Cyber-ludic pedagogies: towards a post-critical methodology of

Acta Scientiarum

http://periodicos.uem.br/ojs

ISSN on-line: 2178-5201

Doi: 10.4025/actascieduc.v45i1.65840

TEACHERS' FORMATION AND PUBLIC POLICY

Acta Scientiarum. Education, v. 45, e65840, 2023

Cyber-ludic pedagogies: towards a post-critical methodology

of video games as cultural sites

Dora Kourkoulou

and Rhiannon Bettivia

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 601 E John St, 61820, Champaign, Illinois, United States of America.

Simmons University, Boston,

Massachusetts, United States of America. *Author for correspondence. E-mail: tkourkou@illinois.edu

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we explore contradictions in the uneven movements of engaging video games

in learning, and the affective deployment of play as a strategic mechanism to guarantee institutional and

civic compliance. To that purpose, we are tracing the links between positivist, evaluative paradigms in

Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) scholarship, arguing that a linear assessment of knowledge

transmission does not adequately engage the complexity of virtual worlds and the learning processes they

mobilize. As a response, we propose a cyber-ludic pedagogical framework that embeds gamers’ knowledge-

production practices and performances in the wider social context they occupy, acknowledging their

hybridity as digital and physical experiences. We apply this framework to a case-study reading of a vlog

entry performed as a humorous guide to social distancing at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our

reading recognizes the operationalization of knowledge communication modes as tropes while

emphasizing discrete projects of brand awareness, identity formation, and claims to digital space. Our

analysis of the vlog performance of what we term ‘technodeviance’ serves to de-exoticize the deviant in

educational research; problematize the assumption of one-way knowledge transmission and

representation; and center the pedagogical value of game and play data that is found in popular culture

texts and in user-generated content.

Keywords: cyber-ludic pedagogies; post-critical methodologies; video games; digital game-based learning.

Pedagogias Ciberlúdicas: em direção a uma metodologia pós-crítica de videogames

como locais culturais

RESUMO. Neste artigo, exploramos as contradições nos movimentos desiguais de engajamento dos

videogames no aprendizado e o emprego afetivo do jogo como um mecanismo estratégico para garantir a

conformidade institucional e cívica. Para esse fim, estamos rastreando as conexões entre paradigmas

positivistas e avaliativos na pesquisa de Aprendizado Baseado em Jogos Digitais (ABJD), com o argumento

de que uma avaliação linear da transmissão de conhecimento não envolve adequadamente a complexidade

dos mundos virtuais e os processos de aprendizado que mobilizam. Como resposta, propomos uma estrutura

pedagógica ciberlúdica que incorpora as práticas de produção e desempenho de conhecimento dos

jogadores no contexto social mais amplo em que estão inseridos, reconhecendo sua hibridização como

experiências digitais e físicas. Aplicamos esta estrutura a uma leitura de estudo de caso de uma entrada de

vlog realizada como um guia humorístico para o distanciamento social no início da pandemia de COVID-

19. Nossa leitura reconhece a operacionalização dos modos de comunicação de conhecimento como tropos,

ao mesmo tempo em que enfatiza projetos discretos de conscientização de marca, formação de identidade

e reivindicações ao espaço digital. Nossa análise do desempenho do vlog do que chamamos de

‘tecnodeviança’ serve para desexoticizar o desviante na pesquisa educacional; problematizar a suposição

de transmissão e representação unidirecional de conhecimento; e centrar o valor pedagógico de dados de

jogos e jogadas que são encontrados em textos da cultura popular e em conteúdo gerado pelo usuário.

Palavras-chave: pedagogias ciber-lúdicas; metodologias pós-críticas; videogames; aprendizagem baseada em jogos digitais.

Pedagogías ciberlúdicas: hacia una metodología poscrítica de los videojuegos como

sitios culturales

RESUMEN. En este artículo, exploramos las contradicciones en los movimientos desiguales de involucrar

los videojuegos en el aprendizaje y el despliegue afectivo del juego como mecanismo estratégico para

garantizar el cumplimiento institucional y cívico. Con ese propósito, estamos rastreando los vínculos entre

Page 2 of 14 Kourkoulou and Bettivia

Acta Scientiarum. Education, v. 45, e65840, 2023

los paradigmas evaluativos positivistas en el programa de Aprendizaje Basado en Juegos Digitales (DGBL),

argumentando que una evaluación lineal de la transmisión del conocimiento no aborda adecuadamente la

complejidad de los mundos virtuales y los procesos de aprendizaje que movilizan. Como respuesta,

proponemos un marco pedagógico ciberlúdico que incorpore las prácticas y actuaciones de producción de

conocimiento de los jugadores en el contexto social más amplio que ocupan, reconociendo su hibridez como

experiencias digitales y físicas. Aplicamos este marco a una lectura de estudio de caso de una entrada de

vlog realizada como una guía humorística sobre el distanciamiento social al comienzo de la pandemia de

COVID-19. Nuestra lectura reconoce la operacionalización de los modos de comunicación del conocimiento

como tropos mientras enfatiza proyectos discretos de conciencia de marca, formación de identidad y reclamación

del espacio digital. Nuestro análisis del desempeño del vlog en lo que llamamos 'tecnodesviación' sirve para des-

exotizar la desviación en la investigación educativa; problematizar el supuesto de transmisión y representación

del conocimiento unidireccional; y centrar el valor pedagógico de los datos de juego que se encuentran en los

textos de cultura popular y en el contenido generado por los usuarios.

Palabras-clave: pedagogías ciber-lúdicas; metodologías pos-críticas; videojuegos; aprendizaje digital basado en juegos.

Received on November 14, 2022.

Accepted on March 21, 2023.

