Dr. Jon Wargo
Associate Professor, University of Michigan
Games are not only forms of documentation, communication, and expression but critical sites and technologies for learning. Indeed, as recent research illustrates, games not only further the development of domain-specific knowledge but also provide the designed constraints – analog or digital – rendered necessary to learn specific practices and embody ways of being. Moving beyond the content/context divide, this presentation brings together methodological insights from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis with theoretical concepts and tools from distributed cognition and game studies to reimagine what learning looks like in the peripheries of play. More specifically, it examines how an immersive escape room’s designed landscape and environment served as mediational resources that fostered and advanced consequential learning for players to “claim” and “exhibit” escape.
