to learn how to fly a plane. There is obviously an level of fantasy to that so it's sort of a simulation-type game - It's a genre of game. The Sims is interesting because it became popular in sort of the age of the Internet and so, you can not only play these games where you develop your characters and share those characters with other people. So people upload their games that they've played and people can download them and see what you've done with your characters and the neighborhoods you've built. And now there's an online Sims where your characters can even interact in real time with the Sims characters that other people have made.

For Dee, a central issue in participating in these games is the ways in which they function as interactive storytelling that draws on traditional narrative forms, but with the simulate reality of digital video. He describes his own experience of playing one game, Max Payne:

I sit down in my living room to play (if that's even the right word anymore) Max Payne, another popular, violent title from Rockstar. It's a story-based shooter, and Max's story - set in a nighttime, comic-book-livid New York City - is a sad and vengeful one: Max was formerly a by-the-book cop, but the agony he suffered when his wife and baby were murdered by junkies has pushed him into vigilante territory. The man of law who, when the quest for justice becomes personal, steps outside the law's boundaries: anyone who's ever seen a John Wayne or a Clint Eastwood movie already knows the drill.

Max is not me; but is he a character? Do I ever feel the sort of emotional affinity for him I might feel for a grief-demented father in a movie or a book? He's more of a narrative puzzle piece, an archetype, a situation; if I walked into the middle of a movie and saw a chase scene, I could feel something simple and immediate for both hunter and prey without having any idea who they are, and that's how I feel about Max. The whole scenario strikes me (especially after he dies a few more times) as silly and ponderous and overly bloodthirsty, and yet there's something there - a curious tension between control and no-control - that seems worth feeling solely on the grounds that, over a lifetime of novels and plays and movies and songs and paintings, I've never felt it before. The form is miles ahead of the content, and as long as the gold rush is on, it'll probably stay that way. But, as in the first days of television or radio or the movies, the form is the whole thrill, and it's more than thrill enough. (p. 63)

Dee quotes Bruno Bunnell, CEO of Atari, who argues that that this experience of interactive storytelling in video games will eventually change the movie industry:

The golden age of movies is gone. That's it. It's a fact. What they do today to survive is they multiply the special effects to catch up with what the kids want, because they've seen it in the incredible universes of these video games. It used to be, 'Well, let's make a movie and then make a video game version as a licensed product.' The next step to this will be the collaboration between the stories, between the complexity of their stories and the personal expression of the video game. This product doesn't exist yet, but it will. Think about this kind of game, where you'll be in a kind of Star Wars environment, you'll have X thousand people playing together at the same time; you could just spend your day watching the screen and waiting for the stories to happen, or else you can decide to enter the game and take your own little path, all in real time. Or let's say you see a movie and your character is in the jungle, there's a snake there, you see the snake but he hasn't seen it, he's smoking a cigarette, talking to his girlfriend. You're like: 'The snake! The snake!' And the character on the screen says: 'A snake? Where?' But if you choose not to say anything, then he just goes on doing what he's doing. The movie people don't anticipate this revolution. They better watch their back. We're right there. Big time. (p. 56)

Greg Costikyan ("Where Stories End and Games Begin") disagrees with the idea that games are forms of narrative, given his assumption that narratives involve a linear experience of unfolding events.

A game is non-linear. Games must provide at least the illusion of free will to the player; players must feel that they have freedom of action within the structure of the game. The structure constrains what they can do, to be sure, but they must feel they have options; if not, they are not actively engaged. Rather, they are mere passive recipients of the experience, and they're not playing any more. They must not be constrained to a linear path of events, unchangeable in order, or they'll feel they're being railroaded through the game, that nothing they do has any impact, that they are not playing in any meaningful sense.

