Article review
This is a review of an article, well more a book that will be useful for my research. The reference for the article is
Steinkuehler, C. (2005). Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: A Critical Approach. Found at http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/thesis.html
When I first contemplated conducting an ethnographic study in an online environment for my 315 class I did some preliminary research in an attempt to figure out if this was something that I could do. This is how I stumbled onto the doctoral dissertation of an educational psychologist named Constance A Steinkuehler. While I continued my research, found other sources and refined my approach and worked to develop my own understandings it is her dissertation “Cognition and Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: A Critical Approach” that enabled me to start looking for the answers to my questions.
1) What is the central issue addressed in this work?
Steinkuehler’s dissertation is a collection of articles that are based on a two year ethnography she conducted in a game called Lineage. While there is no explicit single problem that she addresses in all of her articles there are recurrent themes in her articles that point to the issues that interest her. First and foremost as an educational psychologist Steinkuehler is interested in learning and that interest informs all of the articles in her dissertation. Whether she is making a brief overview of Massively Muliplayer Online Games (MMOGs), analyzing specific player utterances or interactions, or discussing literacy in videogames she never strays far from the themes of cognition and learning. While it would be difficult to isolate a single issue that unifies all of the articles in the dissertation it is clear that she set out to understand how people in online video games learn.
2) What makes this work important?
Steinkuehler’s work is important on several levels but most important is the way she presents video games and gaming as intellectually significant or worthy of study. Without saying that she founded the Game Studies as a discipline Steinkuehler’s work and others like it established the notion that something as innocuous as a computer game could be worthy of study. Steinkuehler’s emphasis on cognition and learning make her arguments more accessible to people who don’t play video games and in doing so she counters prevailing media discussions on the topic which tend to describe video games using tropes of deviance. In her field Steinkuehler was one of the first to look at MMOGs as valid field sites but clearly not the last and her theories about learning in MMOGs can impact the work of scholars outside of her field.
3) How does this work fit into wider scholarly literature of relevance?
Steinkuehler’s work is connected to wider scholarly literature on several levels. On a methodological level she connects her work with both the writings of Clifford Geertz about the ethnographic method and Gee’s theory of big ‘D’ discourse. As a series of articles heavily grounded in ethnographic data Steinkuehler’s work fits into literature about the ethnographic method and while she only explicitly references Geertz, the manner in which she supplements Geertzian theory with Gee’s big “D” discourse theory seems to demonstrate some awareness of anthropological meditations on the subject. Of course Steinkuehler is quick to connect her work to the relevant psychological literature about cognition as well as to the relevant literature about learning practices. Steinkuehler is also careful to mention work in other disciplines have put forth to understanding MMORPGs and in doing so writes herself into the growing discipline of Game Studies. Above and beyond the links that she makes I see connections between Steinkuehler’s work and the work of linguistic anthropologists in studying language acquisition. Reading Steinkuehler and Shieffelin at the same time I was able to see the themes of learning, cultural values and discourse in the works of both authors. The project of understanding how people
4) What original material does the author present?
Steinkuehler presents not only original ethnographic data but she combines existing theories in concert with this data to present a perspective on games that is or at least was relatively new at the time. While arguing that playing an MMOG is a discursive practice may not seem entirely original Steinkuehler works to identify how playing an Online Game constitutes participating in discourse. Instead of creating entirely new material Steinkuehler creates a new approach by combining previously existing theoretical elements and extending them into fields their authors could not have imagined.
5) What methodologies does this author use?
Steinkuehler conducted what she called a cognitive ethnography, that is to say that she uses ethnographic methodologies to collect data from her field site. Steinkuehler also conducted interviews with some of her informants in order to get their impressions on a variety of topics. She used hermeneutic methodologies to analyze some of her data and to establish a theory about learning and cognition in MMOs.
6) What are the strengths and weaknesses of this article?