Introduction

In mid-March 2020, with the United States following Asia and Europe in lockdown measures due to the

COVID-19 pandemic, Asmongold, a gamer, YouTuber, and Twitch streamer, released a video on his personal

YouTube account. While both accounts are public, he maintains another one specifically used for streaming.

The video was titled ‘Advanced Social Distancing Survival Guide from a 10+ year NEET.’ The video is

evocative of sitting in front of an imaginary cave-fire: in the video frame, the attic’s ceiling looms right above

the performer’s head. He looks pale in the video, as he always does in his video posts, a semi-long beard on

his face. His hair appears unwashed and unkempt (later, he claims that he has not showered in days), and he

is snuggly wrapped by what seems like a child’s blanket. In the background, right beneath his streaming logo,

which resembles a fantasy-inspired war emblem, one can see a pile of teddy bears.

The video begins with Asmongold declaring, after a smirk and in his usual tone of stoic irony and childlike

energy “well, well, well… how the tables have turned” (ZackRawr, 2020b). He is alluding to the social

distancing guidelines that turned his self-proclaimed ‘marginal lifestyle’ into an apparent social norm. He

then proceeds to offer his list of directives for successful social distancing. Chief among his advice is,

unsurprisingly, the usage of gaming, particularly to play an immersive video game to occupy the majority of

the NEET’s time. Immersive play serves to exclude the possibility of physical closeness, reaffirming the

complicated boundaries between the Internet and socialization (ZackRawr, 2020b).

Asmongold’s video has left unspoken another kind of connection that is changing our educational,

professional, and social landscape: the one between online socialization and entertainment on the one hand

and work/school on the other. Early and foundational research on the educational potential of video games

worlds, in the field of Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL), advocates for the capacity of games to promote

self-driven and peer-based learning more than top-down teaching (Shaffer, 2007; Steinkuehler & Oh, 2012;

Squire, 2012; Gee, 2013; Chee, 2016). At the same time, research from media and communication studies

points to the participatory character of fandom or gamer cultures and the agency of users, especially in

transmedial spaces (Jenkins, 2012). Yet, Asmongold’s popularity depends upon a commonly held belief among

gaming cultures that he is a representative of gamers’ attachment to anti-social ways of life.

This gap between gaming communities’ self-reflection, and self-identification, as ‘anti-social’ stands in

contrast to the overwhelmingly positive scholastic rhetoric about the educational potential of games.

Additionally, as in many other instances, the events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic served as a

crystallization for such attitudes by shining a spotlight on both social distancing and e-learning platforms

and pedagogies. In early spring of 2020, the world was bracing for a possible Zoom crash when colleges and

universities in the United States returned from extended spring breaks, reconvening in an unprecedented

number of online spaces as in-person learning environments shuttered in response to public health closures.

Social media influencers joked about the possibility of holding classes in game worlds, such as World of

Warcraft, which had already passed the ‘crash test,’or demonstrated their ability to operate at the scale of

millions of simultaneous users. While faculty learned to use a combination of commercial and homegrown

learning platforms like Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas, students were petitioning to use Discord (gaming

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software) servers or YouTube videos instead of Zoom to hold their classes. Even as some instructors joked

about a return to ham radio and educational institutions outside the US experimented with asynchronous

content delivery via television, it seemed as if the time for this generation had come. And yet, though the

majority of today’s students are considered ‘natives’ of virtual worlds in gaming and social media, there was

enough discomfort with the shift to online instruction to warrant a significant drop in enrollment for online-

only instruction and a general disillusionment in the two years that followed over online learning. This

observation indicates that the cultural character of game worlds does not lend itself seamlessly to educational

purposes, even as these models persevere beyond the pandemic crisis (Bettivia & Davis, 2023).

The purpose of this paper is to acknowledge the contradictions existing in the movements of digital video

games in and out of school curricula and classrooms, and to propose a post-critical methodological approach

in order to explore the depth and content of their pedagogical potential and message. Set within a broader

framework of social studies-based research beginning in the 1970s, post-critical methodologies, a response

and continuation of critical ethnographic research, questions the existence of unified knowledge frameworks

and theories by homing in on the mismatches between representations and particular meanings,

foregrounding subsequent aporias (Noblit, 2003). Rather than being a mere methodological choice, however,

post-critical methodologies are grounded in political projects which seek to give rise to alternative ways of

knowledge and instruction, while questioning the very structures of the educational systems in which they

operate, including the time, spatial and bodily boundaries of educational praxis. In this article, post-critical

methodologies both inform and are informed by game and technology studies, and their theoretical premises.

This work is divided into three sections. The first section, a brief history and overview of DGBL,

foregrounds two arguments: firstly, that the economic and technological conditions of game development

and market deployment took place in an intimate relationship with educational institutions, allowing for our

contemporary understanding of commercial video games as legitimate sites for knowledge production and

learning. The second argument points to the multi-layered methodological insistence of DGBL on utilizing

evaluative paradigms of learning outcomes, even when this preference is not stated. This section foregrounds

the need for alternative methodologies that challenge unified representations and can accommodate the

complexity of contradictions of gaming cultures and platforms.

The second section presents the proposal for the ‘cyber-ludic conceptual framework’. Cyber-ludic

pedagogies frame gamers’ knowledge-production practices and performances in the wider social context they

occupy, acknowledging their hybridity as digital and physical experiences. This section offers definitions of

post-critical methodologies and their current status in educational research before moving towards exploring

their potential application in the study of games and unveiling their role in learning and education. One of

the characteristics of post-critical methodologies is the commitment to groups of resistance and deviance to

foreground marginalized voices while resisting the temptations of techno-romanticization. This

commitment, we argue, has special significance for DGBL, because it calls into question the affective

deployment of play as a strategic mechanism to guarantee institutional and civic compliance. Contemporary

interpretations of gaming cultures tend to gravitate between the idealization of the liminal qualities of play,

its definitional capacity to push institutional and social boundaries and bring forth change, and the more

aggressive or antisocial manifestations, such as #gamergate. Cyber-ludic pedagogies call for tracing the ways

that each of these poles lurks inside the other, suggesting the need for more complex pedagogical work in

gaming communities and media.