In other words, there's a direct, immediate conflict between the demands of story and the demands of a game. Divergence from a story's path is likely to make for a less satisfying story; restricting a player's freedom of action is likely to make for a less satisfying game. To the degree that you make a game more like a story - a controlled, pre-determined experience, with events occurring as the author wishes - you make it a less effective game. To the degree that you make a story more like a game - with alternative paths and outcomes - you make it a less effective story. It's not merely that games aren't stories, and vice versa; rather, they are, in a sense, opposites.

In considering comparisons of games and films as narrative media, Costikyan also recognizes a central principle of this course associated with comparing media - that rather than assuming that certain media are superior or inferior to other media, that one needs to recognize that media are different from each other.

On one level, it's a status thing. Game designers view movies as more legitimate, more important than games, just as screenwriters view novels are more legitimate, more important than movie scripts. But it also has to do with the fact that movies and novels are our fundamental storytelling artforms, whereas games are the artform we created based on the fundamental human activity of play. Neither is superior to the other in any meaningful sense. To think that stories are somehow more legitimate than games is like thinking that music is somehow more legitimate than poetry, or poetry more legitimate than painting. It's comparing apples to oranges. It's the merit of the individual product within the form that matters - whether the poem is good or bad, the music soaring or trite, the game well or ill designed.

Modularity and game design. Games build on one of Manovich’s (2001) principles—modularity. Modularity allows developers and users to mix and match components to achieve different goals. This has multiple consequences for software developers and users (Dubbels, 2004).

Each component works independently of the others allowing each component to be an "expert" in one specific area. Given the complexity of software today it is difficult for any single developer to produce an excellent all-purpose piece of software. It allows programmers to build on their strengths and produce a single component that functions well (a master of one) rather than something that performs in an average manner on many tasks (jack of all).

It allows for combinatorial creativity on the part of the user/developer. Given a wide variety of components, the user/developer can mix and match pieces that are relevant to their task at hand and construct a piece of software that performs a variety of tasks seamlessly.

The component architecture also allows for expansion and modification of the software with changing needs. For instance an instructional web site that just had text and images can be very easily adapted to include animations and video. Contrast this to a situation where one uses a single piece of large instructional software constructed without taking advantage of the component architecture. Adding another media to the mix would require rewriting the entire software from scratch.

Having a component architecture allows for easier trouble shooting. In a component based world, a malfunction can be caused by two things–malfunction in a single component or malfunction in the manner in which different components talk to each other. In either case, identifying and rectifying the problem is easy–something that would be extremely hard in the previous ways of developing software. One does not have to go back and attempt to parse through the entire code. The solution is usually replacing a malfunctioning module rather than revamping the entire software.

Learning different literacies associated with video games. For adolescents, acquiring proficiency in learning these literacies often serves to define their social identities as experts or active participants in a community organized around media use. For example, as active computer game players, adolescents are learning a range of practices involved in becoming proficient in playing computer games and in being recognized as a successful game player (Gee, 2002). Rather than learning "content," students learn to participate in what Gee describes as "semiotic domains." Video games are a semantic domain, which includes an affinity group of insider people who know a lot about a particular game and who interact around shared uses of and knowledge about the game. These participants are also a part of a "lifeworld" consisting of people who share a common set of discourses and social practices associated with a particular semantic domain. These game players create fan sites on which they discuss their experiences with games.

Video games are designed in ways that involve learners adopting certain identities as virtual characters in the game world who move through a series of steps or challenges in order to succeed in the game. In doing so, players are learning how to adopt different identities, learning that may then transfer to learning to adopt the role of the "scientist" or "historian" in school. Central to motivating players to successfully adopt virtual identities is whether they are willing to make an effort to succeed in ways that results in success in the game, particularly when one's real world identity is that of a fearful newcomer who is uneasy about or reluctant to play a game. Video games are therefore designed in ways that support novice players in ways that serve to minimize taking risks or failing and in ways that reward success.

Gee identities a number of design principles that support novice participants and provide a sense of success:

• Amplification of Input Principle: For a little input, learners get a lot of output.

• Achievement Principle: For learns of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learner's level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner's ongoing achievements. (p. 67)

• Practice principle: Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is not boring (i.e., in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success). They spend lots of time on task.

