Summary of Findings

Question 1: How might students experience situated role play within the Revolution environment?

Unlike the experience of watching a film or participating in live role play in a drama studio the game offers a fundamentally new kind of experience. The player is at once an actor within the virtual drama capable of influencing events and a spectator watching the drama unfold around their character. The level of immersion created seemed to produce high levels of engagement as students explored the virtual world led by their own inclinations and curiosities within the multimodal interactive game text. To a degree the defining characteristics (race, class, political affiliation, trade etc) of each character afforded each student a distinctive and highly structured kind of designed experience. The virtual avatar positioned each student in a particular role and encouraged them to experience the unfolding drama as an insider, empathising with the distinctive concerns of their virtual persona as they attempted to achieve various personal goals. However, the experiences that individual pupils bought with them to the role also seemed significant. For example, an African American girl who played Hannah, the house slave character, felt that the other slaves were ridiculing her and describes her sense of guilt because she was the masters’ favourite and worked inside the farm house rather than out on the fields. In this sense virtual role play appeared to offer opportunities for learners to draw on prior knowledge and take an active role in constructing knowledge about the identities, sympathies and concerns of their virtual ‘second self’. Nevertheless, the high degree of agency accorded the student within the interactive medium may not always be exercised in ways deemed desirable by the teacher. Some pupils, particularly the ‘gamers’ in the group, did not stay in role. Instead, they tended to pick fights, exploit bugs in the game world for comic effect and appropriate the instant message facility built into the game for non-game related chat. In short exactly how students choose to participate in the interactive drama might depend to a large part on their own values, priorities and prior experiences. One of the most fascinating themes that emerged concerned how pupils might be forced to challenge their own perspectives on history and assumptions about a range of social issues as a result of temporarily becoming a virtual character they might not naturally identify with. For example this might be an asian Amercian girl playing William Waddill, a loyalists, who perceived the patriot rebels as troublemakers or caucasion American boy playing Dan, a slave character, for whom the essential political dispute over taxation might have appeared like an irrelevant squabble among white folks of little significance to the daily plight of a field slave.

Question 2: How does the experience of playing a character within the Revolution simulation impact on a student’s ability to participate in discussion about aspects of social history?

Students start learning about multiple aspects of life in colonial Williamsburg from the moment they enter the game world. Whilst playing the game, stimulated responses indicated that students were beginning to form understandings and conjectures about aspects of life in the colonial period. However, the role of the teacher / questioner seemed critical. It is unclear to what degree students might reflect and form hypotheses about the significance of the interactions and events that they observed unless prompted to reflect by a question. In short the knowledge acquired might remain tacit. In this sense the teacher remains an essential part of the activity system and there remains a need to consider how devices and activities might be incorporated in the session to provoke critical reflection during game play. However, the experience of virtual role play does appear to furnish pupils with a rich pre-verbal experiential base that can facilitate an inclusive discussion following game play. Each player plays a different character in the game, therefore each participant brings a different perspective on events to the whole group discussion. As a result, the final discussion is informed by multiple view points. For example, all participants may have developed an awareness of the impact of social class on the their characters ability to converse with other characters. However, the implications of ones social class was experienced differently by a student playing Margaret Chadwell, a common serving maid and Robert Carter Nicholas the town magistrate. At times, the multiplicity of perspectives stimulated a rich discussion as multiple students articulated their unique experience of a particular social theme and challenged each others interpretation of events. No one was excluded, since all pupils had shared the same basic experience of situated role play a pupils’ ability to contribute to discussion depended on their ability to articulate the tacit knowledge acquired through the experience of virtual role play rather then their ability to read and understand textual material.

Educational and Scientific Importance of the Study

The study makes a unique and significant contribution to our understanding of the potential of virtual role play for educational ends. It may prove of interest to developers interested in modifying commercial available games for educational purposes, teachers in the humanities interested the new pedagogical possibilities opened up by the experimental use of role playing games modelled on historical periods, researchers interested in theorectical models and methodological techniques to explore the use of interactive gaming technologies in a classroom context and educationalist, parents and the wider public with an interest the implications for media change for education. A full report on this project that explores the experiences of those who participated in the spring workshops is forthcoming. What is clear is that virtual role play provides exciting and radically alternative modes for learning across the humanities. Indeed, when learning with Revolution traditional barriers between academic displines such as history, sociology, geography, drama, art and media studies begins to break down. Further, the study shows that activites based on gaming experiences can be easily devised using freely available digital tools to foster New Literacies in a world in which interactive participatory media are have become part of young peoples’ everyday lives.