Cyber-ludic pedagogies: towards a post-critical methodology of video games as cultural sites

In this paper, we explore contradictions in the uneven movements of engaging video games in learning, and the affective deployment of play as a strategic mechanism to guarantee institutional and civic compliance. To that purpose, we are tracing the links between positivist, evaluative paradigms in Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) scholarship, arguing that a linear assessment of knowledge transmission does not adequately engage the complexity of virtual worlds and the learning processes they mobilize. As a response, we propose a cyber-ludic pedagogical framework that embeds gamers’ knowledge-production practices and performances in the wider social context they occupy, acknowledging their hybridity as digital and physical experiences. We apply this framework to a case-study reading of a vlog entry performed as a humorous guide to social distancing at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our reading recognizes the operationalization of knowledge communication modes as tropes while emphasizing discrete projects of brand awareness, identity formation, and claims to digital space. Our analysis of the vlog performance of what we term ‘technodeviance’ serves to de-exoticize the deviant in educational research; problematize the assumption of one-way knowledge transmission and representation; and center the pedagogical value of game and play data that is found in popular culture texts and in user-generated content.