Futures of Learning

Today, the Pew Internet and American Life Project, in collaboration with the Mills College Civic Engagement Research Group, released a report of findings of the first nationally representative survey of how teen video gaming relates to civic engagement. The study was an effort to survey the distribution of certain forms of video game practice in teen culture, as well as to investigate specific questions about what forms of gaming contribute to prosocial and civic forms of engagement. The project has released a report that documents the overall findings of the survey (authored by Amanda Lenhart, Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, Alexandra Rankin Macgill, Chris Evans, and Jessica Vitak), as well as a research paper analyzing the civic potential of video games (authored by Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, and Chris Evans). 

A note of disclaimer – I participated as an advisor on this project, so I did have a small role in it, and it is funded by the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative that I also am part of.

This work has a number of interesting findings that are worth highlighting. First, the survey confirms that fact that video games have become a pervasive fact of life for US teens, with 97% reporting that they play some form of video game with boys having only slightly higher rates (99%) than girls (94%). The survey does more than give us these blanket numbers for overall video game engagement, but also asks questions about teens’ favorite games, game genres, and frequency of game play. Here we see a diversity in different forms of game play, with boys more likely to be frequent players, and preferring M rated games more than girls.

Interestingly, the four top games in terms of popularity were Guitar Hero, Halo, Madden NFL, and Solitaire. These four titles span an immense range in terms of genre, giving good evidence that the forms of game play are diversifying and that we should not approach teen game play assuming that there is a single “typical” form of game player or a single game or game genre that is overwhelmingly popular. This may seem to be a commonsensical point, but so often public debates over game play proceed as if there are particular kinds of behavioral effects of game play that apply regardless of the form of game play involved. A teen who lists Solitaire as a favorite game is likely to be a very different kind of gamer than one who lists Madden NFL or Halo.

The survey also confirms that gaming is a social activity for most teens, with only 24% saying that they only play alone. These findings are in line with the work reported on in Grand Theft Childhood, that gaming has become a baseline for social participation, and that teens who don’t game are more likely to be socially troubled than kids who do. I would have liked to know the relationship between game genres and the level of social game play. For example, of the 24% who play alone, are they more likely to play so-called casual genres such as Solitaire? Or are those kids fairly distributed among different game genres? Based on our ethnographic work, I would expect the former, but the report does not break down the results in this way.

After setting out these findings about the overall distribution of game practices, the report focuses on civic engagement measures more specifically. The research paper explains how the authors identified certain features of gaming which they call “civic gaming experiences” that they see as exhibiting features of civic engagement.

The civic characteristics of game play:  Do teens who have civic experiences while gaming—such as playing games that simulate civic activities, helping or guiding other players, organizing or managing guilds (an opportunity to develop social networks), learning about social issues, grappling with ethical issues—demonstrate greater commitment to and engagement in civic and political activity than those with limited exposure to civic gaming experiences?

Overall, the study found that teens who have high levels of civic gaming experiences also tend to have high levels of civic and political engagement. They also found that teens who tend to play with others in real life also have higher rates of civic and political engagement than teens who primarily play alone, and that the same was true for teens who have social interaction around the game, such as commenting on web sites or contributing to online discussion groups. One of the more surprising findings was that the link to civic and political engagement did not hold for teens who played with others online. Included in this category are both more casual “pick-up” forms of online play as well as more intensive forms, such as in MMO guilds. This deserves further investigation; my guess is that the different forms of online play would have different relationships to civic engagement measures. In our observations of youth gaming practice, we’ve found certain forms of engagement that are highly social, but much more focused on competition and performance than what you would think of as a more expansive civic orientation, while other forms of gaming have more explicitly civic and political agendas. The more we can get specific about these different dimensions of practice, the more we can begin to untangle the threads that tie together gaming activity with different dimensions of kids’ lives.

One of the significant findings for educational practice is that civic engagement activities are relatively equitably distributed, where income level, race, and age do not determine levels of engagement. The only major demographic category that did make a difference, not surprisingly, was gender, with girls having lower rates of civic gaming experiences. In our ethnographic work, we also found that girls had lower rates of participation in the more social and “geeked out” forms of gaming. The finding that civic gaming is accessible regardless of socioeconomic status is a significant one. The report authors point out that traditional measures of civic engagement indicate that elite youth are much more likely to have access to these experiences. In other words, if gaming is indeed an avenue into civic engagement, it could become one that provides broader avenues for access for diverse teens.

The survey is an effort to get more precise about the specific forms of games and game practices that might be related to specific forms of public participation. In other words, this report is doing work to move the discussion of the learning outcomes of gaming away from simply positing relationships between media content and behavior. Instead, the report suggests looking at the social and cultural contexts of gaming in practice. In doing this, the report does not assume that participatory forms of gaming automatically result in civic participation.

This work is a promising step in building an empirical base for mapping relationships between recreational and social new media practice and ones that have a closer relationship to formal education and civic engagement. The findings confirm many of the intuitions and initial findings of those of us engaged in qualitative research in this area – that youth engagement in sociable forms of play relate to comparable forms of sociability in other realms of life. At the same time, the report challenges us to be much more precise about positing the nature of these linkages, and to proceed with cautious optimism in interventions that target the space between game play and civic engagement.