Play the game, live the story: pushing narrative boundaries with young adult videogames

Abstract

Purpose Videogames are complex, meaningful and multimodal texts. This study aims to explore how students could learn about narratives from, and be engaged by, playing a videogame and how a teacher adapted their pedagogy to incorporate the young adult videogame (YA game) What Remains of Edith Finch into an English Language Arts curriculum. Design/methodology/approach This case study examined the experiences of a classroom teacher and students in a Year 10 English class in Australia. Thematic analysis included a wide range of data, including interviews, surveys, observations and artefacts. Findings First, students demonstrated a strong understanding of the game as a narrative text, including essential components of narrative such as plot, characterisation, themes, settings and literary techniques. Second, students experienced a consistently high level of engagement and embodiment throughout the study as a consequence of the interactive, collaborative and multimodal nature of YA games. Third, the teacher discovered that he was able to achieve key curriculum outcomes with the videogame through re-imagining pedagogy. Originality/value A playful approach allows teachers and students to be curious about the diverse narrative pathways possible within YA games and offers new opportunities to experience embodiment within and through digital texts.

Playful pluralities: exploring play and playful literacies across ages, spaces and places

“…Brownell (2018) describes, for instance, how children use popular culture storiessuch as Disney films and cartoons like Adventure Timeas mentor texts to produce creative "play (giarisms)" that meet the requirements of their in-class writing assignments. Theodoulou (2022) details the benefits of considering students' "ruling passions" (Barton and Hamilton, 1998) while building curricula, describing how the incorporation of texts like commercial videogames can bring diverse perspectives and connections to the fore, while simultaneously addressing the technocentric learning benchmarks in educational mandates. Similarly, integrating analog games (e.g.…”

“…Kim and Johnson (2021), for instance, note the ways in which youth's play is a social process wherein shared popular culture interests are recontextualized to represent intended meanings. Similarly, Theodoulou's (2022) work around gameplay in classroom spaces demonstrates how youth, when given the opportunity, will naturally pull from pre-existing cultural knowledges to make sense of playful worlds, infusing practice with identity along the way (Flint and Adams, 2018). Guss (2005) centers this process in research exploring children's "dramatic play episodes" (p. 233), describing how play becomes imbued with self through the repurposing of intertextual interests to forge new meanings.…”

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

“…The notion that subject English should be a site where students can engage with and explore the everyday textual and cultural practices of their lives is not new. From the advocacy of personal growth perspectives (Goodwyn, 2016) to the philosophy of those challenging narrow definitions of culture (Baker-Bell, 2020) and efforts to use third spaces principles as a means to reconceptualize classrooms and their potentialities (Guti errez, 2008), it is now common for story-telling to be present in classrooms in myriad forms beyond the novel and often, to be mediated through digital technology and for this activity to be the focus of school-based learning (Mills, 2010;Theodoulou and Curwood, 2023). Digital games represent the most ubiquitous of these digital forms.…”