Personality Types and Learning Styles Research Papers (original) (raw)

In 1958, American physicist William Higinbotham created what is now considered the first video game, Tennis for Two. Also in 1958, French sociologist Roger Caillois wrote Les jeux et les hommes (published in English in 1961 as Man, Play and Games), an important treatise on play and games as social activity, a promordial form of culture. Building on Johan Huizinga’s seminal Homo Ludens (1950), Caillois introduced key concepts in game studies such as ludus and paidia, equating roughly to rule-based and free form play, and agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry, and ilinx (vertigo), a quadripartite taxonomy of play forms clearly influenced by the traditional four temperaments of Western psychology. Although Caillois’ perspective on digital gameplay is unknown, several design frameworks informed by these play styles have greatly influenced video game development today (e.g. Bartle, 1996; Stewart, 2011; Lazzaro, 2005), as developers try to tune their games to appeal to one or more styles (Reinhardt, 2019).

In the 1970s, around the time videogames were becoming commercialized, American educational psychologist David Kolb and others began forming an experiential theory of learning styles. According to the theory (1984), learning should cycle through experiencing, reflecting, conceptualizing, and experimenting stages, with learners starting with or focusing on the stage they prefer. The theory has been highly influential in language pedagogy, most strongly in multiliteracies pedagogies (New London Group, 1996; Kalantzis & Cope, 2005), and it has been adapted to technology-mediated and gameful L2 pedagogies (Thorne & Reinhardt, 2008; Reinhardt, 2019). Critiques include that it is overly prescriptive and constructivist, it is grounded in individualistic rather than social approaches, it assumes universality of Western cultural learning ideologies, and that as a cycle it does not accommodate the non-linear, complex, and recursive nature of reflective learning (Seaman, 2008).

With the aforementioned setting the stage, the chapter imagines an alternate universe where Caillois did not pass in 1978 but instead visited bilingual Montréal in 1983 where he met Kolb at a hotel bar. Together, they visit an arcade and watch children play games like Space Invaders, Dragon’s Lair, Qix, and Joust. Together, they experience, reflect on, conceptualize, and transform their understandings (though not necessarily in that order) of play and learning styles, as well as of game-mediated language learning.