Some Thoughts on Deep Participation
I woke up this morning early to resift through yesterday’s posts and remain startled and amazed by the thoughtfulness of each entry in the online dialogue I am moderating as part of a seried on Games, Kids, and Learning. I am learning a tremendous amount from this discussion, both in terms of the positions from which people are choosing to express their ideas (as Justin noted, there are a range of disciplinary voices present), as well as from the content of what is being shared. I found yesterday’s posts to be particularly generative: more questions were raised than answered, and a number of frameworks introduced. I am thinking here of Lizbeth’s model of an AgencyAgency, Kallen’s discussion of bridging vs. bonding social capital, Jane’s notion of quality of life, Craig’s link between consumption and participation, Linda’s rumination on games as “mini-cultural spaces of their own making,” Justin’s call for an integration of games into all aspects of daily life. Each of these frameworks contributes to the conceptual toolkit we are collectively building around games and learning, and I am so happy to see the dialogue tackling tough issues. The question of “participation” is most certainly tied to issues of access (physical, economic, social) as well as the way in which participatory modes of gaming intersect with lives “complicated by physiological realities, human relationships and circumstances over which many may have limited control.”
I wanted to pull out one tiny thread from the giant tapestry of threads being woven here, mostly because it connects to a little and unformed idea I wanted to share. The term “deep participation” has been used several times, and in light of Lizbeth’s post on the power of “small moves” (my rephrasing here), I have been thinking about “largeness” and “smallness” as it relates to the creation of deep experiences. As a game designer, it is often easy to get caught up in the push toward making bigger games with more community features, complex mechanics, and a world that feels like a space in which anything can happen. As a teacher, it is also easy to get caught in the wave of “bigness” that drives a desire to educate—to give students as much as they can handle and then even a bit more, in the hopes that immersion in much, will result in the learning of many. Often, in discussions of power and participation, emphasis is placed, at least initially, on the complexity of an activity or the availability of multiple activities within a single space. I am making rash generalizations here, so please forgive the gloss, but the point I want to make is that when Lizbeth pointed to the power of a single small gesture made by a child with limited movement abilities, I was reminded that it is incredibly useful to remember that agency can be supported through the tiniest of interventions. We see this theory played out again and again in the failure state of games and the moments of micro learning that go on each time a player tests out a hypothesis about how something works, fails in that theory, and tries again. We also see it embedded in many of the posts made in this discussion over the past few days as people point to the specific small moments they observe where they see meaningful participation occurring.
I was thinking about this idea of “smallness” as I viewed one of the many YouTube demo video’s made around the game Line Rider. Line Rider is a simple flash game where you are given an interface with which to draw a surface for a little penguin on a sled to slide down. Once the surface is drawn, you click the play button to watch the ride. It is in essence a game where designing the level is the gameplay. There have been several recent games that use the mechanic of drawing as means of play (Draw Play, Okami) or the design of levels (Blockaction), placing something of a spin on the idea of modding. What interests me in these games, and the plethora of demo videos that document the levels, is not just the fact that players are empowered through design to literally create their own game world, but that the smallness of the game and the simplicity of the mechanic has led to the kinds of deep participation often documented in much larger and more complex games. In Line Rider, a player only has a line with which to work…the expression of that line within the context of a game turns it into any number of things: a landscape, a race course, a loop de loop, a movie set on which to film the trials and travails of a well-outfitted penguin. In noting the hundreds of demo videos made by players documenting the games they’ve designed, it is clear that the game has created a deep sense of participation from the simplest of means. Free, “casual” games like these are important, I think, because they can get into the hands of players who don’t have the economic means to support the purchase of games or subscription fees, and because they remind us that finding ways to place tools in the hands of players does not require complicated technology, nor complex gameplay. Something as small as a line can lead to a whole universe of meaning and participation for players.