Digital Games for Peace Education

Interactive, communicative, and participatory activities contribute to the effectiveness of peace education. The use of games in educational settings is expressed as educational games. From the Oregon Trail to today's highly interactive games, many games have been used to support learning in many subjects. To state it specifically about peace education, the history of digital games for peace education started with My City (1995), supported by UNICEF, continued with games aiming different learning subjects, such as Escape from Woomera (2003), Ayiti (2006), PeaceMaker (2007), Hush (2007) and This War of Mine (2014). The most important contribution of these games in terms of peace education is that individuals gain empathy and perspective. These gains at cognitive and affective domains will contribute to individuals to be more successful in conflict resolution. The games introduced in this chapter are detailed with their pros and cons within the scope of peace education. The researches based on these games are included, and the critical findings of these studies are discussed.

“This is like an RPG where you pick up friends along the way”

This chapter examines how Millennial friends in their late twenties appropriate texts from video games they have played to serve particular social interactive functions in their everyday face-to-face conversations. Speakers use references to the video games Papers, Please, The Oregon Trail, Minecraft, and Role Playing Games (RPGS) to shift the epistemic territories of conversations when they encounter interactional dilemmas. These epistemic shifts simultaneously rekey formerly problematic talk (on topics like rent, money, and injuries) to lighter, humorous talk, reframing these issues as being part of a lived video game experience. Overlapping game frames are laminated upon real-life frames and are strengthened by embedded frames containing constructed dialogue. This chapter contributes to understanding how epistemic shifts relying on intertextual ties can shift frames during interactional dilemmas in everyday conversation, which is ultimately conducive to group identity construction.

The Problem with Preservation: Aesthetics and Sanctuary in Catlin, Parkman, Erdrich, Melville, and Byatt

Chapter three traces preservation’s antebellum theorization and long-lasting repercussions. The first parts of this chapter delineate the flawed aesthetic logic of preservation, beginning with the earliest proposal for a “Nation’s Park” in painter and writer George Catlin’s Letters and Notes (1844). Preservation emerges as an environmental ethic because indigenous, “wild” natural spectacles are imagined to benefit an expanding, increasingly “civilized” white U.S. population. While Catlin calls for preservation of the beauty he sees in the Plains peoples, bison, and their threatened landscape, Francis Parkman Jr.’s The Oregon Trail (1849) writes of an ugliness in need of violent eradication. Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag (2010) illustrates the pernicious persistence of such aesthetic violence. The final portion of the chapter illuminates preservation’s flawed spatial logic. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) rejects the possibility of whale extinction by insisting that whales have ocean sanctuaries to which they can retreat. A. S. Byatt’s plastic pollution tale, “Sea Story” (2013), plays out the destructive twenty-first-century consequences of Moby-Dick’s romantic ideas about nature. Altogether, the chapter suggests that preservation is an environmental ethic imbricated in settler colonialism, incapable of fostering meaningful human or interspecies community, and whose meagre benefits only continue to diminish as anthropogenic climate crisis intensifies.

Digital Games for Peace Education

Interactive, communicative, and participatory activities contribute to the effectiveness of peace education. The use of games in educational settings is expressed as educational games. From the Oregon Trail to today's highly interactive games, many games have been used to support learning in many subjects. To state it specifically about peace education, the history of digital games for peace education started with My City (1995), supported by UNICEF, continued with games aiming different learning subjects, such as Escape from Woomera (2003), Ayiti (2006), PeaceMaker (2007), Hush (2007) and This War of Mine (2014). The most important contribution of these games in terms of peace education is that individuals gain empathy and perspective. These gains at cognitive and affective domains will contribute to individuals to be more successful in conflict resolution. The games introduced in this chapter are detailed with their pros and cons within the scope of peace education. The researches based on these games are included, and the critical findings of these studies are discussed.