IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2020 - 28

attention to getting companies and young
designers to think about how media might
be a positive role in young people's lives
and encouraging them to think about and
build a field in which games for impact
might just be normalized into the market.
When she came back to academics, her
time in policy had changed her thinking
on how she might be most impactful.

Examining Impacts
Today, Steinkuehler is a professor in the
Department of Informatics and School of
Education at the University of California,
Irvine, where she researches the cognitive
and social aspects of multiplayer video
games. For the last four years, Steinkuehler and her team have been studying the
impacts of the North American Scholastic
Esports Federation (NASEF). This oneof-a-kind, free, international program
developed by the Samueli Foundation
takes e-sports and builds digital tool kits
and curricula around it that meet International Society for Technology in Education, Next Generation Science Standards,
and other standards. This program is different from many of the other e-sports
programs entering schools today in that it
is constructed not around the competing
team, but around the school-sanctioned
club, where e-sports and the business
of running an e-sports team are used as
the entry point into engaging students in
math, English language arts, and career
technical education.
Steinkuehler's team has conducted
focus interviews and site observations,
performed experimental work, and conducted qualitative survey work to understand the impacts of the program, where
the program is making a difference, and
the results of those impacts. In its work
with NASEF, the team has studied data
science; communication; interest in science, technology, electronics, and mathematics; and even parental behaviors and
attitudes toward gaming, but it is the
findings around social emotional learning, which has emerged as the unexpected power of the NASEF project, that have

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been most interesting to Steinkuehler.
"While the curriculum is really powerful and they're doing great work on the
academic side, this social emotional side
around basic wellness and citizenship online has proved to be this 'sleeping giant'
that I don't know we really anticipated,"
explains Steinkuehler. "It It turns out that
putting this sports frame around games
is this really provocative context to intervene with kids and their behavior online."

The Effects of Tilt
E-sports has grown from the community
up. Unfortunately, this grassroots origin
means that for a long time there hasn't
been corporate oversight to regulate and
govern behavior, and players have had to
more or less figure it out for themselves.
This means that e-sports is not always the
friendliest world. There's toxicity, especially for female and minority gamers.
"A lot of cognitive behavior comes
about when players experience repeated
losses and become frustrated, and the next
thing you know, they're being nasty online," says Steinkuehler. This aggressive,
stress-induced behavior is a big issue in
the industry, and it's a big issue with kids.
It's called tilt, a poker word for when you
start making poor decisions because your

emotions have been hijacked. "Tilt means
that you have kind of lost control of your
feelings and you're in the world of irrationality," Steinkuehler explains.
Video games can be a sort of trigger
topic for parents, but their concerns are
not generally related to online behavior.
"Few parents know enough about games
or care enough about games to talk to kids
about their gameplay, to game along with
them, or to 'shoulder surf'," Steinkuehler
says. Parental involvement is usually confined to concerns about game types and
time spent gaming. This means that most
parents only use restriction and regulation
around games-they either restrict gaming by using hard-and-fast rules, such as
"no gaming past nine o'clock," or they use
regulation, which is more of a negotiation
where, for example, the child may game if
they finish their homework in time.
But, this means that many parents
don't actively parent when it comes to
actually playing games. "We often regulate but we don't as often pay as much
attention to what they're doing-not
just the games they're playing but who
they're playing and how they're playing,"
Steinkuehler articulates. "We tend to focus on whether it's a shooter game, instead of how is the child using the game

In Steinkuehler's University of California, Irvine lab, the team studies what
gamers are doing cognitively and intellectually as they play.

DECEMBER 2020

IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2020

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