The final section applies the cyber-ludic framework to a case-study reading of the humorous vlog entry

described in the opening vignette, Asmongold’s ‘Advanced Social Distancing Survival Guide from a 10+ year

NEET’. Offering a methodology that expands the nature of data from participant observation to the cultural

artifacts and media texts within gaming culture, the case-study questions the documented knowledge

production of gaming communities. Rather, we suggest that knowledge production is often used as a

communicative trope, which nevertheless allows its user to simultaneously construct their critique of

traditional school structures while positioning themselves in relation to them. Finally, we argue that the

deployment of such forms and the performance of them as humorous enables their transmitter to provide

concealed messages of deeper political problematizations than expected from their audience or the spaces

they occupy. A discussion of the learning implications of this case study highlights the pedagogical

significance of gamers’ commentaries for the integration of games into classrooms, providing insight into

learners’ cultures as they utilize these forms in and out of school.

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DGBL: a brief history

This section presents two interrelated points that emphasize the need for a cyber-ludic conceptual

framework and methodological practice to make a post-critical expansion to existing work in DGBL research.

The first point underlines the links between educational institutions and the development of video games and

the gaming industry. The second posits that DGBL literature is often uncritical of such neoliberal

developments even when recognizing them, a tendency that can be traced in its epistemological and

methodological choices. Even when employing qualitative and ethnographic methodologies, DGBL still

adopts an evaluative paradigm of assessing process and matching representational content onto specific

learning outcomes. Cyber-ludic pedagogies pave the way for the development of a standpoint that will

acknowledge these complex relations and contradictions, by diversifying the sites, data, methods, and

theoretical foundations of DGBL research.

Existing educational literature often makes the argument that games are neglected and underrepresented

in classroom instruction. Yet links between games and education are more complex than they appear at first.

In reality, video games have been created and played since the 1950s in direct relationship with institutions

of knowledge. These relationships include the creation of video games as methodologies for advancing early

computer science, often within exclusive clubs of elite institutions, or by students who were pushing the limits

of their curriculum in dorm rooms or garages. Digital games drove the development of the technologies

supporting them in universities across the Western world (Jerz, 2007; Donovan, 2010). Finally, they also

include the relationship between early video game companies and the educational software market, which

gave rise to the genre of ‘edutainment’ games, exemplified by titles like the Carmen Sandiego and Oregon trail

franchises in the 1980s (Kinder, 1996; McDonough et al, 2010; Bettivia, 2016).

The simultaneous development of gaming technologies and widespread adoption of their use changed the

relationship between games and education. Our contemporary understanding of computer game pedagogies

and research coincides with the development of online games and their related digital and physical fan

communities. Traditional educational media, like video and sound texts, have a perceived direct line of

transmission between the message sender and its receiver. The development of online games not only

expanded spaces of play, it also gave rise to activities in the platforms, fora, guides, and streaming sites related

to the games. The technological development of online gaming called into being a complex network of social

interactions that challenges understandings of education that rely on a linear relationship between message

transmitter and message recipient. Advances in communication technologies, to which video games had been

a major driving force, drove publishers of educational games to financial extinction or invisibility

(Montgomery, 2016). Educational gaming companies could not compete with the pace of technological

development that was spurred in part by the entry of monopolistic technology companies like Sony and

Microsoft into video game production. Additionally, the advancement of online games and the building of

their satellite communities made strictly educational game content seem like parochial, unimaginative media

(Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, & Tosca, 2016), a perception exaggerated by what was perceived as the financial

greed of educational game publishers (Francis, 2015).

While this direct link between education and the gaming industry changed as a result of the development

of Internet technologies and digital play, there are still traces of these commercial relationships, especially in

relation to the field’s epistemological inquiries. Educational research has maintained a methodological

paradigm that aims to assess the extent of implementation of video games in specific subject-matter teaching;

practical and explicit skills (Ypsilanti et al., 2014; Landers & Armstrong, 2017); metacognitive and

communication skills, especially within the framework of affinity groups (Gee, 2005); communities of practice

(Steinkuehler & Oh, 2012) or ‘epistemic’ communities (Shaffer, 2007); and, more recently, the evaluation of

specific educational outcomes in and out of the classroom and curriculum (Backlund & Hendrix, 2013;

Alshammari, Ali, & Rosli, 2015; Eordanidis, Gee, & Steward-Gardiner, 2017; Paravizo, Chaim, Braatz,

Muschard, & Rozenfeld, 2018). This line of inquiry extends beyond quantitative research into mixed methods

and qualitative research. Yet, this research does not escape the search for a one-way relationship between the

message and its reception, as it translates to learning outcomes. This methodological choice acquires new

depth if it is seen against the parallel development between DGBL and the edutainment economy.

Imaginaries of video games, such as that of the trope of the deviant and its deployment, cannot produce

conceptual singularities. Instead, examining games and gaming communities warrants understanding them

in a space of meeting between education and the gaming industry; the conflicting representations of youths

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claiming marginalization; and the industry’s disruptive innovators existing in those sites respectively. In

addition, such rigid meaning production in DGBL needs to be juxtaposed against the needs and dictates of the

economy that produces the field’s subjects of inquiry, a direct line between process and profit, which informs

lines between meaning and representations, messages and learning outcomes, often found in unexpected

spaces and non-representational events. What follows is a framework for executing this project.

