Actually existing vitality rights: resisting neoliberal affects at a video game design camp

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the power of affective pedagogies and playful literacies to resist neoliberal framings of video game play and design in educational contexts. Design/methodology/approach Focusing on the Giga-Games Camp, a video game design camp for adolescents, the authors mobilize different methodological impulses across a number of different registers, using interview data to trace institutional arcs, focal frames from a GoPro camera to see vitality in action and descriptions of platform events to follow these lines through the shift to online instruction brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings The authors narrate three transversal movements of the Giga-Games Camp to reveal how play-centered pedagogies can challenge the neoliberal tendency to assimilate young people’s video gaming practices as a vehicle for future-proof science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning. Originality/value The authors offer the concept of actually existing vitality rights to describe how attending seriously to vitality in learning spaces will often manifest organically in very real strategies to reimagine and restructure preexisting, neoliberally sedimented uses of space, institutional configurations and constellations of sociopolitical power.

You Will Perish: A Case Study of Serendipitous Literacies and Novice Video Game Design

“…At the same time, educational scholars have countered such anxieties by reframing young people's video gaming practices as a form of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (i.e., STEM) learning, where the computational skills inherent to video game play and design are positioned as future-proof career skills (e.g., Ball et al, 2020). Concerned with the neoliberal logics guiding such rationalizations, in this study, as in earlier work (Robinson & Wright, 2023), I have understood video games in general and the GGC in particular as sites for the enactment and protection of “vitality rights” (Boldt, 2020, p. 210), or the rights of young people to be present, to be curious, to move and be moved, to engage in unproductive play and exploratory design without their activities only taking on value within an economic grid of intelligibility.…”

“…Although a full account of the GGC's history is beyond the scope of this article (see Robinson & Wright, 2023), there are a few aspects of its origins and evolution I want to address as they provide important pedagogical context relevant to Raul. The camp was created in 2007 by university faculty and graduate students in the sponsoring university's college of education, where a corporate-university partnership was developing a massively multiplayer online educational video game for children.…”

“…Rather than creating categories or delineating binaries, diagrammatic thinking reckons with middles, thereby erasing the conventional lines that separate "the natural and the social, agency and structure, things and people, experiences, and so on" (Freeman, 2017, p. 94). Working with a diagrammatical mode of thought, I enacted a transversal analysis (Charteris et al, 2017(Charteris et al, , 2020Robinson & Wright, 2023) of the curated data, a process that traversed-like the Princes of Serendip across foreign lands-across different data units and data modalities to dissolve boundaries, rethink interactions, and initiate new insights.…”

Playful literacies and pedagogical priorities: digital games in the English classroom

“…Beavis’ (1995) work on textuality and literature in the mid-1990s challenged English teachers to broaden what might constitute literature or texts worthy of study to include digital games, a challenge that has been continued by more recent scholarship on digital games in English classrooms (Nash and Brady, 2022). This body of work lays the conceptual groundwork for thinking differently about subject English literacies in ways that invite play and push back against often invisible hegemonic expectations of what constitutes learning or value in schools and in subject English (Robinson and Wright, 2023), opening up new ways of thinking about textuality and digital literacies. Problematizing the relationship between pedagogy and play is fundamental to understanding how gameplay practices relate to classroom learning, and it is this relationship that is central to our analysis of case studies throughout this paper.…”