• Ongoing Learning Principle: The distinction between learner and master is vague, since learners, thanks to the operation of the "regime of competence"

Gee argues that through participation in games, children and adolescents also engage in critical learning of how they are manipulated by games as design spaces and how they can, in turn, manipulate the game for their own ends. They are also recognizing how these designs spaces are connected to other similar genres of design spaces and how these design spaces function to engage us.

And, he argues, that through participation in video games, children and adolescents are learning that meaning is constituted through intertextual links connected to other related texts. Having experienced the genre of the fantasy quest adventure in literature, film, and other games, they draw on their knowledge of that genre to navigate through new, unfamiliar quest games. They are also learning that, in addition to words, meaning resides in multiple modalities of images, actions, and sounds that serve to support their learning a new game. And, because many games store knowledge of a player's previous experience, players learn that they can move on in the game without having to worry about what the game already knows about them.

And, because players may be working together on-line as members of an affinity group, they are learning that knowledge is distributed different players and tools given their common, shared attempted to achieve certain goals. And, as the player acquires experience with they game, they assume the role of insider producer/teacher of others, as well as an active agent in altering the game itself.

Games are also designed to help players develop new skills and tactics that can be layered and manipulated to evolve strategies to create the player’s desired outcome. As Brock Dubbels (2004) notes:

Once a player develops a skill and uses it tactically, in many cases the game is designed to make the player change their strategy and use the skills and tactics in novel ways so that pire trial and error is not enough to win. These evolving challenges put the players in positions where, if they want to beat the game, they must develop novel approaches to old problems in matching skill sets in new combinatorial and permutative sets, thus players begin to create novel combinations and reductions from the game’s skill sets, unique tactics, and layered strategies are acquired through the experience of applying their problem solving skills to changing events and twists in the story.

Play, like trial and error and planning, is a creative process where the player co-creates meaning to navigate towards a game ending scenario based on goals, consequence, and outcome. Video game play seems to be a form of critical literacy where individuals are involved in a narrative where they investigate a problem, fantasy, or scenario without life or resource threatening outcomes.

Perhaps what might be helpful in thinking about games and classroom learning is the way games can be broken down into the separate challenges, and the player can approach them at different levels of difficulty, and in different contexts. In this way, players can acquire skills and knowledge that allow them to advance and gain skills and perhaps mastery of the game while they are playing. (p. 17).

All of these interactive learning experiences with not only video games, but also on-line chat sites and interactive websites serve to provide students with experiences that transfer to participation in other media and to schools. While games may be designed primarily for entertainment, players are engaged in a lot of incidental learning that enhance their sense of agency as active learners. They are also acquiring new literacies constituting new ways of experience media. This means that schools need to develop learning experiences that provide equally interactive modes of learning that mimic some of the learning principles inherent in games. In the long run, schools will incorporate more game-like, interactive, multimedia learning, and games will be designed to assist learning in ways that serve to support schools.

Educators also use games and simulations as "learning objects" developed with the use of that serve to supplement their instruction with engaging online activities that actively engage students with graphics-based learning.

Scott Wilson-Barnard, of the University of Minnesota Digital Media Center, cites some examples of games and simulations developed using Flash MXTM that are designed to foster learning.

One example he cites is on the PBS NOVA site: Build a Rice Paddy.

See Kurtis Scaletta's examples of games developed with Flash™ or Authorware™.

Links related to video/computer games

Google: links to video game sites

Clips/trailers of video games

Game Nation television program: reviews/discussions

Yahoo: free games

Computer Games: online games

Apple: game trailers/clips

Electronic Arts: major games producer

The Sims

SONY Playstation

Games Domain

Computer Simulation games

Game Culture: articles on cultural aspects of games

Computer Games Magazine

Game Studies: journal of research on games

Center for Computer Game Research

Digital Games Research Association

Digital Games Research Conference, 2003

Game Culture and Technology Lab

Discussion of a documentary on video games

References on games (some provided by Kurtis Scaletta)

British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (2002). Information sheet on computer games to support learning.

