Constance Steinkuehler (University of Wisconsin - Madison) opens the 2016 NMC Summer Conference with her keynote - Games, Learning, and Society: The Intellectual Life of Digital Play.

For video games to be considered a serious medium of expression, they must demonstrate thecapacity to communicate serious ideas or operate with serious intention. This does not mean thatthey should be flat-footed, pedantic, or artless. Rather, the games must demonstrate themselvescapable of expressing and inflecting cultural understandings and values in some way. They mustcreate great art, and they must also be great tools for thinking.In this presentation, Steinkuehler reviews research on the intellectual life of commercialentertainment video games and highlights the ways in which the culture of play functions as acritique of schooling, highlighting the downfalls of standardization in the United States, evidencedin both the substance of what we teach and metrics we use to assess children. She details researchon the communities that games inspire and the culture they encourage against the backdrop ofstatus quo in education, explains how and where games might serve as a vehicle for Americandomestic policy, and suggests key advances needed to help usher in a new golden age of games.