http://gotlandgameconference.com/ For videogames to be taken as a serious medium of expression, it must demonstrate the capacity to communicate serious ideas or to operate with serious intention. This does not mean that it must be flat-footed, pedantic, or otherwise artless. Rather, it means that the medium must demonstrate itself capable of expressing and inflecting cultural understandings and values in some way. It must create great art. It must also, I argue, create great tools for thinking. In this presentation, Constance reviews research on the intellectual life of commercial entertainment videogames and highlight the ways in which the culture of play functions as a critique of schooling, highlighting the downfalls of standardization in the United States, evidenced in both the substance of what we teach and metrics we use to assess children. She detail research on the communities that games inspire and the culture they encourage against the backdrop of status quo in education, explain how and where games might serve as a vehicle for American domestic policy, and suggest key advances we might in the innovation in order to help usher in a new golden age of games. Constance Steinkuehler is an Associate Professor in Digital Media at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Co-Director of the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) lab at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, and Chair of their annual GLS Conference. She currently serves as Executive Director of the Higher Education Videogames Alliance (HEVGA), an organization of higher education leaders whose mission is to underscore the cultural, scientific, and economic importance of video game programs in colleges and universities. In 2011-2012, she served as Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) where she advised on national initiatives related to videogames. Policy work there included the coordination of cross-agency efforts to leverage games toward national priority areas (e.g. childhood obesity, early literacy, STEM education) and the creation of new partnerships to support an ecosystem for more diversified innovation in commercial and non-commercial games.

• published: 25 Jun 2015
• views: 73