Conceptual framework: DGBL theories meet post-critical methodology

A cyber-ludic framework weaves together digital game-based educational theories with post-critical

methodologies. Post-critical methodologies are as much a critique of earlier approaches inspired by critical

theory as they are a continuation engaging critical theory in new directions. As Noblit (2003) explains, the

term ‘post-critical methodologies’ often refers to ethnographic research in educational spaces that protests

the existence of absolute truths and precise meanings existing in observation data. Moreover, post-critical

frameworks follow social foundations research developed in the 1960s. This research attempted to give voice

to ‘deviant’ youth, but in doing so, it engaged in the exoticization of the underdog (Willis, 1977; McRobbie,

1978; Giroux, 1983). Post-critical researchers offer critiques of previous attempts at deviant ethnographies,

noting their tendency to reproduce the colonial traditions of ethnographic and anthropological research,

especially as they submit research subjects to hegemonic gaze and analysis. Post-critical research centers the

voices of marginalized and underrepresented educational subjects, while at the same time avoiding

romanticizing or objectifying subjects and their attachments to specific symbols, meanings, and messages.

As such, post-critical methodologies offer new insights into these emerging questions and sites of

educational inquiry. Their importance for our educational research project, therefore, is triple-fold. First,

post-critical methodologies challenge both idealization and innovation assumptions regarding deviance. In

this paper, we explore the relationship between deviance and gaming, by deploying the liminality of play in

our exploration of what we term ‘the technodeviant’. Second, we suggest that understanding games as

rhizomatic sites of identity formation, community development, and knowledge production must involve

questioning the precision between representations and their meanings. Third, we advocate for

methodological fluidity to match the dynamic nature of games and virtual worlds, rejecting orthodoxies of

theory and method in favor of cyber-ludic pedagogies.

This research is performed on the ‘hyphens’ of gender, class, sexuality and racial identities, and

acknowledges the fluidity between those, and their meanings and significations (Anders, 2019). At the same

time, the understanding that knowledge is situated across spatial and qualitative institutional boundaries and

bodies of research challenges the authority of data, as well as what constitutes data (Childers, 2011). This

framework of investigation and analysis welcomes the data that accounts for researchers’ intuitions and

instincts. Finally, it advocates for the inclusion of what has been less privileged in scientific research, such as

sense(s), affect, mnemonic experience, pre-ideas, and non-representations.

Opening up the definition of what constitutes data is especially important for research in a field that is

both expanding and ever-changing. The reflexivity and flexibility of cyber-ludic pedagogies offer deeper and

more inclusive accounts of educational praxis and institutions. Cyber-ludic theories, therefore, open up an

understanding of learning as a matrix of activities and messages, capable of ‘transmitting affect’ (Brennan,

2004; Muñoz, 2020). By affect, we mean energy that drives cognition. We also want to account for the

‘stickiness’ of affect, its ability to stay on and define subsequent experiences, even when it has become invisible

(Ahmed, 2013). Through these aesthetic interactions, generating and acquiring knowledge does not happen solely

in school environments or even necessarily in conscious experiences, but rather in the subconscious process of the

encounter with the Other that reading and cultural participation allow (Schwab, 2012).

Based on these theoretical considerations, operationalizing cyber-ludic pedagogies constitutes an

important framework for studying video games as educational sites, challenging commonly shared

assumptions in the literature about the cultural and pedagogical value of gamers’ actions in and out of virtual

worlds. One common assumption lies in the fact that gaming is often framed as a site and act of inherent

resistance, youth reflection, and deviation. Earlier cultural scholarship within the field has homed in on

cheats/cheat codes (Consalvo, 2009), griefers/protesters (Taylor, 2006; 2018), MODers (Loh & Byun, 2009),

and textual poachers (Jenkins, 2012), offering important insight on how young people use game code and

stories to create their own virtual realities, deviating from mainstream culture. While not exclusively

educational, this research has serious pedagogical implications and has often been acknowledged as such

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(Duncum, 2013). In essence, this research finds political significance in the way gamers are reclaiming their

gaming agendas in relation to and in conflict with popular game publishers.

Therefore, play in virtual worlds and its associated terms—fun, freedom from profitability, freedom from

oppression, liminality, creativity—are used to serve an anti-institutional, and often anti-educational,

rhetoric. The gamer as a deviant, what we call the technodeviant, is a symbolic figure in this context because

the deviant reveals a contemporary contested territory for identity and belonging that can be simultaneously

both embodied and equally read/observed. The dual acts of embodiment and critique are increasingly part of

the production process (Hall, 2003). On the one hand, technological agents deploy images of disruptive

innovation and profit seeking as revolutionary action with political and social implications, by assuming and

enacting displaced and exoticized marginalized identities (Chun, 2021). On the other, contemporary game

marketing is positioned as feeding off the innovation, privilege, and social status of early adopters in

technological diffusion models (Rogers, 2003). We argue that the way this exclusivity is constructed through

the idealization of deviance becomes part of the contemporary identity of gaming communities.

In games and education scholarship, formal paths between learning and video games are frequently rigid,

and are restricted to examining the direct implementation of one into the other. This approach risks missing

unstated and more nuanced aspects of these relationships. Gamification critics have also challenged claims

about playfulness that are increasingly marked by technological progress, increased algorithmic control, and

an additional educational emphasis on operationalizing play and measuring its learning outcomes. In that

sense, the tendency is for gamification to engage in similar practices as grading, mechanical repetition, and

value exchanges (Hung, 2017). Still, technological play (that goes beyond games) maintains and expands a

deviant appeal, and this mechanism of expansion remains often unexamined. Because the default

technodeviant is a white, hetero, male subject, the technodeviant both lays claims to marginalization while

operating from a position of hegemony. This affective privilege allows the population with the assumed

deviant identity a claim to the game space, which can displace marginalized groups. Even while centering a

community of deviants, play-based pedagogies have often relied on suppressing defiance as a necessary

condition for instructional success. Marjanovic-Shane (2016- fixed) reveals an emphasis on narrative

cohesion when play is involved. This emphasis obliges the teacher or facilitator to expel dissenting voices

when they contest the flow of the plot. While games seem to challenge disciplinary, temporal, and spatial

boundaries, as well as forcing schools and universities to expand theirs, they are raising new divisions in

education and equity.