Steinkuehler’s assertions about learning in MMOGs rest on a number of assertions that she does not always examine closely enough. For one she argues that game worlds are both artifact and cultures without ever elaborating what she means by culture thus presupposing its existence. This is perhaps the biggest problem with Steinkuehler’s thinking; she asserts that MMOGs function as cultures without ever really attempting to prove it. Granted I don’t think she’s wrong in her assessment of the situation, virtual game worlds can intuitively be understood as societies in their own right and it’s not a large leap from society to culture. And to be fair her liberal use of discourse theory as well as her insistence on multiple in game discourses means that she is probably defining culture in terms of heteroglossia, culture as the ensemble of discourses that every member can find themselves in yet her insistence on calling MMOGs discourse communities can be unwieldy at times. Representativity is another problem that plagues Steinkuehler’s work, but this is a problem endemic to all ethnographic work. How accurate is what Steinkuehler argues outside of the particular moment and locations where she conducted her study? This dissertation is a good overview of cognition and learning in MMOGs and its weakness is that some of its underlying assumptions need to be examined more closely.
7) How will this work affect your thesis?
Like I said before this is the dissertation that led me to Game Studies so that I would argue that this paper helped me to find the subject I am writing about. Steinkuehler’s assertion that a virtual world in an online computer game can function as a social world as interesting as any in the geographical world is one I have to make when choosing to study communities in MMOGs Interestingly it is the elements that Steinkuehler presupposes into existence that are often the ones I find most interesting , where she is interested in the acquisition of culture I am interested in the culture itself. Where she describes the cognitive processes that allow cognitive adaptability I am interested in the specific adaptations. This is not to say that my interests are that different from Steinkuehler’s, on the contrary we are both interested in understanding how small local everyday actions fit into larger discursive patterns, I’m guessing which patterns is where the differences between our interests are probably at their most evident . Steinkuehler’s understanding of MMOGs as both cultural object/designed experience and social world/ culture is one that I find useful for exploring virtual worlds. I also get my understanding of game play as situated in a multiplicity of discourses from Steinkuehler and while I have become leery of completely downplaying the digital physicality of virtual worlds I can’t deny the linguistic or at the very least literary nature of the interactions that I observe online. While incomplete her explanation of communities in MMOGs as both communities of discourse and communities of practice is a useful tool for understanding communities in online settings and if her vision of MMOGs as discourses can be somewhat monolithic I’m not prepared to completely abandon it because of that one flaw.
Steinkuehler, C. (2005). Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: A Critical Approach. Found at http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/thesis.html
When I first contemplated conducting an ethnographic study in an online environment for my 315 class I did some preliminary research in an attempt to figure out if this was something that I could do. This is how I stumbled onto the doctoral dissertation of an educational psychologist named Constance A Steinkuehler. While I continued my research, found other sources and refined my approach and worked to develop my own understandings it is her dissertation “Cognition and Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: A Critical Approach” that enabled me to start looking for the answers to my questions.
1) What is the central issue addressed in this work?
Steinkuehler’s dissertation is a collection of articles that are based on a two year ethnography she conducted in a game called Lineage. While there is no explicit single problem that she addresses in all of her articles there are recurrent themes in her articles that point to the issues that interest her. First and foremost as an educational psychologist Steinkuehler is interested in learning and that interest informs all of the articles in her dissertation. Whether she is making a brief overview of Massively Muliplayer Online Games (MMOGs), analyzing specific player utterances or interactions, or discussing literacy in videogames she never strays far from the themes of cognition and learning. While it would be difficult to isolate a single issue that unifies all of the articles in the dissertation it is clear that she set out to understand how people in online video games learn.
2) What makes this work important?
Steinkuehler’s work is important on several levels but most important is the way she presents video games and gaming as intellectually significant or worthy of study. Without saying that she founded the Game Studies as a discipline Steinkuehler’s work and others like it established the notion that something as innocuous as a computer game could be worthy of study. Steinkuehler’s emphasis on cognition and learning make her arguments more accessible to people who don’t play video games and in doing so she counters prevailing media discussions on the topic which tend to describe video games using tropes of deviance. In her field Steinkuehler was one of the first to look at MMOGs as valid field sites but clearly not the last and her theories about learning in MMOGs can impact the work of scholars outside of her field.
3) How does this work fit into wider scholarly literature of relevance?
