Wed, Nov 19 · 6:30 PM PST
Please join us for the Orange County ACM Chapter's bi-monthly evening program series.
Games as Social Platforms
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Event Details
In this talk, I’ll trace that evolution through examples from my own work: from early studies of the intellectual impact of commercial games “in the wild” and the design of after-school game-based programs for youth, to later investigations into how online play can sometimes normalize toxic behaviors, hate, and extremism. That trajectory ultimately led me to reexamine the social dimensions of games in an unexpected setting—one inside San Quentin prison.
Here, I describe my most recent collaboration with incarcerated individuals and correctional staff to understand how a game-based program there, in stark contrast to much commercial online play, has become a space for fostering connection, building emotional regulation, and reducing racial self-segregation. I close with a broader challenge to the audience: To reconsider today’s political divide as much a matter of belonging and not belief, to refocus our attention not on the relational over the ideational.
Speaker Constance Steinkuehler is a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine where she researches cognition, culture, and learning in the context of multiplayer videogames. She is the Co-Director of the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center at UCI where she teaches courses on games and society, games as social platforms, the sociology of games (in Donovan Correction Facility), research methods, and visual design. Recent projects include investigations of toxicity and extremism in online commercial games and the design, development and evaluation of game-based programs in incarcerated settings to foster inclusion, equanimity, and social connectedness.
Constance formerly served as Senior Policy Analyst under the Obama administration in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, advising on videogames and digital media. She is the founder of the Federal Games Guild, a working group across federal agencies using games and simulations as tools for thought, and the Higher Education Video Games Alliance, an academic non-for-profit organization of game-related programs in higher education. Her research has been funded by the Anti-Defamation League, the Samueli Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Universities of Cambridge, Wisconsin-Madison, and California-Irvine. She has published over one hundred articles and book chapters including six conference proceedings, four special journal issues, and two books. She has worked closely with the National Research Council and National Academy of Education on special reports relate to videogames, and her work has been featured in Science , Wired , USA Today , New York Times , LA Times , ABC, CBS, CNN NPR, BBC and The Chronicle of Higher Education .
Constance has a PhD in Literacy Studies, an MS in Educational Psychology, and three Bachelor’s Degrees in Mathematics, English, and Religious Studies. Her dissertation was a cognitive ethnography of the MMOs Lineage I and II where she ran a large siege guild. Her husband Dr. Kurt Squire is Co-Director of the GLS center at UCI. They live with their two adolescent gamers in Southern California where they enjoy surfing, hiking, camping, travel, and all manner of headset-wearing, dps-flinging, computer-screened mayhem.
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