Video games represent a new artistic medium where multiple modalities meet, with rituals involving

different experiences of time, space, and belonging. Games challenge conceptualizations of curricular and

disciplinary divisions and restrictions, similar to the ways in which the emergence of the novel influenced

such conceptualizations (Anderson, 2006; Hunt, 2007). The pedagogical potential of games cannot fit into

class times or allocated coursework assignments. Much like literature, video games constitute immersive

experiences, and immersion needs to be conceptualized as a temporal concept as well as a spatial one

(McMahan, 2013). As an effect, the cyber-ludic research framework moves video-game pedagogies beyond

participant observation research that seeks to evaluate the educational outcomes of video games.

This article centers the multiplicity of sites that operate together to form the ‘embodied experiences’ of

video games interactions. Traditionally, DGBL theories have attempted to create experiential narratives that

are linear and function as a traceable set of connections in relation to each other. Yet games, the technologies

themselves and the rhizomatic communities that interact with them, are more complicated than this: they

are not discrete objects with boundaries, but dynamic, time-based experiences dependent on ever-changing

combinations of data, human agents, and technological agents. Embracing this complexity by applying post-

critical methods to DGBL theories enables a more comprehensive examination of virtual worlds as informal

sites of learning and sites of informal learning that exist at the borders of formal schooling. In moving beyond

DGBL theories to cyber-ludic pedagogies in this way, we can study the relationship between games, play, and

education as part of the on-going project in the field of education to challenge the patriarchal transmission

lineage that views the relationship between teachers and students as one wherein teacher transmits to

student. This ‘sideways’ communication, what Brennan (2004, p. 75) calls ‘horizontal line of transmission,’ is

important because it also helps move our understanding beyond individual body boundaries, extending sites

of investigation into the realm of ‘things,’ ‘technologies’ and the non-representational spaces of pre-ideas,

cognition, memory and imagination (Thrift, 2008). Cyber-ludic research practice engages with alternative

bodies of data outside of the school experience.

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In the next section, we are going to apply this theoretical framework to a case-study event in gaming

culture that occurred at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Asmogold’s vlog post on social distancing

reflects on gaming’s positioning at the boundaries of educational institutions and social activities. Our

analysis of Asmogold’s performance of the imagery of a NEET identity serves as a site to 1) question the

exoticization of deviance in educational research, 2) problematize the assumption of a one-way relationship

between meaning and representation, and 3) acknowledge the pedagogical value of data that is found in

readings of popular culture texts, especially in user-generated content.

Applying cyber-ludic pedagogies

The case study: starring Zack as Asmongold

This article takes up Asmongold’s video, ‘Advanced Social Distancing Survival Guide from a 10+ year

NEET,’ as a case study to explore the tensions between online socialization, entertainment, work, and school.

Employing the cyber-ludic pedagogical framework, such research invokes a diverse set of sites and skills and

includes data from a variety of sources. The research corpus traces pathways between mainstream media

texts; public forum posts; blog and media posts on games and technology, including computer code; and

audiovisual material of gameplay, screenshots, streaming and blog posts. Gaming communities are

rhizomatic, a proliferation and syndication of data and the innumerable connections created between agents,

both human and technological. Selection criteria of both data and connections for the corpus follow the post-

critical approach of acknowledging researcher positionality and experience as they trace and document

connections. What follows is the application of the cyber-ludic pedagogical framework to the vlog entry

vignette described at the outset of the article.

Asmongold’s vlog post is meant to be a humorous guide to social distancing. Asmongold describes social

distancing as a way of life, often associated with NEETs, that has expanded beyond an affinity group of

technodeviants to the general population because of the COVID-19 pandemic. What was once a niche

experience has become essential for the survival of civilization. The technodeviant lifestyle is sometimes an

involuntary one: in Asmongold’s content, he at times references symptoms of social anxiety. Pre-pandemic,

social distancing is discussed variously as a technique, a skill, learning outcome, and wisdom which has been

painstakingly acquired, either as a result or as the cost of earlier social shunning. Now, Asmongold can impart

this acquired knowledge upon others. Reading from a list on his digital tablet, he describes behaviors that can

facilitate social distancing, supporting his authority by recruiting statistics-inspired words to lend

mathematical legitimacy to his claims, terms such as ‘correlations’ and ‘curves’. The list foregrounds the all-

encompassing playing of immersive video games that will occupy the majority of the time spent social

distancing. Other items include advice such as staying at home except for when picking up fastfood via

drivethrough, avoiding human contact including sex, not showering, and generally not keeping up the

appearance of self-care.

