Constance Steinkuehler

University of California, Irvine | UCI · Department of Informatics

Games, including video games have long been associated with both rhetorics of progress and frivolity, simultaneously recruiting efforts to employ games toward furthering cognitive skills, while also eliciting concerns about the decadence of players. Casual games, defined as games with a low barrier to entry and quick play sessions often focus on co...

Hate speech, harassment, and an increasing prevalence of right-wing extremism in online game spaces are of growing concern in the United States. Understanding trends in how and to what extent extremist groups utilize online gaming spaces is vital in taking action to protect players. To synthesize the current state of extant research and suggest fut...

Through our work studying team communication and awarenes sunder stress in elite and developing esports teams, we are building a foundation for testing the generalizability of findings between similar teams in disparate domains. Team taxonomy literature implies that findings from one domain might have implications for a team with similar characteri...

A crisis of literacy has emerged among high school students in the United States. In order to encourage students’ engagement with literacy education, there is a need for an integrated curriculum of English Language Arts (ELA). An integrated language arts curriculum would allow students to learn literacy and reading skills while engaging with a moti...

Mindfulness training has been shown to improve attention and change the underlying brain substrates in adults. Most mindfulness training programs involve a myriad of techniques, and it is difficult to attribute changes to any particular aspect of the program. Here, we created a video game, Tenacity, which models a specific mindfulness technique – f...

In the 2017-2018 school year, 38 student teams from 25 high schools across Orange County, California, competed in weekly tournament play of the multiplayer arena battle video game League of Legends, culminating in a championship playoff in one of the first region-wide high school esports leagues in the US. Our team performed a formative evaluation...

Some video games create challenging environments that presume that players will often fail as part of developing the skills and knowledge they need to progress through the game. Psychology has a rich history of studying the ways that individuals react towards failure, including mastery orientation. Mastery oriented individuals are characterized by...

Collegiate esports' rising popularity has created a host of new educational and research opportunities, ranging from understanding and modeling these communities to expanding programs beyond college into high-school learning environments.

Accompanying esports’ explosion in popularity, the amount of academic research focused on organized, competitive gaming has grown rapidly. From 2002 through March 2018, esports research has developed from nonexistent into a field of study spread across seven academic disciplines. We review work in business, sports science, cognitive science, inform...

Despite the rise of esports over the last decade, to date there is little effort to coordinate research related to the subject. This special issue attempts to address this gap by presenting a diversity of research exemplars from scholars both within and outside the United States The articles included herein were culled from the top peer-reviewed pa...

The ability to understand emotional experiences of others, empathy, is a valuable skill for effective social interactions. Various types of training increase empathy in adolescents, but their impact on brain circuits underlying empathy has not been examined. Video games provide a unique medium familiar and engaging to adolescents and can be used to...

The last 2 years have witnessed a tremendous rise in esports in the US and, with it, a growing concern about the lack of diversity and its underlying probable cause: toxicity toward women and minorities. The popularity of this new pastime among undergraduates has skyrocketed and club leagues are quickly transitioning into collegiate sports, leaving...

In many video games, failure can be an indicator that you are, in some way, progressing (Juul, 2013). This is often through challenging content which may take multiple attempts to complete. In education failure can also be seen as an underpinning of learning. In this study, we investigate the influence of failure on thinking skills in an educationa...

Background Since 1999, a “two hours a day” restriction has been recommended for screen time for children, yet American households continue to consume far more media than such recommendations allow. At the basis of such largely ignored admonitions is a dosage model of technology in which a presumed homogeneous substance called “screen time” is the i...

Lacking a digital crystal ball, we cannot predict the future of education or the precise instructional role games will have going forward. Yet we can safely say that games will play some role in the future of K-12 and higher education, and members of the games community will have to choose between being passive observers or active, progressive cont...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to inform designers and researchers about the current state of play in videogames in education and its broader context. Design/methodology/approach This synthetic piece reflects the author’s past decade of work and observation in the domain. It is not a research piece but a reflective essay. Findings Struct...

This project seeks to marry theories of situated cognition to the big data movement by connecting clickstream data from technologies in isolation to key forms of multimodal data available from their contexts of use. Using a data corpus gathered from a five-day implementation of the STEM game Virulent (targeting cellular biology), we are combining m...

There is a terrific disconnect between parenting advice related to media and the realities of contemporary parenting. We condone enrichment parenting and condemn the use of “digital babysitters,” admonishing parents who exceed the two-hour screen time limitation even when, all the while, no one is listening. Parents are not merely blasé about their...

The field of games and learning encompasses research around the design of educational games, the ways in which teachers and players use commercial games for educational purposes, and even ways in which game-like systems are being implemented to make learning more engaging. The first section of this entry outlines several foundational theories for g...

