As interactive multimodal texts, video games can teach SEL because of their unique affordances. This chapter investigates how playing video games can teach literacy to adolescent children while also cultivating their opportunities to develop SEL skills. SEL is defined, as is the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) SEL Framework, a set of five competencies that also considers the nested environments that children inhabit. Next, emerging research on adolescent neuroplasticity when video games are used as an SEL intervention is reviewed. How the consumption of interactive media, like video games, affects well-being is explored, followed by the ways in which video games teach literacy through a variety of modalities. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how games and games genre map and align to CASEL's SEL framework.
TopIntroduction
The International Literacy Association defines literacy as “the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, compute, and communicate using visual, audible, and digital materials across disciplines and in any context” (Why Literacy?, 2020, para. 1). Although this definition is broad, in schools, students may typically spend much of class time learning accepted spellings, pronunciations, phonics, phonemes, and grammatical rules of written text, but not other modalities (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). However, literacy is more than writing, just as speaking is just one communitive form of knowledge representation; ideas can also be transmitted through imagery, sounds, and embodiment.
Literature represents the highest canon of written language shares the same stem as literacy (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). Kidd and Castano (2013) studied readers of literary fiction and compared them to nonfiction readers. Findings suggested that those who read literary fiction were better at mentalizing the inner thoughts of characters, which led to boosts in the capacity to have empathy and perspective-take (Kidd & Castano, 2013). This effect, known as theory of mind, describes how readers sometimes vicariously experience others’ situations (Bal & Veltkamp, 2013; Frith & Frith, 2005). Theory of mind can depend on the strength of narrative that mentally transports readers into fictional worlds (Bal & Veltkamp, 2013; Murphy et al., 2011).
Changes have been observed in brain networks when theory of mind occurs (Frith & Frith, 2005; Kidd & Castano, 2013; Mar & Oatley, 2008). Extensive networks in the brain develop, including “the superior temporal sulcus, fusiform gyrus, temporal pole, medial prefrontal cortex, frontal pole, orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, temporoparietal junction, and cingulate cortex” (Singh & Duraiappah, 2020, p. 1). These changes differ from other experiences that evoke perspective-taking and empathy, such as embodiment (Singh & Duraiappah, 2020).
Played by nearly all children (“Essential Facts,” 2021), video games are an example of a multimodal text that has been shown to boost empathic concern amongst adolescents (Kral et al., 2018). Like theory of mind in literary fiction, in video games, players are transported to imagined worlds where they may take on someone else’s perspectives and then make choices based on that other self (Gee, 2007). Walker and Weidenbenner (2019) suggest that playing video games can “open the doors to true empathy via perspective-taking as well as the opportunity to utilize empathy in abstract realms such as hypothetical scenarios and virtual domains” (p. 121).
Mahood and Hanus (2017) analyzed players’ mental transport feelings in a video game’s fictional virtual world. Two groups of participants played a role-playing video game: the first group played an action sequence with no context; the second group viewed a video backstory of in-game characters. The second group was further divided and were shown different backstories: one morally positive, the other immoral and negative. Players who took immoral actions after each backstory experienced more guilt feelings than players who simply engaged in action sequences.
Research from Tangney and Dearing (2002) suggests a synergistic link between guilt-proneness, or receptivity to feelings of guilt, to empathic concern. Guilt-proneness, which players can feel if they take an action that they may regret, has been “positively associated with self-report measures of other-oriented empathy and perspective-taking” (Treeby et al., 2016, p. 1509). Thus, there is the potential for teaching certain SEL competencies with games that tap into emotions specific to play.