Near the end of the video, Asmongold notes that he is purposefully leaving out his final piece of advice

aimed at people with jobs, because most of his audience consists of men without jobs. In so doing, he is

suggesting, performing, to his now expanding audience his belonging to NEET culture, implying that he does

not have a job in addition to embodying the other social distancing traits he has listed. While he persistently

draws on a technodeviant lifestyle of self-induced isolation related to gaming, Asmongold (real name: Zack)

is in fact a gaming powerhouse. His video reflections on current events, carefully constructed to largely read

as apolitical unless taking up a particular right-wing grievance, and Internet culture have gained him a

following of more than one million subscribers on YouTube and three million Twitch followers. He has an

estimated yearly income of a million dollars and enough loyal fans to report and get his ‘griefers’ or ‘trolls’

banned from the platforms he occupies. He has created his brand by livestreaming his playing of World of

Warcraft (WoW) from a dungeon-like, untidy room. While he hints in his video that he lives with his parents,

he in fact inhabits a large house with other streamers and business partners, a current trend in streaming

circles. Despite his immense financial and social success, Asmongold’s fans are loyal to the unhygienic,

socially anxious technodeviant lifestyle that he claims as his brand, and these fans reinforce it with

commentaries and even fan-generated videos. The relationship between brand and lifestyle is an important

one: Zack, as opposed to Asmongold, maintains a brand as a lucrative source of income, while not necessarily

living the lifestyle around which he builds the brand.

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Another facet of Asmongold’s brand is built on his expression of conservative political beliefs: his

participation and support, for example, in a campaign called Make Warcraft Great Again, a direct reference to

MAGA and the 2016 and 2020 American elections, was instrumental in the 2019 recreation of WoW in its

original form, before almost two decades of update patches. Rather than a mere slogan, MWGA was an explicit

demand from some of WoW’s core gamers to bring back the original releases that existed before the game

expanded its demographics. In a video by Punkrat (2019) describing the entire campaign which Asmongold

himself streamed on his own platform, there is a mix of political references and imageries, such as Russian

computer servers and young white male protesters, that serve to emphasize the associations of the

campaigners with the Trump campaign, while at the same time engaging with the image of a resistance

movement and the narrative of the underdog. That the campaign defined the object of gamers’ desire as

Vanilla (community wording) or Classic (the publisher’s choice for the final release) reiterates the racial

statements inherent in the release.

Despite this apparent attachment to right-wing politics, Asmongold, as a branded persona, has also

released more critical commentaries, especially on his personal account. A couple of months before the social

distancing lifestyle video was released, he posted a series of other videos, again on his personal account,

announcing a break from streaming and explaining his grievances with Twitch, the streaming platform that

enabled his success (ZackRawrr, 2019; 2020a). While he himself was experiencing a personal crisis to which

he often refers, Zack, performing a more intimate version of self, admitted that he felt obligated to say specific

things, simply because his audience would want to hear them. The suggestion is that he is performing his

brand for an audience, and that his statements do not adequately reflect his personal beliefs. He alludes to a

series of misogynist comments, targeted against Pink Sparkles, his former girlfriend and another streamer.

Pink Sparkles performs the exaggerated pole of feminized gender roles in Internet culture: her brand is a pink-

girly room, loaded with verbal reminders of gender and visual sexual references. Later that year, right after

the murder of George Floyd, Asmongold posted a powerful commentary on disguised racism in the design of

emotes, Twitch-specific emoticons, and viewer behaviors. This, along with global anti-racism protests, have

been posted again on his personal account, which has far fewer followers than the streaming account.

These examples suggest that the interplay between Zack’s stance and Asmongold’s commentary is more

complex than they originally appear, and warrant deeper examination. His performance of technodeviant and

right-wing American Internet subcultures draws on and represents a large number of gamers and followers.

This paper takes up the complex space between digitally- and play-mediated socialization and work/learning

environments. The next section will analyze the ways in which Asmongold invokes language and practices

around knowledge production to examine how gaming agents position these practices within a complex

political and cultural framework. Such a juxtaposition offers a pointed critique of assumptions that

simultaneously isolate gamers’ knowledge production practices from social realities and embed them into

learning processes.

Theory-crafting in gamer worlds

The relationship between gaming and learning is constantly in flux. In its earliest iterations, with early

interactive fiction in academic environments like Adventure or edutainment franchises like Oregon trail and

Carmen Sandiego, the commercial and regulatory relationships between gaming and educational institutions

were inextricable and mutually constitutive. As games grew in complexity and access to gaming technology

became ubiquitous, the early mutual constitution of games and education yielded the presence of gaming in

education and education in gaming. Asmongold recruits learning and knowledge vocabulary to describe the

content in his video: he is imparting knowledge that he has been acquiring for over 10+ years. He is using the

word ‘teach’ to describe what he is doing while centering terminology that links to knowledge institutions

and methodologies, terms such as advanced; list making, statistics; and the potential generalizations of his

observations. He also makes constant references to the acquisition of his social distancing wisdom beginning

during his teenage/school years to establish his authority regarding the how-tos of the NEET lifestyle.

Asmongold simultaneously invokes knowledge production conventions in reference to educational

institutions while establishing his outsider position in relation to them: both parts of this duality are

important in establishing his authority on the subject of social distancing and as a representative of the NEET

lifestyle. This is an instance of gamers ‘theory-crafting,’ which can be done collaboratively, in forum

participation, or individually, in written and video guides (Steinkuehler & Oh, 2012), and, more recently, in

infographics and data visualizations on social media. Theory-craft is not just about games: it is also found in hyper-

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knowledge environments that people create in social media. Theory-crafting has become a communicative trope

at this point, and its relationship to formal educational environments merits further study.

We argue that the practice of theory-craft cannot be adequately theorized outside of the silences in the

video. Asmongold’s description of his social distancing lifestyle serves to position himself within a group of

involuntary celibate, yet heterosexual, white men, who have occupied digital gaming spaces and have become

synonymous with computing worlds and related fields, including gaming: the technodeviants. Kendall’s

digital ethnography of Bluesky (2002), a text-based virtual world in the late 1990s, was one of the first studies

of its kind. She makes the observation that this exact stereotype of involuntary celibacy was used by her subjects

almost as a token of belonging in virtual communities in those early days of the Internet. Two decades later, with

video games becoming increasingly ubiquitous across the world, the white maleness of game spaces is still

pervasive, resulting in a conflation of gaming and gender. This manifests at all levels, from communities of players

to game creators, as Chess, Evans, and Baines (2017) work on video game commercials reveals.

