Gaming Literacy: Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the 21st Century

INTRODUCTION: LITERACY AND GAMES FROM THE INSIDE-OUT

Gaming Literacy is an approach to literacy based on game design. My argument is that there is an emerging set of skills and competencies, a set of new ideas and practices that are going to be increasingly a part of what it means to be literate in the coming century. This essay’s proposal is that game design is a paradigm for understanding what these literacy needs are and how they might be addressed. I look at three game design concepts—systems, play, and design—as key components of this new literacy.

Traditional ideas about literacy have centered on reading and writing—the ability to understand, exchange, and create meaning through text, speech, and other forms of language. A younger cousin to literacy studies, media literacy, extended this thinking to diverse forms of media—from images and music to film, television, and advertising. The emphasis in media literacy as it evolved during the 1980s was an ideological critique of the hidden codes embedded in media. Media studies scholars ask questions like: Is a given instance of media racist or sexist? Who is creating it and with what agenda? What kinds of intended and unintended messages and meanings does media contain?

Literacy and even media literacy are necessary but not sufficient for one to be fully literate in our world today. There are emerging needs for new kinds of literacy that are simply not being addressed, needs that arise in part from a growing use of computer and communication networks (more about that below). Gaming literacy is one approach to addressing these new sorts of literacies that will become increasingly crucial for work, play, education, and citizenship in the coming century.

Gaming literacy reverses conventional ideas about what games are and how they function. A classical way of understanding games is the “magic circle,” a concept that originates with the Dutch historian and philosopher Johann Huizinga. The magic circle represents the idea that games take place within limits of time and space, that they are self-contained systems of meaning. A Chess king, for example, is just a little figurine on a coffee table—but when a game of Chess starts, it suddenly acquires all kinds of very specific strategic, psychological, and even narrative meanings. To consider another example, when a Soccer game or Street Fighter II match begins, your friend suddenly becomes your opponent and bitter rival—at least for the duration of the game. While many social and cultural meanings certainly do move into and out of any game (your game rivalry might ultimately change your friendship outside the game), the magic circle emphasizes meanings that are intrinsic and interior to games.

Gaming literacy turns this inward-looking focus inside-out. Rather than addressing the meanings that only arise inside the magic circle of a game, it asks how games relate to the world outside the magic circle—how game playing and game design can be seen as models for learning and action in the real world. It asks, in other words, not What does gaming look like? but instead What does the world look like from the point of view of gaming?

But it’s important to be very clear here: gaming literacy is not about just any kind of real-world impact—it is a specific form of literacy. So for the sake of specificity, here are some things that gaming literacy is not:

• Gaming literacy is not about ‘serious games’– games designed to teach you subject matter, such as eighth-grade algebra.
• Gaming literacy is not about ‘persuasive games’ that are designed with a message or social agenda to impart to the player.
• Gaming literacy is also not about training professional game designers, or even about the idea that anyone can be a game designer.

Gaming literacy is literacy—it is the ability to understand and create specific kinds of meanings. As I describe it here, gaming literacy is based on three concepts: systems, play, and design. All three are closely tied to game design, and each represents kinds of literacies that are not being addressed today through traditional education. Each concept also points to a new paradigm for what it will mean to become literate in the coming century. Together they stand for a new set of cognitive, creative, and social skills—a cluster of practices that I call gaming literacy.

I like the term ‘gaming literacy’ not only because it references the way that games and game design are closely tied to the emerging literacies I identify, but also because of the mischievous double-meaning of ‘gaming,’ which can signify exploiting or taking clever advantage of something. Gaming a system means finding hidden shortcuts and cheats, and bending and modifying rules in order to move through the system more efficiently—perhaps to misbehave, but perhaps to change that system for the better. We can game the stock market, a university course registration process, or even just a flirtatious conversation. Gaming literacy, in other words, ‘games’ literacy, bending and breaking rules, playing with our notions of what literacy has been and can be.