Transdisciplinarity

You may be surprised with the answer: the world’s network gaming youth culture and the video game industry. Network gamers engaged in “hacking”, “moding” and “skinning” video games are natural transdisciplinary knowledge workers. Modding is the act of creating new levels, objects, or systems for a game, or building an entirely new game using engines from other games; “skinning” is the act of retexturing characters, objects, or environments (Pearce).

John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, obseves that the “wired generation”—children who grew up with the network as a primary form of socialization—have shifted from linear deductive reasoning to Renaissance, lateral, bricolage (jack of all trades) reasoning (Brown, 2003). Additionally, US Army studies indicate that the learning styles, skills, and attitudes of this generation are different from its predecessors (Macedonia, n.d.). According to Macedonia and the US Army, characteristics of the wired generation include:
• Multiprocessing, the ability to perform several tasks concurrently.
• Attention span variation resembling senior executives exhibiting fast context switching.
• Information navigation changes that define literacy not only as text but also as images and multimedia.
• Shift in focus of learning from passive listening to discovery-based experiential and example-based learning.
• Shift in type of reasoning from deductive and abstract to the concrete.
• Intelligence organized in easily accessible databases.
• Communities of practice emerging from shared tasks.

Network gamers are both consumers and producers of digital content; they also are learners and teachers. At the Austin Gaming Expo, a well-attended, annual game convention targeting consumers, we surveyed 62 gamers for their level of involvement in game development, learning, self-organizing communities of practice, and innovation networks. We asked, “Which of the following formal or informal game development efforts are you involved with?” Of the 62 respondents, 45.2% answered that they were “not involved in any of these activities.” However, of those surveyed who were involved, “hacking games to learn” ranked highest, followed closely by “providing feedback to game companies.”

Consumer Experience in Game Development

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See: games-nano-bio-info-cogno-envro:
How Digital Gaming Connects 21st Century Science, Education and Workforce
http://www.txstate.edu/nac/documents/brazell.pdf

Network gamers involved in these activities as a community of practice form an identity and are bound together by a shared sense of purpose—solving complex problems related to creating or modifying virtual worlds. It is essentially a creative process where gamers learn by doing. Network game teams who mod and construct games often straddle learning and commercialization—a key aspect of transdisciplinarity. The process of modifying a game is in effect social construction of knowledge and technology. This is characterized as self-organizing innovation networks:

“… [self-organizing] innovation networks provide artifacts with the design of visions of usage and subject them to the learning processes […] In this sense the production and application of new technologies is no longer a process of trial and
How Digital Gaming Connects 21st Century Science, Education and Workforce error involving variation and selection but, rather, a coordinated process of learning and designing by producers and users […] Research into the genesis of technology focuses on the role of collective actors who combine technical variation and selection within technology production, which no longer can be equated with the construction of artifacts. Instead, it involves the anticipation and construction of new contexts of application […] This new conceptualization of ‘innovation within a net’ replaces biological principles of variation and selection used in evolutionary economics with social construction, that is, the construction of new artifacts and new contexts of application.” (Kuppers)

In this constructivist process, gamers learn by fusing artistic, scientific and engineering techniques in order to create new games, new game levels, new game art and in some cases new applications for games within non-entertainment markets. It is the application of gaming technologies and skills to non-game markets, problems, research questions and technologies that is most compelling in the context of 21st Century science, education and workforce issues.

Self Organizing Innovation Networks for Gaming R&D

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See: games-nano-bio-info-cogno-envro:
How Digital Gaming Connects 21st Century Science, Education and Workforce
http://www.txstate.edu/nac/documents/brazell.pdf

Formal analysis of the video game industry indicates that game design includes art, informatics, production and business domains, however, the majority of employers consider: knowledge skills and abilities in multiple disciplines; ability to integrate scientific and artistic concepts and ability to communicate and work effectively in multidisciplinary teams important to critically important.
Functional Domains of Commercial Game Production
Source: IC2 Institute

The practice of “fusing” artistic, scientific and engineering techniques is not new, however, the unification of R&D and production is novel. As it relates to the game industry, outside of major game publishers and major console manufacturers, the game industry is not typically-characterized as research-intensive. R&D is usually addressed through game development projects. The mutual reinforcement of R&D and production accelerates innovation in the industry. Game developers constantly push technological boundaries through unified production and R&D. We term this process “production R&D.” Production R&D is the transdisciplinary process of real-time learning, adaptation, and innovation within the context of production.

Disney, Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic are exemplars of this transdisciplinary process. Walt Disney’s “Imagineering” is perhaps the best known and most successful model. Disney’s Imagineering is the master planning, creative development, design, engineering, production, project management and research and development arm of The Walt Disney Company. The dotcom creator-type companies that emerged between 1995-2000 also used this concept of unified R&D and production. Interestingly, the global network game youth culture exhibits these traits of real-time learning, adaptation, and innovation within the context of hacking, modding and skinning games. For these communities of practice; work, learning, and play are one.