There is renewed interest in out-of-school programs for informal learning as a way to complement or supplementformal classrooms. Compelling evidence of learning in the context of virtual worlds is emerging, but few empirically detailed comparisons of programs based on such technologies exist. This article presents a cross-case analysis conducted on...

The videogames industry has been flourishing. In 2010 in America alone, total consumer spending on the games industry totaled $25.1 billion (Siwek, 2010), surpassing both the music industry ($15.0 billion) and box office movies ($10.5 billion). It is also one of the fastest growing industries in the U.S. economy. From 2005 to 2010, for example, the...

This volume is the first reader on videogames and learning of its kind. Covering game design, game culture, and games as 21st century pedagogy, it demonstrates the depth and breadth of scholarship on games and learning to date. The chapters represent some of the most influential thinkers, designers, and writers in the emerging field of games and le...

In Section I we heard from game design luminaries on themes core to both industry practice (how designers think about the titles they create) and their role in learning (which we argue for throughout this book). Games, however, are more than designed artifacts, hewn from the creative labors of a designated team of experienced and thoughtful designe...

Imagine an entire 3D world online, complete with forests, cities, and seas. Now imagine it populated with others from across the globe who gather in virtual inns and taverns gossiping about the most popular guild or comparing notes on the best hunting spots. Imagine yourself in a heated battle for the local castle, live opponents from all over coll...

Literacy skills honed from reading books and writing papers has long been recognized as invaluable to building and sustaining intellect. Educators are charged with strengthening literacy programs, and they typically rely on conventional practices and increased time focusing on text-based media to do so, yet their efforts have not significantly incr...

Modding communities are particularly ripe environments for rethinking what it means to be IT literate in the contemporary world. Mods are, as we argue, computational literacy artifacts, exemplifying not merely computer literacy but also the ability to understand and use computational models and processes to conceptualize and solve problems. In this...

Information literacy is the practices involved in finding information to fulfill an information need. Online reading comprehension outlines what skills are involved in reading online, especially those that differ from reading in print. This paper outlines the interconnectedness of information literacy and online reading comprehension both showing t...

This paper outlines a mixed methods workshop describing how the methods of quantifying qualitative codes, repertory grid analysis, matched sample comparison, triangulation, and discourse analysis can be used in various combinations to create a more detailed analysis. These methods are presented in the context of researching online games.

This paper describes the original designed lab structure for the Games+Learning+Society Casual Learning Lab, an afterschool program for teenage males who were struggling or chronically disengaged with school. In it, we detail the lab's intended design and how it proved to be entirely wrongheaded. The paper then goes on to describe in situ changes w...

Modding communities are particularly ripe environments for rethinking what it means to be IT literate in the contemporary world. Mods are, as we argue, computational literacy artifacts, exemplifying not merely computer literacy but also the ability to understand and use computational models and processes to conceptualize and solve problems. In this...

This article explores the forms of information literacy that arise in commercial entertainment games like World of Warcraft. Using examples culled from eight months of online ethnographic data, the authors detail the forms of information literacy that arise as a regular part of in-game social interaction, emphasizing (ironically) the intellectual n...

Today's youth are situated in a complex information ecology that includes video games and print texts. At the basic level, video game play itself is a form of digital literacy practice. If we widen our focus from the “individual player + technology” to the online communities that play them, we find that video games also lie at the nexus of a comple...

Educators and policymakers have shown increased interest in using after school programs to accomplish a wide variety of goals. One tactic used to leverage student interest while encouraging productive learning and engagement with both academic and nonacademic school activities has been to incorporate games and digital media into after school progra...

This poster outlines an two-year ethnography of an informal after school lab for adolescent boys using the online game World of Warcraft. The purpose of the lab was to promote academic interests and practices to participants who were generally disengaged in traditional school settings. A variety of data was collected including chatlogs, multimedia...

This poster presents a cross-case analysis conducted on two out-of-school programs based on virtual environments: Global Kid's "I Dig Science" curriculum in Teen Second Life and the GLS "casual learning lab" based on the online game World of Warcraft. Using a coding framework representing the shared instructional goals of the programs to analyze et...

Research suggests that text is an important component of videogame culture (Gee, 2003; Leander, & Lovvorn, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2007), but we have few empirical assessments of what kinds of texts are involved or youth's reading performance on them. This paper presents a series of four studies conducted to examine: What texts are a regular part of vi...

Research Goals and Theoretical Framework. (Massively) multiplayer online games (MMOs) have recently emerged as a technology with potential for science education. As simulations of complex systems, they allow participants to digitally inhabit a virtual world and engage in join activity with others. Innovative projects such as Quest Atlantis (Barab,...

This worked example is part of a larger, ongoing project exploring the forms of cognition and learning that go into everyday game play in massively multiplayer online gamesonline videogames played collaboratively in simulated fantasy worlds. The data analyzed herein consist of a single post from a discussion forum that offers a mathematical model o...