While the predominance of the technodeviant population, which we use to encapsulate the techo-

imaginary of white, hetero, North American male, is a known phenomenon among gaming communities,

cultural analyses of games had until recently largely ignored the exclusionary social practices engendered by

gamers invoking these particular identities, focusing instead on representation of the aesthetics of game

worlds. In the few exceptions where the technodeviant population was discussed and acknowledged,

harassment, more often in the form of sexism, was placed in the context of locker-room talk (Kendall, 2002)

or what Nardi (2010) calls a ‘boys tree-house.’ Nardi seems at times amused by it, while Kendall’s work

mentions multiple times that she expressed her concern and discomfort with this locker-room talk. Kendall

eventually acknowledges that she felt that her intervention had less effect on her participants than these

conversations were having on her. Taylor’s (2006) ethnographic work on virtual worlds is concerned with

female representation. She also encounters the misogyny and homophobia of the locker-room talk, yet, like

the other researchers, she appears to end up ignoring the problematic behaviors that seek to define the

boundaries of the technodeviant population. Part of the reason for this seeming nonchalance seems to be a

widespread belief that these locker-room or tree-house aspects of communication were used as a mode of

meme creation and community building, but that these behaviors and affinity groups were restricted to digital

spaces only (Duncum, 2013).

This silence on the subject of exclusionary practices within the academic literature about games and virtual

worlds further serves the romanticization of gaming as an act of resistance, defiance, and deviance as

described in the literature review. Still, besides the obvious acts of aggression, more subtle political

statements towards exclusion and their mechanics are documented among gaming communities. Kendall’s

work employs a discursive approach in order to examine how participants use language selectively in order to

signify and define the boundaries of their respective identities. Her methodology was restricted to linguistic

recording and analysis, given the technological limitations of the time. Kendall describes how her

participants– and co-players– were substituting one identity for another, such as ethnicity for race, or

profession for class, in order to maintain and define a space for their own particular demographic, while at

the same time stripping this process of any political content and claiming color-blindness (Bonilla-Silva &

Ditrich, 2011). This echoes an assumption of neutrality that still defines public perceptions technology (Benjamin,

2019). Still, as Chess and Shaw (2015) describe after becoming targets of harassment in the context of #gamergate,

the ensuing scandal served as a reminder of what is entailed in the perceived purity of game spaces: that they are

reserved for certain populations and that the technodeviant population is an exclusive one.

While Asmongold is seemingly sharing his performed technodeviant identity with a presumed wider

audience of social distancers during the pandemic, he is also reclaiming a space which seems to be losing its

exclusivity for white males like himself. While this movement is taking place, he establishes his authority by

weaving together a seemingly arbitrary, yet loaded, assortment of pre-modern imagery– caveman lighting

and posture, children’s toys and blankets, medieval emblems– that tie the voluntary lack of societal

integration to specific identities and life circumstances. This authority is further reinforced by a

misappropriation of stereotypes later, such as the one that receivers of social benefits are unproductive

members of society, unwilling rather than unable to produce income. Asmongold’s claims expand through

time and space within affinity groups, while constituting a very localized discourse within his own content

across multiple platforms. Throughout his social distancing ‘lecture’ and his larger streaming career, the

influencer attacks social benefits, by adopting and subsequently trivializing the image of a person who is

receiving them and staying outside of society and labor production, not because of any inability to participate,

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but because he prefers playing video games instead. At the same time, it is interesting that Asmongold’s stated

purpose for teaching social distancing in the video is the preservation of civilization for the stated self-serving

purpose of maintaining the social benefits he receives from it as a NEET. His rhetoric places the NEET both

in tension with and in dependency on both civilization and, by invoking social benefits, the state.

Further undermining the assumption that NEET and technodeviant identities are relegated to digital

spaces, physiological senses play an important role in the social distancing video. Asmongold integrates

senses such as smell, vision, and touch when technology is not enough to avoid human contact: his advice to

avoid showering and to avoid self-care to a level that will repel people is accompanied with a visceral

description of encountering a person who smells and looks like ‘shit’. Maintaining such an appearance avoids the

possibility of human touch by rendering NEETs invisible to others, who will bypass them and actively avoid looking

at them in fear of their chosen physical presentation. His video connects recipients of social benefits with those

who shun social interaction, highlighting a group that seeks avoidance while also fearing exclusion.

Cyber-ludic pedagogies and technodeviants

As advances in Internet technologies and access have expanded the use of online virtual worlds, DGBL has

celebrated aspects of commercial video games such as the creation of communities of practice and knowledge

production in game worlds, even when these spaces host rhetorics of resistance against institutions of

knowledge. Employing a post-critical cyber-ludic reading of Asmongold’s vlog post regarding gaming and

social distancing demonstrates the ways in which these practices of informal knowledge-making in virtual

worlds have come to constitute communicative tropes, often operationalized for humorous effect, rather than

the straightforward knowledge dissemination texts that they are described as in the literature. Instead,

streaming technodeviants like Asmongold often engage in ‘theory-crafting’ as part of their branding efforts

in order to increase their audience and revenue. The performative efforts at branding do not detract from the

fact that these texts simultaneously produce nuanced meanings that are relevant to the schooling experience

and its exclusionary practices.

