Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning

by J. Gee, Kenneth A. Loparo

Overview

The authors argue that women gamers, too often ignored as gamers, are in many respects leading the way in this trend towards design, cultural production, new learning communities, and the combination of technical proficiency with emotional and social intelligence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230623415
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	05/14/2010
Edition description:	2010
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at the Arizona State University. He is the author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and Good Games and Good Learning. Elisabeth Hayes is a professor in the Division of Learning, Technology and Psychology in Education at ASU’s Graduate School of Education.

Table of Contents

Video Games and 21st Century Skills: Why the Sudden Worldwide Interest in Video Games and Learning? Games Go Beyond Gaming to Design and New Communities: Women Lead the Way The Nickel and Dimed Challenge: Designing New Forms of Socially Conscious Play A Young Girl Becomes a Designer and Goes Global, Succeeding at 21st Century Skills but Still Failing at School How Passion Grows: A Retired Shut In Goes from Making a Purple Potty to Gaining Millions of Fans Passionate Affinity Groups: A New Form of Community that Works to Make People Smarter A Young Girl and Her Vampire Stories: How a Teenager Competes with a Best Selling Author From the Sims to Second Life: A Young Woman Transforms Her Real Life and Gets a Graduate Education by Living in a Virtual World, Then She Goes to Graduate School What Does it All Mean: What Women and the Sims Have to Teach Us About what Education and Learning Will Look Like in the 21st Century

Editorial Reviews

"James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes offer us vivid portrait of women of all ages gaming beyond gaming, transforming the successful The Sims video games into a platform for their own social, creative, and intellectual lives. These women are gamers, but they are also tinkerers, community leaders, authors, programmers, and artists, and their engagement with The Sims has opened up new opportunities for them to learn and grow far beyond the classroom. Gee and Hayes are patient, informed, and insightful guides showing us how these kinds of participatory cultures might transform our understanding of education in the 21st century." - Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

"Women and Gaming is must-read for anyone interested in the social or intellectual side of gaming - scholars, designers, players and parents alike.At long last, we have a serious treatment of the forms of social engineering or "soft modding" that women do as part of gameplay - not merely as some counterpoint to the (predominantly-male) practice of technical modding (modifying) found in gaming communities but in fact as a vital practice in its own right and a key feature of what it means to Design. Gee & Hayes have managed to treat an often-ignored topic with both depth and clarity." - Constance Steinkuehler, University of Wisconsin-Madison

From the Publisher