Volume 11 (2019): Issue 1 (January 2019)

This is the Editorial Introduction to the special collection of articles on Open Literacy: Games, Social Responsibility and Social Innovation, which will be published across volumes 11 and 12 of the Journal. The Editorial includes information on the research symposium where these papers were first presented, and biographical details for the contributors.

This article offers evidence from a literature review that mediatization research has yet to engage with the internet of things (IoT). This is a major lack, given the widely recognized importance of IoT phenomena, and may be attributable to mediatization’s limited direct interest in media technology. Through an extended examination of media in cars, the article demonstrates the fertility of a mediatization approach toward what is argued to be a prototype example of the emerging IoT. The article concludes by suggesting future directions for empirical studies.

The theory of Darwinian cultural evolution is gaining currency in many parts of the socio-cultural sciences, but it remains contentious. Critics claim that the theory is either fundamentally mistaken or boils down to a fancy re-description of things we knew all along. We will argue that cultural Darwinism can indeed resolve long-standing socio-cultural puzzles; this is demonstrated through a cultural Darwinian analysis of the European witch persecutions. Two central and unresolved questions concerning witch-hunts will be addressed. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a remarkable and highly specific concept of witchcraft was taking shape in Europe. The first question is: who constructed it? With hindsight, we can see that the concept contains many elements that appear to be intelligently designed to ensure the continuation of witch persecutions, such as the witches’ sabbat, the diabolical pact, nightly flight, and torture as a means of interrogation. The second question is: why did beliefs in witchcraft and witch-hunts persist and disseminate, despite the fact that, as many historians have concluded, no one appears to have substantially benefited from them? Historians have convincingly argued that witch-hunts were not inspired by some hidden agenda; persecutors genuinely believed in the threat of witchcraft to their communities. We propose that the apparent ‘design’ exhibited by concepts of witchcraft resulted from a Darwinian process of evolution, in which cultural variants that accidentally enhanced the reproduction of the witch-hunts were selected and accumulated. We argue that witch persecutions form a prime example of a ‘viral’ socio-cultural phenomenon that reproduces ‘selfishly’, even harming the interests of its human hosts.

In 2018 a teacher in a Montessori school captured on camera two children in her special education classroom using a touchscreen tablet to interact. To her it was significant: these pre-verbal children had found a way to independently share aspects of their lives. In 1965 a Nigerian mother commented that volunteering on a care rota in a playgroup in a housing estate in west London gave her the confidence to greet her neighbours when she saw them on the street. To Ilys Booker, the community development worker assigned to the area, this was also a marker of significant change and an indication of success. Using these two instances as starting points, this article explores the links between play/space/city and literacy/civic/citizenship by drawing together two case studies: Notting Dale, London, 1964–1969 and River Montessori School, Australia, 2018. In both case studies, the institutional concern is over how the target groups are educated to become literate as citizens, with a focus on exhibited values and virtues. Working from a historical perspective this paper asks: what are the historical conditions which determine our current understandings of participatory culture? How do these enable and/or limit the possibilities of Open Literacy? How do communities form in a liberal democracy and what roles do institutions play?

This article argues that multiple endings and narrative memory within interactive narratives can engender ethical self-reflection in relationship with broader discourses surrounding controversial issues. It introduces the term ‘expressed self’ to describe this process. The expressed self is how an interactive text ‘sees’ the player – through either their alignment, faction favour, flags, etc – and is used to generate a personalised response to the player through their unlocked ending. This concept is then applied to a close analysis of Papers, Please by juxtaposing the ‘Antegrian Husband and Wife’ choice with the ‘Snowier Pastures’ ending. The manner in which this process takes place has implications for the ways in which videogames and interactive narratives engage with open literacy.

This paper provides a micro-perspective on the business activity of VR content production in China’s digital creative industries. It is based on two case studies in the form of semi-structured interviews with the founders of Pinta studios and Sandman studios. Questions concerning the development of sustainable VR content production in China are raised. This article employs the framework of business model canvas (BMC) to describe and analyse business models by exploring the dynamics and initiatives of VR content enterprises from 2016 to 2019. Research with Chinese VR content enterprises provides an opportunity to rethink many of the opportunities and challenges confronting Chinese VR content creators as they seek to implement this disruptive technology to engage consumers and adapt to the huge market in the future. Based on fieldwork research for these two case studies, exploring the dynamics and initiatives in the process of VR content production in China, the article finds that the need for specific and sustainable business models for VR enterprises represents a significant challenge. The paper concludes with some comments on the acquisition of ‘open literacy’, this time at enterprise level.

