'Just Gaming': On Being Differently Literate

Kendall and McDougall's "'Just Gaming': On Being Differently Literate" argues that video game play produces meaning through active, agentic engagement rather than the interpretive habits associated with reading, and that UK media literacy policy, shaped by regulatory and protectionist concerns such as the Byron Report, has failed to account for these practices. Drawing on Gee's work on active and critical learning and on Game Literacy research, the authors contend that media literacy should recognise plural, local forms of meaning-making rather than reducing them to a single set of competences or levels.

The study's empirical basis is a qualitative investigation of eight UK media students aged 16 to 17 who played Grand Theft Auto IV, blogged about their sessions in a Facebook group, and took part in half-hour interviews. The authors find that players adopt performative, self-aware "story-teller" personas for their blog audiences and treat the game as a fantasy distinct from their everyday selves. Their accounts repeatedly fracture the narrative with meta-aware commentary on mechanics, humour, moral discomfort, and gendered interactions. Players also engage in "parological" play, such as deliberately disrupting missions, which the authors present as evidence that readers creatively subvert intended meanings.

Participants described gaming as more engaging than reading or film because they control outcomes and "make their own story," and they moved fluidly between immersion and evaluative distance. The authors conclude that there is no single way of being in a game. They note that all participants were male, a limitation they treat as shaping the performances observed. Taken together, the work calls for media literacy frameworks that are more theoretically grounded and attentive to player voices, linking policy more explicitly to research on media literacy as social practice.