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Researching Virtual Play Experiences Visual Methods in Education Research 1St Edition Chris Bailey All Chapter
Researching Virtual Play Experiences Visual Methods in Education Research 1St Edition Chris Bailey All Chapter
Researching Virtual
Play Experiences
Visual Methods in
Education Research
Chris Bailey
Digital Education and Learning
Series Editors
Michael Thomas
Liverpool John Moores University
Liverpool, UK
John Palfrey
Phillips Academy
Andover, MA, USA
Mark Warschauer
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, USA
Much has been written during the first decade of the new millennium
about the potential of digital technologies to produce a transformation of
education. Digital technologies are portrayed as tools that will enhance
learner collaboration and motivation and develop new multimodal liter-
acy skills. Accompanying this has been the move from understanding
literacy on the cognitive level to an appreciation of the sociocultural
forces shaping learner development. Responding to these claims, the
Digital Education and Learning Series explores the pedagogical potential
and realities of digital technologies in a wide range of disciplinary con-
texts across the educational spectrum both in and outside of class.
Focusing on local and global perspectives, the series responds to the shift-
ing landscape of education, the way digital technologies are being used in
different educational and cultural contexts, and examines the differences
that lie behind the generalizations of the digital age. Incorporating cut-
ting edge volumes with theoretical perspectives and case studies (single
authored and edited collections), the series provides an accessible and
valuable resource for academic researchers, teacher trainers, administra-
tors and students interested in interdisciplinary studies of education and
new and emerging technologies.
Researching Virtual
Play Experiences
Visual Methods in Education Research
Chris Bailey
Education
Sheffield Hallam University
Sheffield, UK
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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For Ava and Orla xxx
Acknowledgments
This book was made with the generous support of many people. Special
thanks go to Cathy Burnett and Guy Merchant for showing patience,
encouragement and support far beyond their contractual remit. To Jess,
who encouraged me from the start. To Mum and Dad and Janet, for sup-
port, and Alan, whose absence is always felt.
Thank you to Sheffield Hallam University for funding this work. To
those I have met there and learnt from along the way, including Steph
Hannam-Swain, Ian Guest, Lauren Doak, Jo Ray, Kiri Langmead, Rachel
Handforth, Julia Leatherland, Nick Marshall, Karen Daniels, Roberta
Taylor and the Breakfast Champions. Thanks also to the comic critique
of Sumin Zhao, the wisdom of Jozef Sen, the generosity of Jennifer
Rowsell, and the academic kindness of Anne Kellock and Jackie Marsh,
for helping me feel like this was an actual thing.
I am, finally, extremely grateful to children and staff at the school
where I conducted this study, particularly to the participants who made
this such an exciting project to take part in.
xiii
Praise for Researching Virtual Play Experiences
1 ‘Welcome to Banterbury’ 1
Index377
xvii
About the Author
xix
List of Figures
xxi
1
‘Welcome to Banterbury’
emphasised that prior experience of the game was not necessary. Initially
eleven children joined the club. After a few weeks, one child left due to
other commitments. Another member joined a few weeks after, mean-
ing that eleven children were present for the majority of the weeks.
As mentioned above, Minecraft Edu was a build of the game designed
for use in educational contexts. In most ways it was identical to the
commercial version of the game, however the ability to easily host a
local server and its compatibility with school networks were the main
reasons I chose it over the standard version of Minecraft. Minecraft Edu
also made it easier for the administrator to manipulate aspects of the
game, such as turning on and off weather or day/night cycles; enabling
or disabling the creation (‘spawning’) of animals and other non-play-
able characters (NPCs, known as ‘mobs’, short for ‘mobiles’); enabling
or disabling spells and teleporting players to different locations.
Following the established practice of the previous iterations of the club,
I used these features occasionally, largely at the request of the children.
1 ‘Welcome to Banterbury’ 9
The main alteration made during the club involved switching between
game modes, from Creative to Survival. Although the threat to players
was disabled for the full duration of the club (no player could die), to
reduce the potential for in-game conflict, the two game modes still dif-
fered in terms of the materials and movement available to the children.
Creative Mode offered unlimited resources for construction, whereas
Survival Mode required players to collect resources from the game’s land-
scape. Creative also allowed for avatars to move by flying, whereas Survival
required the player to negotiate the landscape more slowly by walking
and jumping.
Although the club began in Creative Mode, and I had originally
envisaged the full club taking place in this mode, the children negoti-
ated the change of gameplay mode on several occasions. As outlined in
the following comic strip transcript, assembled from screencast data
recorded during week two, some children argued that their in-game
behaviour would ‘be a lot more sensible’ and present a number of new
opportunities if we switched from Creative to Survival, where they had
to collect their own resources rather than being given them.
10 C. Bailey
1 ‘Welcome to Banterbury’ 11
be too reductive to suggest that there is a simple, direct line between the
‘heterogenous’ (Fletcher-Watson & Happé, 2019, p. 159) experience of
being autistic and pursuing a particular research approach, autistic peo-
ple are understood to experience the world in ways that are different to
those who are considered neurotypical. The neurological type said to be
shared by autistic individuals includes, for instance, differences in sen-
sory processing (Chown & Leatherland, 2020). Given that the world is
perceived through our senses, these sensory differences influence how
an individual interacts with and understands the world. Like many
autistic people, my brain processes sound differently (Davies, 2019)
including, for instance, an inability to isolate background noise and
both hypo- and hyper-sensitivity to particular sounds (Fletcher-Watson
& Happé, 2019). As such, my sensory processing had some influence
on my experience of the club and, therefore, goes some way to explain-
ing my choice to focus on the club’s soundscape. Of course, this alone
does not fully explain my methodological approach, as my personal
experience of the world is also bound up with wider cultural and social
perceptions what a valid research project can and should look like.