How do parents and carers approach the task of bringing up their children in the digital age? What is their vision of their children’s future and that of the wider society? Most importantly, how are parental expectations, and expectations of parents, designed into learning opportunities for children, if at all? In this article, our focus is on how children gain media literacy in a range of non-formal sites including after school clubs, digital media learning courses, makerspaces and, of course, the home.

When the Archive of Our Own (AO3) received a prestigious Hugo Award from the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin the summer of 2019, this moment represented a recognition by the literary science fiction community of an alternative model of authorship – one which operates outside the publishing world or academia, one where authorship is collective rather than individual, and one where artworks are appropriative and transformative rather than “original.” Using this occasion as my starting point, I will discuss here the ways that the literacies associated with fandom may be understood as illustrative of the new forms of expression that have taken shape in a networked era.

Social media and videogames are often blamed for individual behavioural delinquency, but rarely praised for cultural creativity, social innovation, or helping us to form new social groups or work through new ideas. Videogames are now a political football, both in the US (where they’re blamed for gun crime) and in China (where they’re blamed for childhood myopia). Every new media form has grown up surrounded by those wanting to control it.

Popular literacy has never been free and open. Popular novels and the press; cinema and TV; and more recently digital and social media, have all attracted the wrath of incumbent commercial, government or social interests. But in the era of open access, open science, open knowledge, what about open literacy? Can it be extended to whole populations, across demographic borders, at global scale, for purposeless but nevertheless pedagogic play, and for social innovation? Or will it, like predecessor forms, be dismissed as a delinquent waste of time or commodified instrument for profit, power and mass persuasion?

Everybody seems to have an opinion about the value, risks and opportunities of children playing digital games. Popular media conveys messages to parents and the public alike of addicted, violent, desensitised, and anti-social children and of the privacy risk of back end data collection. Educationalists waver between seeing digital games as hindering more positive educational, social and physical activity, or as being a new way to engage students and improve learning outcomes. Parents are in fear of the ‘dangers’ of gaming and screen time yet enticed by the educational promise and the entertainment value of keeping their children occupied. Game developers see opportunities for data collection, surveillance and for nudging children’s behaviour and purchases. Many of these fears, hopes, and hype are replaying older tropes that circulate around any new technology, media forms and associated changes in practices, but are amplified further by having children as their central focus. Indeed, all of these stakeholders in children’s futures have particular understandings of what is good for children and what an ideal child should be. Yet children are not docile bodies who simply have things happen to them: they subvert, appropriate and innovate. This paper is a call for an exploration of what and how children’s digital gaming looks like from a child’s perspective and for a reframing of understanding children’s digital play as a result.

Video games are an expanding area of popular culture spanning traditional age, gender and socioeconomic divides and appealing to a diverse market. People with disability represent a significant but under researched gaming demographic (Beeston et al., 2018). While this group represent a large portion of the gaming population, inaccessible interfaces and consoles may prevent people with disability from playing games. Despite this, research dating back to 2008 suggests 92% of gamers with disability continue to play games despite these obstacles. This paper aims to put the topic of gamers with disabilities on the agenda for Open Literacies.

The paper brings into dialogue research and conceptions of disability and digital media (especially the work of Gerard Goggin, Meryl Alper, Katie Ellis and Elizabeth Ellcessor) with accounts of gamers with disability, and how we might understand digital access as a cultural practice (for instance, the work of Foley & Ferri). This theoretical synthesis leads us to draw attention to the alternative ways in which games can be played and the impacts this has for the disability community.

A secondary aim of the paper is to consider the contexts in which disability appears in gaming in popular culture and everyday life. For example, therapeutic and educational contexts dominate while recreation is considered less important. The paper concludes with reflections about the ways disabled gamers engage in open literacy to bring accessibility to the forefront and change the rules of the game.

Reading and Writing in any domain, whether it is law, rap songs, academic essays, superhero comics, or whatever, are not just ways of decoding print, they are also caught up with ways of doing things, thinking about things, valuing things, and interacting with other people – that is, they are caught up with different sorts of social practices. (Gee 2007, p. 18)

Reading and Writing, for James Gee, is how we engage with any knowledge community; what he calls a semiotic domain (2007). Our level of literacy in a given domain amounts to how well we can read (understand) and write (convey) the knowledge that the domain values. Education is all about teaching the student how to read and write. However, we read and write with much more than just pens and paper. Our literacy covers how we engage and interact within our domain of knowledge.

In the following paper I will explore these ideas of reading and writing within the domain of Minecraft. I will use the educational theory of John Dewey to show how the community of Minecraft creates its own knowledge community, and how its members learn to read and write.