Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Teachers College Educational ...

Videogames in Institutional Practice: Towards A Taxonomic Model of
Negotiated Control Between Code and Context
Laquana Cooke,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8 th Street Troy, NY 12180,
Email: Cookel3@rpi.edu
Abstract: Today, more than ever, schools and other educational facilities are celebrating
the possibilities of learning through game play. Unfortunately, video games are often
over zealously regarded as prescriptive didactic means of resolving the epidemic of
disengaged youth, without in-depth critical reflections of the phenomena of in-context
gaming. Commercial off-the-shelf games like The Little Big Planet offer tremendous
affordances for immersive play by embedding STEM literacy within its rich situated
learning environments. In a similar light, teachers and researchers adopt simulated
historical games such as Civilization to engage youth in subject matter that is often
deemed as “boring” and “irrelevant”. This paper does not seek to explore the efficacy of
such gaming, but rather look to critically examine the ramifications of content-specific
gaming in classrooms. The rhetorical potential of video games in practice calls for
theories that investigate the structural code of the video game vis-à-vis the conventions
of the contexts that they are practiced. Reexamining preexistent literature and
ethnographic work, this paper will critically evaluate this liminal space of negotiated
control between algorithm and institution, and ultimately provide a potential taxonomic
model for future research.
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