Autistic people also report differences in visual processing (e.g.
Grandin, 1996), and my own experiences around visual perception
underpin my use of multiple variations on visual representation and
investigation in this book. As this project progressed, using and manip-
ulating images in various forms became a way of thinking about and
representing the research, in a way that helped me to make meaning, in
synergy with what the psychologist’s report around my autism diagno-
sis that observes my own ‘novel and innovative way of looking at things’.
I will take up this theme again more specifically in Chap. 3 when I
address my use of drawing in more detail. I emphasise these aspects of
my identity here in order to clarify that my approach to this research
was never explicitly motivated by the need to do things ‘differently’, to
be ‘innovative’ or to see the world ‘in a different way’, rather I was
driven to do what seemed authentic to the fieldsite, within the broad
parameters of my own particular perception and understanding of
the world.
28 C. Bailey
• What is the nature of the children’s play in the club? What motivates
this play?
• What do the children draw upon in the club; what ideas and resources
fuel their play? How is Minecraft implicated in their play?
• How do the children use the on and off-screen space? What is the
nature of the group’s interactions in this space?
Given the complex and messy nature of such research I was also
interested in the following methodological question, which invoked
thinking about individual and group identities, and the ways in which
we represent the lives of children.
1.6 Contributions
Reading any text requires a commitment from the reader. As such, I
would like to outline what the reader might gain from engaging with
this book, covering four main dimensions.
Firstly, I suggest that the reader will gain insight into a particular
methodological approach, developed as part of this project in order to
1 ‘Welcome to Banterbury’ 29
explore and account for the rich complexity of the children’s on- and
off-screen experiences. I refer to this here as rhizomic ethnography. This
constitutes a flexible array of methods, underpinned by an epistemo-
logical perspective that draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rhizo-
mic ‘image of thought’ (p. 16). This emergent approach could have
affordances in other contexts as a means of tackling complexity in other
contexts. I demonstrate, for instance, how it enabled me to approach
the project’s data from multiple directions, thereby exploring the mul-
tiple and complementary ways of understanding the fluid and complex
concept of ‘lived experience’. This approach allowed for new under-
standings of the fieldsite, as exemplified in the latter two contributions,
that could potentially have been missed or written out of accounts
using other methodological approaches.
Secondly, the reader will encounter an academic text that relies on
more that the written word: what I later refer to as a ‘hybrid text’ and
an example of ‘neurodivergent writing’ (West, 2020). This results in a
text that employs multiple modes: words, images (in multiple configu-
rations, often constructed as comic strips) and audio are used at differ-
ent points, for multiple purposes. This experimentation with different
ways of conveying research serves to challenge the dominance of the
written word in academic research and could be seen as an encourage-
ment for others to do the same.
Thirdly, this book makes a contribution to the literature on virtual
world video game play. It provides distinct and rich accounts of the
club as a longitudinal case study of co-located play, in and around a
virtual world environment. These accounts help us to consider the
potential for the use of similar technologies with groups of players in
similar contexts, with a particular focus on the possibilities for creative
play and social interaction.
Finally, this book offers a theoretical exemplification of what I call
‘the emergent dimension of play’. In the case of Minecraft Club, this
emergent dimension was largely characterised by collaboration, sponta-
neity, exuberance, imagination, performance and mischievousness.
Furthermore, it involved collaboration that spanned difference spaces,
drawing upon a diverse range of resources from aspects of the children’s
lives and their experiences of wider culture.
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CHAPTER II
The full flood of the sun, now low in the heavens, poured through the
western windows upon the figure of the boy standing in the doorway.
The room was beginning to darken, and the ruddy firelight, too, fell
glowingly upon him.
The earl was instantly roused, and could scarcely persuade himself
that the boy before him was only fifteen; seventeen, or even
eighteen, would have seemed nearer the mark, so tall and well-
developed was he. Like all creatures of the highest breeding, George
looked handsomer the handsomer his dress; and although his
costume was really simple enough, he had the splendid air that
made him always appear to be in the highest fashion. His coat and
knee-breeches were of dark-blue cloth, spun, woven, and dyed at
home. His waistcoat, however, was of white brocade, and was made
of his mother’s wedding-gown, Madam Washington having indulged
her pride so far as to lay this treasured garment aside for waistcoats
for her sons, while Mistress Betty was to inherit the lace veil and the
string of pearls which had gone with the gown.
George’s shoebuckles and kneebuckles were much finer than the
earl’s, being of paste, and having been once worn by his father. His
blond hair was made into a club, and tied with a black ribbon, while
under his arm he carried a smart three-cornered hat, for the hat
made a great figure in the ceremonious bows of the period. His dog,
a beautiful creature, stood beside him.
Never in all his life had the Earl of Fairfax seen so noble a boy. The
sight of him smote the older man’s heart; it flashed through him how
easy it would be to exchange all his honors and titles for such a son.
He rose and saluted him, as Madam Washington said, in a tone that
had pride in every accent:
“My lord, this is my son, Mr. Washington.” George responded with
one of those graceful inclinations which, years after, made the
entrance of Colonel Washington at the Earl of Dunmore’s levee at
Williamsburg a lesson in grace and good-breeding. Being “Mr.
Washington” and the head of the house, it became his duty to speak
first.
“I am most happy to welcome you, my lord, to our home.”