Aesthetic Experience and Potential Spaces

In this paper, I am interested in the following question: What can we learn in the strange spaces of digital games? This is not the same as asking what digital games can teach us or what we learn from digital games. Rather, I am interested in thinking about what it is we learn as we play digital games. This question of learning has less to do with the content of the game—although that is an important question too—and more to do with what the experience of the game allows us to think or not think and to be or not be. What do the place and time of the digital game offer us? Educational research on digital games (of which there is still very little) and, more generally, on media education and educational technology is of-ten preoccupied with questions of ‘media effects’. What do media do to us? How do they shape our children’s behaviour? Or, as I phrased it above, what do media teach us? This approach is at the root of concerns about whether or not video game content encourages violent behaviour and fears that the frequent use of digital media will somehow negate the benefits of literat