ABSTRACT
Debates about the educational value of computer games have tended to focus on how education can benefit from their informational and skill-based content or their embedded pedagogy. This debate often relies on a restricted conception of play, which emphasises its benevolent and self-motivating character at the expense of its role in hierarchical peer relations, power negotiations and institutionalised rituals. In this chapter, I examine certain conceptions of play in education and then go on to study the social functions of game play in peer and power relations in an after-school club run by researchers in London between 2004 and 2006. The aim of the club was to enable 12–14-year-olds draw on their experience of game play to create their own computer games. The rationale for this endeavour emerged from a media education tradition (Buckingham, 2003; Burn & Durran, 2007; Hobbs, 1998). This emphasises the importance of extending conceptions of literacy to multimedia texts, and developing communicative abilities in a variety of modes and genres (see Carrington, this volume). My focus is on how conceptions and enactments of what ‘play’ entails emerged from experiences of game play in the club, including social relations between club members. A second point of focus will be on the approach taken by researchers to teach about game design. These two points of interest are linked in that I will trace students’ conceptions and enactments of play over a number of weeks to comment on the potential usefulness of the approach taken in the club to develop a more complex understanding of games and game play.
