| dc.description.abstract | How do gamers play and what are gamers’ competencies while gaming have been hiding in a black box. What are the competencies that result from gaming experiences? This is a core concern being debated in the field of learning science lately, but not thoroughly unveiled. The present study aims to analyze the emerging co-constructive knowledge in gamers’ communities, identifying the characteristics of potential competencies gamers may exhibit. The main research question is “What are the unknown/potential competencies among gamers of the gaming generation?”
Through a long-term engagement in the gaming field, along with field notes, interviews, and document analysis, the present study unveiled three important findings: the knowledge of gaming community, the co-constructive competencies among gamers, and the competence of re-gamification.
Gamers’ potential competencies revealed in the present study, in fact, were not the experimental results concluded from a deliberately designed research. Rather, they were gleaned from authentic gaming field, with the approach of long-term ethnographic immersion, by the researcher. The present study has two significant contributions. First, a two-dimensional analytic framework that specifically identified the extant literature gap has been proposed. The framework, a coordinate system identifying gamers’ wide range of competencies, serves as a breakthrough on which fellow researchers could easily rely in gaming community research. Second, as an experienced gaming veteran, the present study strived to provide an analytic framework for gaming researchers, bridging the knowledge gap between gamers’ communities and gaming community researchers. That is, transferring and interpreting the known and the unknown of these communities, bridging and minimizing the literature gap of gamers’ hidden competencies through empirical studies is a timely response to the field of academic gaming community research.
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