Learning :: thinking :: playing @ digital media & technology

• Authors: P. J. Rusnak
• Venue: Future Play '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Future Play on @ GDC Canada
• Year: 2009

With theoretical interests that lie at the intersection of ethics and game design, as well as gaming and cognition, I am currently investigating youth-driven design of digital game-play to address real-world issues of social justice. I respectfully welcome everyone who is interested to engage in meaningful dialogue about activist gaming and pedagogy [7]. In this session, I report findings of youth being@play with digital media and technology at 101 Technology Fun, two intensive one-week gaming and robotic research camps held in a technology-rich lab at the University of British Columbia. Child-technology interrelations are characterized according to a six-fold typology that draws from social, ethical and cognitive domains: recognition, feeling, attention, engagement, contact and attachment. My goal is to educe a sensitive attunement and thoughtful attentiveness towards understanding how youth act-in and perceive their being-in this milieu technique. I invite you to critically consider and to reflect deeply upon how today's youth are be-thinged [bedingt]: simultaneously dependent upon, inhabited by, immersed in, and indifferent to the digital media and technology in their lives [9]. If we take a step back and depart from our pre-determined views and the normative assumptions that legitimatize the already-known, might it be possible to think differently and to question the as-yet unimagined possibilities for technology to shape our children's worlds, particularly in ways that escape our scrutiny of thought?