A growing amount of evidence points to a literacy crisis among teenage boys in the United States. Nationally only 65 percent of all boys graduate (Greene and Winters 2006), and of those who persist, by age 17 only one in 17 can read well enough to understand information from a specialized text such as the science section of a newspaper (Thinking K-...

The past three decades of cognitive research has well documented that play is an important context for learning for younger children, but we have a harder time accepting that it is equally important for teenagers and adults. Digital worlds for play such as those found in massively multiplayer online games (so called "virtual worlds") offer compelli...

This paper reports on an unconventional collaborative event called Real-Time Research, a project that brought twenty-five participants together from radically divergent fields for a playful and somewhat improvisational investigation of what it means to do games and learning research. Real-Time Research took the form of a two-part workshop session a...

Purpose This paper aims to reviews the structure and format of an after school incubator program that leverages online games for literacy learning, particularly for adolescent males. It also aims to describe its dual function as both quasi‐natural context and design experiment laboratory and to discuss some early findings that illustrate the kinds...

Purpose – This brief introductory paper aims to outline seven key principles for educators thinking about life in a continuously partial virtual world. Design/methodology/approach – The seven educational design principles are based on observations of both successes and failures the authors have encountered in their work as the “Games, Learning and...

Modding communities are particularly ripe environments for rethinking what it means to be IT literate in the contemporary world. Mods are, as we argue, computational literacy artifacts, exemplifying not merely computer literacy but also the ability to understand and use computational models and processes to conceptualize and solve problems. In this...

In today’s increasingly “flat” world of globalization (Friedman 2005), the need for a scientifically literate citizenry has grown more urgent. Yet, by some measures, we have done a poor job at fostering scientific habits of mind in schools. Recent research on informal games-based learning indicates that such technologies and the communities they ev...

Role-playing games provide a particularly fruitful environment for the development of critical, ethical reasoning skills, a core component in developing a citizenry capable of fully participating in a cosmopolitan, democratic society. In this study, ethnographic interview participants recount particularly engaging ethical situations in their own ga...

For those with a vested interest in online technologies for learning, the knowledge and skills that constitute successful participation in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) places these games squarely among the most promising new digital technologies to date. In this article, the author broadly outlines the qualitative results of a two and...

The claim that video games are replacing literacy activities that is bandied about in the American mainstream press is based not only on unspecified definitions of both ‘games' and ‘literacy’ but also on a surprising lack of research on what children actually do when they play video games. In this article, the author examines some of the practices...

For those with a vested interest in online technologies for learning, the knowledge and skills that constitute successful participation in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) places them squarely among the most promising new digital technologies to date. In this paper, I broadly outline the qualitative results of a two and a half year cogniti...

For those with a vested interest in online technologies for learning, the knowledge and skills that constitute successful participation in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) places them squarely among the most promising new digital technologies to date. In this paper, I broadly outline the qualitative results of a two and a half year cogniti...

Historically, media literacy efforts have been couched in terms of helping a younger generation of students learn to "see through" media messages emanating from corporate-produced media that are designed to produce hegemonic discourse. Today's emerging media environment - particularly video games - are built on a logic of participation that operate...

This article examines the form and function of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) in terms of social engagement. Combining conclusions from media effects research informed by the communication effects literature with those from ethnographic research informed by a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning, we present a shared theore...

In this essay, I discuss the ways in which, in the context of Lineage, the game that’s actually played by participants is not the game that designers originally had in mind, but rather one that is the outcome of an interactively stabilized (Pickering, 1995) “mangle of practice” of designers, players, in-game currency farmers, and broader social nor...

Why pay attention to games? For starters, games are the "medium of choice" for many Millennials, with broad participation among the 30 and under population. Although part of a web of new media, technology, and social shifts, games are the quintessential site for examining these changes. Game cultures feature participation in a collective intelligen...

This article has two primary goals: (a) to illustrate how a closer analysis of language can lead to fruitful insights into the activities that it helps constitute, and (b) to demonstrate the complexity of the practices that make up Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOGaming) through just such an analysis. The first goal is in response to the wa...

Cognitive theory, which views cognition as symbolic computation, and situativity theory, which views cognition as (inter)action in the social and material world, are two alternative theoretical perspectives on the nature of human learning. These theories are contrasted in terms of their implications for educational research and practice.

In today's increasingly "flat" world of globalization, the need for a scientifically literate citizenry has only grown more urgent; yet, by some measures, we have done a poor job at fostering the right scientific habits of mind in schools. Recent research on informal games-based learning indicates that such technologies/communities may be one viabl...

Games are a nascent topic for educational research, with an increasing numberof conferences (e.g. Games, Learning, & Society), print publications (e.g. Games & Culture), and even federal grants (e.g. Quest Atlantis, RiverWorld, Whyville) recently given to the study and design of gaming technologies in/for education. However, to date, games have bee...