Tools of play: Coordinating games, characters, and actions while learning to play video games

This paper describes an individual's role in coordinating a distributed system for learning. The analysis deals with a core issue for CSCL; the mismatch between common measures for learning, which are based on individual traits and outcomes, and learning processes that are distributed across people and artifacts. Rather than bridge this mismatch through an assessment of group performance, we suggest that learning scientists consider assessing an individual's adaptive reorganization in a socio-technical system. We selected video game play as a context for looking at collaborative learning because it represents an emergent social activity young people commonly engage in. Additionally, recent claims that game play involves deep learning have not been thoroughly investigated with ethnographic research; this project begins to address that gap.