Identity Play in Gameful Learning: Avatars as Multiplayers in a Graduate Course

Abstract

Considering how games engage players in goal-driven pursuits, educators and researchers are paying attention to the learning and design principles of games for their efforts to support meaningful learning experiences in classrooms. We argue that educators’ experience in gameful learning is important in order for them to understand the gaming context of young people. We propose that as educators engage in identity play through gameful learning, they are able to discover their own potentials and work towards a constructionist ethos of creating both artifacts and selves. In this paper, we discuss how we designed a graduate course on digital game-based learning to engage participants who are educators in its concepts and practices. The design of the course was a progressive development for three years, which included gaining experience points (XP) mediated by a social media technology, Google+. The design was modified with subsequent iterations to implement the use of avatars and self-assessment of XP. The social media worked as a possibility space for the participants to explore, embody and implement new identities especially from the second iteration, which introduced the avatars. In this paper, we discuss the identity play across three iterations from three different perspectives: as a course facilitator, a student and researchers. Our findings, which are primarily based on learner-generated content on Google+, demonstrate the participants’ emergent play with identities in their effort towards being gameful.