Steinkuehler’s work is connected to wider scholarly literature on several levels. On a methodological level she connects her work with both the writings of Clifford Geertz about the ethnographic method and Gee’s theory of big ‘D’ discourse. As a series of articles heavily grounded in ethnographic data Steinkuehler’s work fits into literature about the ethnographic method and while she only explicitly references Geertz, the manner in which she supplements Geertzian theory with Gee’s big “D” discourse theory seems to demonstrate some awareness of anthropological meditations on the subject. Of course Steinkuehler is quick to connect her work to the relevant psychological literature about cognition as well as to the relevant literature about learning practices. Steinkuehler is also careful to mention work in other disciplines have put forth to understanding MMORPGs and in doing so writes herself into the growing discipline of Game Studies. Above and beyond the links that she makes I see connections between Steinkuehler’s work and the work of linguistic anthropologists in studying language acquisition. Reading Steinkuehler and Shieffelin at the same time I was able to see the themes of learning, cultural values and discourse in the works of both authors. The project of understanding how people
4) What original material does the author present?
Steinkuehler presents not only original ethnographic data but she combines existing theories in concert with this data to present a perspective on games that is or at least was relatively new at the time. While arguing that playing an MMOG is a discursive practice may not seem entirely original Steinkuehler works to identify how playing an Online Game constitutes participating in discourse. Instead of creating entirely new material Steinkuehler creates a new approach by combining previously existing theoretical elements and extending them into fields their authors could not have imagined.
5) What methodologies does this author use?
Steinkuehler conducted what she called a cognitive ethnography, that is to say that she uses ethnographic methodologies to collect data from her field site. Steinkuehler also conducted interviews with some of her informants in order to get their impressions on a variety of topics. She used hermeneutic methodologies to analyze some of her data and to establish a theory about learning and cognition in MMOs.
6) What are the strengths and weaknesses of this article?
Steinkuehler’s assertions about learning in MMOGs rest on a number of assertions that she does not always examine closely enough. For one she argues that game worlds are both artifact and cultures without ever elaborating what she means by culture thus presupposing its existence. This is perhaps the biggest problem with Steinkuehler’s thinking; she asserts that MMOGs function as cultures without ever really attempting to prove it. Granted I don’t think she’s wrong in her assessment of the situation, virtual game worlds can intuitively be understood as societies in their own right and it’s not a large leap from society to culture. And to be fair her liberal use of discourse theory as well as her insistence on multiple in game discourses means that she is probably defining culture in terms of heteroglossia, culture as the ensemble of discourses that every member can find themselves in yet her insistence on calling MMOGs discourse communities can be unwieldy at times. Representativity is another problem that plagues Steinkuehler’s work, but this is a problem endemic to all ethnographic work. How accurate is what Steinkuehler argues outside of the particular moment and locations where she conducted her study? This dissertation is a good overview of cognition and learning in MMOGs and its weakness is that some of its underlying assumptions need to be examined more closely.
7) How will this work affect your thesis?
Like I said before this is the dissertation that led me to Game Studies so that I would argue that this paper helped me to find the subject I am writing about. Steinkuehler’s assertion that a virtual world in an online computer game can function as a social world as interesting as any in the geographical world is one I have to make when choosing to study communities in MMOGs Interestingly it is the elements that Steinkuehler presupposes into existence that are often the ones I find most interesting , where she is interested in the acquisition of culture I am interested in the culture itself. Where she describes the cognitive processes that allow cognitive adaptability I am interested in the specific adaptations. This is not to say that my interests are that different from Steinkuehler’s, on the contrary we are both interested in understanding how small local everyday actions fit into larger discursive patterns, I’m guessing which patterns is where the differences between our interests are probably at their most evident . Steinkuehler’s understanding of MMOGs as both cultural object/designed experience and social world/ culture is one that I find useful for exploring virtual worlds. I also get my understanding of game play as situated in a multiplicity of discourses from Steinkuehler and while I have become leery of completely downplaying the digital physicality of virtual worlds I can’t deny the linguistic or at the very least literary nature of the interactions that I observe online. While incomplete her explanation of communities in MMOGs as both communities of discourse and communities of practice is a useful tool for understanding communities in online settings and if her vision of MMOGs as discourses can be somewhat monolithic I’m not prepared to completely abandon it because of that one flaw.