The deployment of the deviant, a persona that has both served educational research and the industry,

requires additional scrutiny. These concurrent and often conflicting existences of deviance proliferate in

gaming communities. When theory-crafting practices are placed in a larger social context and in relation to

the intersections and valleys between games and games-related media texts, layers of often self-contradicting

meanings begin to emerge. These layers challenge the ways in which scholars envision the integration of

video games forms, genres, and rhetoric in educational settings and purposes. In this case study, Asmongold

uses knowledge-making, scientific vocabulary, and the allusion to knowledge acquired during his adolescent

years in order to simultaneously position himself outside of school settings and therefore claim the authority

to critique them. By operationalizing the ‘lecture’ format of this vlog post for humorous effect, he adheres

both to the gaming cultures from which he derives his audience and positions himself in a more ambivalent

space of critical reflection and social commentary. The framework we present offers a means to find insight

into the youth that comprise Asmongold’s audience, in turn highlighting meanings and pedagogical practices

often missed in evaluative paradigms of education. This article centers on the complexity of processes

involved in delineating the pedagogical role of video games and their cultural expressions.

Concluding remarks

The relationship between gaming and learning is often unreflexive, whether the assumptions are coded as

negative, such as the construction of the deviant gamer, or positive, in the gamification of learning tasks. We

explored some of these contradictions in the uneven movements of engaging video games in learning in order

to suggest a methodology for interpreting alternative data sources and emerging action sites with pedagogical

implications for video games, casting virtual worlds as media of artistic expression and communication. We

began by tracing the links between the positivist, evaluative paradigm in DGBL scholarship, arguing that a

linear assessment of knowledge transmission does not adequately engage the complexity of virtual worlds

and their hybrid physical and digital communities. We bring DGBL into dialogue with current games studies

research and post-critical methodologies to generate cyber-ludic pedagogies, a framework that goes beyond

evaluating the didactic effectiveness of video games in learning outcomes. The commitment of post-critical

methodologies to the lived experiences of marginalized populations has special significance for DGBL because

it calls into question the affective deployment of play as a strategic mechanism to guarantee institutional and

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civic compliance. We proposed one method for performing cyber-ludic research that challenges the

idealization of deviance among gaming communities by questioning rigid and one-way relationships between

representations and meanings.

Our case study vlog claims social distancing as native knowledge of game world inhabitants at the onset

of the COVID-19 pandemic. The vlog traces the boundaries of educational institutions, having gaming

communities simultaneously rejecting and being rejected by them while invoking hyper-knowledge

communication practices. By branding his Asmongold persona as a socially anxious, NEET, technodeviant

still living with his parents, Zack achieves a loyal audience of white, heterosexual, North-American males

reportedly sharing the technodeviance culture. The relationship between the technodeviant and Asmongold’s

occasional right-leaning political grievances is not coincidental. Both identities lay claim to a status of

marginalization when they in fact occupy privileged positions in the current hegemony. The MAGA move to

reclaim ‘lost’ ground for white supremacy, founded on imaginaries of US racial purity, is mirrored in

#gamergate and other controversies in game spaces that seek to preserve the perceived purity of the virtual

world form as one reserved for the technodeviant. Zack uses Asmongold in this way to reclaim the exclusivity

of video game space in the interest of this demographic while offering a visceral critique of both his followers’

conservative ideas, social practices, and gamer stereotypes. A cyber-ludic analysis of the case-study

acknowledges the operationalization of knowledge communication modes as tropes while emphasizing

discrete projects of brand awareness, identity formation, and claims to digital space. Our analysis of

Asmogold’s performance of technodeviance serves to de-exoticize the deviant in educational research;

problematize the assumption of one-way knowledge transmission and representation; and center the

pedagogical value of game and play data that is found in popular culture texts and in user-generated content.

Despite the fact that Asmongold performs a lifestyle that he does not himself live in order to establish a

brand does not in any way diminish the reach or impact of his media and discourse. His positionality as

performed and its relationship to popular virtual worlds work together to give him authority as separate from

and in relationship to formal learning environments. In much the same way the commercial imperative of

educational gaming companies, or the gamification of education platforms (like ‘badges’ in e-learning

software) does not detract from our understanding of these digital spaces as educational, so too can we

understand that branded streaming content from gamers like Asmongold can constitute sites of learning.

Given the scope of the audience for popular streamers, their ability to establish authenticity as sympathetic,

deviant subjects, and the ways in which they weave together virtual worlds with the associated affinity groups

that transcend digital environments merits further research on the potential educational impacts of gamers

and streamers. The capacity for these texts to communicate informal learning is well demonstrated by the

application of our framework to Asmongold’s social distancing video: in a time where social distancing

became the temporary norm, aspects of the NEET lifestyle became mainstream and, in our case study,

increasingly profitable. Further research is needed to begin to unpack the broader educational potentia l

of these multi- and transmediated works. Cyber-ludic pedagogies aim to embed gamers’ knowledge

production practices in the social realities they occupy, understanding them as inherently hybrid digital

and physical experiences. The lack of edges and boundaries in game worlds means understanding their

impacts, mnemonic experiences, and sticky affect in similarly unbounded ways. But just because we

cannot understand gaming and playfulness within the bounds of traditional school models does not mean

that the potential for reflexive inclusions of rhizomatic game networks do not have a role to play in both

formal and informal learning environments. Our framework provides a starting point for beginning this

important research by allowing emergent meanings to come through, furthering our understanding of

the pedagogical workings of video games.

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INFORMATION ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dora Kourkoulou: Dora Kourkoulou is an Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership doctoral candidate, teaching

and research assistant, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8254-9253

E-mail: [email protected]

Rhiannon Bettivia: Rhiannon Bettivia is Assistant Professor at Simmons University. She earned her PhD from the School

of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4593-562X

E-mail: [email protected]

NOTE:

Dora Kourkoulou: Conceived topic, performed analysis, wrote parts of paper; Rhiannon Bettivia: Contributed data

analysis tools, designed the analysis, edited and wrote parts of paper