ABSTRACT
Digital games are all about identity (Gee, 2007). Imagine a 15-year-old boy, who wants to impress his classmates, wants to chase that lovely girl next door, wants to be popular among his friends, and wants to acquire a well-paid job in the future. Where does he look for inspiration? Where can he nd examples of how to build and maintain the right “identity” as a popular, attractive, and competent person? Very likely, nowadays, he will acquire a great deal of information through playing digital games, because today’s adolescent worldwide plays games intensively (both in frequency and in duration). Therefore, although it is reasonable to expect that game play may in uence developmental processes in adolescents, it is thus far an understudied area in game research. To address this, the present paper will discuss how the underlying mechanisms of contemporary digital game play make it so entertaining for adolescents to play them intensively, and therefore, why and how digital games can be used as a tool for learning and adolescent identity development. We will bring together theories from media entertainment (especially those relating to digital game play and television) and developmental psychology (especially regarding adolescence). The purpose of this chapter is to explicate underlying processes of the use of serious digital game characters as role models for the development of an adolescent’s identity. We include serious games as well as entertainment games that may have “incidental” impact on learning and development. We assume that similar underlying mechanisms hold for both types of games; processes that enhance learning and development in an entertainment environment will do so in a serious game environment (cf. Ritterfeld & Weber, 2006). Finally, because male adolescents are heavy users of entertainment media (Roberts, Foehr, Rideout, & Brodie, 1999), and more speci cally of digital games (Gentile, Lynch, Linder, & Walsh, 2004), the following will primarily hold for adolescent males. While Turkle (1995) believes that digital game play may cause a fragmented self, we believe that game play may help to develop a exible,
yet stable, identity. Because the adolescent developmental stage is a critical period in life, in which identity construction is a most important developmental process, identity construction through playing games could be studied and exploited in a more serious way.
