Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
We could refl ect on who created the products which have made these new popular
cultural expressions possible, but there is no one answer or single factor involved.
One should mention the technology behind them, the interdisciplinary team some-
times working for years toward the launch of a new game, the fi nancing involved in
presenting the product to the player, and, undoubtedly, the people who actively play
and respond to it. Creative processes are embodied within video games, just like
cinema, novels, or architecture. They are the result of their creator's application,
but, as educators, we are convinced that interacting with them could foster the
development of such creativity.
Summing up,
old and new media require collective creation processes
according
to different contexts and work processes
.
In this research, creation is inseparable
from a teenage community while creating video games as part of an after-school
program. The goal of this chapter is to analyze the creative processes present in a
community of teenagers when they design games and participate in a collective blog
at school and several interviews in which they express their refl ections during the
process.
The specifi c objectives are the following:
1. To analyze the game creation processes taking place in the classroom and to
defi ne dialogical contexts favoring intersubjectivity and the creative process
2. To explore the creative process from the creators' perspective in a system defi ned
by the roles assumed by the participants in the game creation process
3. To propose
educational strategies supporting the acquisition of creative ways of
thinking and acting
when video games are considered as cultural tools present in
the classroom
8.2
Theoretical Framework
This chapter focuses on the cultural practices of video game creation as involving
new media, explored from the general frame of convergent culture. Creation is
understood as
a cultural, collective, and historically situated process in which rela-
tionships are established between different conceptual elements that become mean-
ingful in the social practices of the community
(John-Steiner
1985
/1997,
2000
)
.
Sociocultural psychology, classic or contemporary, serves as a starting point.
Figure
8.1
includes a synthesis of these theoretical models and their main concepts,
as well as some possible relationships between them.
We understand creativity from the models provided by two classical authors
(Bakhtin and Vygotsky) and others who more recently worked on their legacy. For
Bakhtin, culture is immersed in intersubjective and discursive processes. Vygotsky,
however, approaches creativity from emotions and thinks of community settings
interpreted from the concept of ZPD (zone of proximal development). In the follow-
ing pages we will delve into these models.
