This individual papers session, ”Pro-Social”, will include the following:
Investigating a Supportive Online Gaming Community as a Means of Reducing Stereotype Threat Vulnerability Across Gender
We explore the relationship between online gaming communities (which literature shows act as informal learning environments) and experience in game culture, which has been shown to be inequitable, harassing and otherwise unsupportive to certain players, like females. Specifically, this study explores the experiences of gamers in gaming clans, both explicitly gender supportive and not, to see if they can serve as protective spaces for vulnerable players. Ultimately, the goal is to inform the design of equitable gaming environments.
Gabriela Richard, Christopher Hoadley
Tunnel Tail: Successful game developer-educator collaboration
This paper describes the development process for Tunnel Tail, a game developed in tandem by a traditional game studio and nonprofit organizations, and released in 2012. Two factors condition the game design: the educational goals and the caveat that the target audience responds negatively to any heavy handed attempts at education through games. By employing their expertise, the companies are able to come up with a solution that satisfies the educational and game design goals. This paper explains the approach taken, why it worked for the parties involved, what were the risks associated with it and when and how to adopt a similar approach.
Francisco Souki
Life Imitates Art: Embodying Focused Attention and Pro-Social Behavior in the Tenacity Project Collaboration
Educators have long been concerned with not only the development and transmission of knowledge in the classroom, but also in the social and moral development of children (Noddings, 2002). Educational researchers are beginning to explore how the use of games can facilitate these many domains of learning. To this end, the Games+Learning+Society center has joined in collaboration with the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds in a project called Tenacity. A major goal of this project was to build games to cultivate skills in 8th grade students to prepare them for high school and college success (rooted in attention training derived from contemplative practices, empathy, and compassion). The work pivots around the development of two iPad games: Tenacity, a game cultivating the self-regulation of focused attention using breath counting; and Crystals of Kaydor, an RPG designed to cultivate the development of pro-social behavior, particularly sensitivity to the non-verbal communication of others and skill at collaborative, cooperative and kind social interactions. In the latter, learning objectives such as the accurate identification of emotions from facial expressions and choosing the most productive responses to these emotions (e.g. Ekman, 2007) have been interwoven into a virtual landscape in which players most complete missions to assist the native population and eventually be able to return to her/his home planet. Creating both of these games was a wonderfully rich collaborative process of connecting the practice of breath awareness & pro-social content to data-driven iterative game design. The next phase of our collaborative work entails a rigorous examination of the neural and behavioral changes produced by playing each of these games over the course of a two-week period. This paper provides an account -- as well as emergent best-practices -- of the cross-disciplinary work done in the Tenacity project to connect the power of attention, learning, and games.
Mike Beall, V. Elizabeth Owen, Stefan Slater, Amy Smith, Enrique Solis, Constance Steinkuehler, Richard J. Davidson
Bob Coulter, Discussant
