What Videogame Making Can Teach Us About Access and Ethics in Participatory Culture

Kafai Yasmin B., Burke William Q., Fields Deborah A.
September
2009
Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
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In “Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory
Culture”, Jenkins and colleagues (2006) outlined three
challenges in their participatory competencies framework
that need to be addressed to prepare youth for full
involvement in a digital culture – participation,
transparency, and ethics. Expanding upon the framework
of our earlier work, in this paper we examine more
closely two aspects of Jenkins and colleagues’ challenges
– the participation gap and the ethics challenge – as they
apply to game-making activities in schools. We report on
a four-month ethnographic study documenting youth’s
production of video games in both an after school club
and classroom setting. The growing use of videogamemaking
for learning in schools offers youth the
opportunity to no longer simply be consumers but also
producers of technology. But as kids learned to contribute
as such producers, both participatory and ethical issues
arose in the ways they were willing or reluctant to share
their own ideas and projects with their peers. Schools’
long-standing focus on individual achievement and
traditional notions of plagiarism drew these issues of
participation and ethics to the foreground, making them
especially relevant considerations given on-going efforts
to bring more game playing and making activities into
schools.