摘要：This article explores how playing and co-creating games in higher education contexts contributes to expanding learner personas. Working from the interdisciplinary perspectives of media/games studies, pedagogy, and linguistic anthropology, we conceptualize in-class learning as the making and playing of ‘games’, following Long’s “ecology of games” (e.g. Firestone 1989) framework. We report on game experiments and playful practices targeted at learning key theoretical concepts like identity, power, agency, and performance. Game-based modifications to established educational practices involved: replacing lectures with Educational Live Action Role Play (Bowman 2014) sessions and acting/performance games (Boal 2002, Flanagan 2009) to invite learners to embody theory; introducing Twine (Werning 2017; Wilson & Saklofske 2019) to defamiliarize the expected structures and media modalities of academia; and playing analogue games like Mao and Werewolves to illustrate the notions of “community of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991) and “tactics of intersubjectivity” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004) in learning situations. Based on evidence from participant reflections and classroom ethnographies, we argue that games can serve as a resource for extending the expressive spectrum of learner personas, for enabling embodied, participatory learning of theory, and for empowering students and educators to reflect on our internalized rules of the game of education.
