The Digital Edge. S. Craig Watkins
to playing also led to the creation of some fruitful social relationships within the game.
Jason, a fifteen-year-old from Florida, was someone that Miguel met in the virtual gaming world. “I was a noob [newbie] and had a quest that needed to be done and he decided to help,” Miguel told us. During the quest they entered a dungeon and killed the boss. Shortly after that they became in-game friends and connected with each other outside of the game through Facebook.
Another colleague in the game also came to his rescue in a time of need. “I had this other friend that invited me to his faction because my old faction was full of a-holes,” Miguel said. He needed another quest to complete a level, and the leader of the other guild helped him achieve his mission. They started chatting after that. The leader of that guild was twenty-four years old and lived in New York. Miguel was fourteen. He also befriended a couple based in Brooklyn. He chatted with them three or four times a week via Skype’s voice service.
Needless to say, the strategic play, social ties, and skills that Miguel developed through participation in Perfect World intrigued us. This was a whole different person. In school Miguel was reserved, quiet, and unassuming. Out of school he was actively involved in a virtual gaming world that required him to collaborate with strangers to problem solve and that also led to meaningful social interactions outside of the game.
The challenging computing conditions that they faced at home made after-school time especially appealing to Miguel and Marcus. Like a core group of students in our study, the twins stayed after school to access the Internet. When the school day ended, their social gaming and computing lives began. The twins were tinkerers and fond of experimenting with new online gaming platforms, forms of play, and communities.
As a result of their curiosity, the twins introduced Minecraft into their peer group’s informal gaming ecology. Somebody (it was never revealed who) took the time to secretly download Minecraft on all of the computers in Mr. Warren’s Game Lab. This act of bravado turned the classroom into a quasi-Minecraft studio for a brief period of time. In addition to playing the game, several students shared their perspectives and knowledge about the open and innovative world the Minecraft platform has sparked.
While Marcus, Miguel, and some of the other students played the game recreationally after school, Mr. Warren, the advanced game design instructor, was exposed to Minecraft and its merits as a learning engine. The following summer Marcus and Miguel were among a small cadre of students who received an invitation to work on a Minecraft-based project with geologists from a local university. The informal gameplay enriched the formal learning opportunities for the twins and some of their peers.
Critics typically decry engagement in gaming worlds, but the assorted skills—social, tactical, and communication—that some pick up can be useful beyond the game world.15 The twins were among the few students in our sample who played in this particular sandbox of digital and participatory culture. In many ways, their play was socially networked and reciprocal—that is, connected to other gamers who helped them execute various quests, level up, and attain skills and in-game assets that raised their status and capabilities within Perfect World. These are precisely the kinds of skills—leveraging networks to achieve mastery, greater competency, and social mobility—that are growing increasingly valuable in a knowledge-driven and networked world.
Even in a home environment that required four siblings to share an outdated PC, Miguel actively participated in a connected gaming community. Moreover, Miguel and Marcus’s discovery of Minecraft contributed to the making of a rich, informal learning and gaming ecology at Freeway. Their openness to new gaming platforms and experiences led to important learning opportunities for them and their peers and also embodies the creative resilience that is a vital but seldom noticed feature of life in the digital edge.
Shifting Contexts of Internet Engagement
In addition to learning about their access to Internet media, we were interested in learning more about the contexts in which black, Latino, and low-income youth use media technologies. Their widespread use of social and mobile media can be attributed to many factors, including a rapidly evolving media environment. In this section we focus on two features of this changing environment. First, we consider the widespread adoption of the Internet in schools. Second, we discuss how the diffusion of Internet-enabled handheld devices has profoundly reshaped the technology landscape and practices of black, Latino, and lower-income youth.
The Internet Goes to School
Since the mid-1990s, public schools in the United States have made steady progress in expanding Internet access. In 1994, 3 percent of U.S. schools had Internet access in instructional rooms.16 By 2005, nearly all (94 percent) public schools had Internet access in instructional rooms.17
Predictably, schools with high poverty and black and Latino student populations were less likely than their counterpart schools to provide Internet access. In 1999, about three-quarters, 74 percent, of low-minority schools provided Internet access in instructional classrooms compared with 43 percent of high-minority schools. By 2005 schools with “majority-minority” populations (92 percent) were about as likely as schools with “majority-majority” populations (96 percent) to have access to the Internet in instructional classrooms.18 The same was true across economic lines. Schools with a majority of students from lower-income households (91 percent) were nearly as likely as schools with a majority of students from higher-income households (96 percent) to provide Internet access in instructional classrooms.19
In short, by 2005 most public school students—lower-income/higher-income, black/white/Latino, primary/secondary—were in classrooms that could provide Internet access.
These data, however, are misleading. Even though virtually all schools in the United States are connected to the Internet, not all connections are equal. First, there are substantial differences in the speed and quality of connections. During our time in the field, only 30 percent of U.S. public schools were meeting the Federal Communications Commission’s minimum Internet access goal of one hundred kilobits per second per student, according to a study by the nonprofit EducationSuperHighway.20 Freeway offered wireless connectivity, but it was spotty and occasionally required patience to use.
While Freeway was a wired school, not every classroom had computers. This was not atypical or inherently problematic. The school did not have sufficient funds for distributing laptops or tablets to each student to create what are commonly called “one-to-one computing environments.” A laptop or tablet for every child is more likely to occur in affluent rather than lower-income schools. Freeway’s main computer lab consisted of a cluster of desktops in the school’s library. The library computers were used on occasion for school-based assignments, but we never observed high traffic or usage. Among the students that we spent the most time with, there was barely any mention of the library computers. This was in sharp contrast to the two classrooms in which we spent the entire school year—the Game Lab and the Digital Media Lab.
Both of these classrooms were outfitted with Apple iMac computers with large twenty-seven-inch display screens and an impressive suite of software. Students who were enrolled in either the Game Design or the Video and Technology applications elective courses used these computers as a matter of routine to create digital videos, graphics, and even simple games. As we discuss in chapter six, students also used the computers in these two classrooms to pursue more interest-driven projects during the after-school hours. It may have been precisely because the computers in the game and media labs were not marked strictly as “academic” that made them a more desirable destination for students and their “non-academic” creative pursuits.
As recently as 2013, only about 20 percent of U.S. students had access to true high-speed connections in their classrooms.21 Freeway students frequently complained about the spotty Internet connections when using their own devices. In fact, it was common for Freeway students to express frustration with a school Internet that was also deliberately limited as a result of the school district’s decision to block access to social media. In short, even as schools have become a key point of access to the networked world, lower-income students remain hampered by an inadequate technical infrastructure for high-capacity networks, ill-conceived district policies that block