(2001). Computer games in education project (project profile). This and other documents are available at this site. Registration is required, but free.

(2001). What aspects of games may contribute to education? This and other documents are available at this site. Registration is required, but free.

Cassell, J., & Jenkins, H. (Eds.). (1998). From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and computer games. Boston: MIT Press.

Costikyan, G. (1994) I Have No Words & I Must Design.
http://www.costik.com/nowords.html

Crawford, C. (2003). On Game Design. New Riders: Indianapolis, In.

Crawford, C. (2003). Chris Crawford on Game Design. New York: New Riders.

Goldstein, J., & Raessens, J. (Eds.) (2003). Handbook of computer game studies. Boston: MIT Press.

Jones, K. (1997). Games and simulations made easy: practical tips to improve learning through gaming. Stirling, VA: Kogan Page.

Kafai, Y. B. (2001). The educational potential of electronic games: from games-to-teach to games-to-learn. Paper presented at Playing By The Rules, Chicago, IL.

Kent, S. (2001). The ultimate history of video games. Roseville, CA: Prima.

Mount, P. (2001). Gameplay: the elements of interaction. Master's thesis. Liverpool, John Moores University.

Prensky, M. (2000). Digital game-based learning. New York: McGraw Hill.

Poole, S. (2000). Trigger happy: Videogames and the entertainment revolution. New York: Arcade.

Rouse, R. (2001). Game design: Theory and practice. Plano, TX: Woodware.

Wolf, M. (Ed.) (2002). The Medium of the Video Game. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Wolf, M., & Perron, B. (Eds.) (2003). The video game theory reader. New York: Routledge.

Related sites: New Media Studies

Institute for New Media Studies, U of M

Center for Cyberculture Studies

New Media Studies

Journal of New Media & Culture

Center for History and the New Media, George Mason

Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning

The New Literacies Archive: Readingonline.org

Students Find their Voices through Multimedia

For further reading

Alvermann, D. (Ed.). (2002). Adolescents and literacies in a digital world. New York: Peter Lang.

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Bruce, B. C. (1997). Literacy technologies: What stance should we take?. Journal of Literacy Research, 29, 289-309.

Everett, A., & Caldwell, J. (Eds.). (2003). New media: Theories and practices of digitextuality. New York: Routledge.

Harries, D. (Ed.). (2002). The new media book. London: British Film Institute.

Herman, A., & Swiss, H. (eds). (2000). The world wide Web and contemporary cultural theory. New York: Routledge.

Hillis, K. (1999). Digital sensations: Space, identity, and embodiment in virtual reality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kolko. B. (Ed.) (2003). Virtual publics: Policy and community in the electronic age. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddins, S., Grant, I., & Kelly, K. (Eds.) (2003). New media. New York: Routlege.

Murray, J.H. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. New York: Free Press.

Reinking, D., McKenna, M.C., Labbo, L.D., & Kieffer, R.D. (Eds.). (1998). Handbook of literacy and technology: Transformations in a post-typographic world. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Shyles, L. (Ed.). (2002). Deciphering cyberspace: Making the most of digital communication technology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Tyner, K. (1998). Literacy in a digital world. Teaching and learning in the age of information. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Module 2: Word document

Five Principles of New Media Production

Acquiring Literacies through the Use of New Media

Literacies Associated with Digital Media

One Example: Video Games as a New Media

Studying and Using the Web

Using the Web as a “Media Lab”: Working with Media Using the Internet

Building Learner-Centered Environments through Technology Integration

Creating a Webquest

What is a Webquest?

What are the Different Parts of a Webquest?

The Webquest Design Process

A Sample Webquest using Filamentality

Final Task: Creating Your Own Webquest

Web-based Resources for Teaching Media Literacy

Using Tappedin.org and Nicenet.org

Tappedin.org

Nicenet.org

References