Complexities of gaming cultures: Adolescent gamers adapting and transforming learning

Abstract

In 2007, the authors' ethnographic research study of 11 adolescent gamers began in a response to social concern regarding adolescent (dis)engagement in school literacy practices. Since then, the authors' ongoing research has revealed the importance of understanding and knowing more about individual gamers' ways of knowing, and also about the overlapping and nested culture(s) they create and to which they belong. What is being observed is a culture working deep within the values of complexity science, allowing for the novelty and unpredictability of emergence to occur. The values of complex systems exhibited by these young people serve to disturb values of traditional linear thinking about schooling, and demonstrate the deep and sophisticated learning occurring outside of school.