Rocksmith All Nite: Technology-Mediated Guitar Learning in an Online Affinity Space

In efforts to gain a deeper understanding of how technologies can provide alternative ways for people to learn how to play a musical instrument, this dissertation explores how digital games can inspire and foster music learning with the support of online communities in which people gather to learn, share, and collaborate. These communities have been defined in the literature as affinity spaces (Gee, 2018), a concept that builds upon Lave and Wenger's (1991) framework of communities of practice and highlights their informal and interest-driven features. This qualitative study uses both discourse analysis and multimodal analysis to examine how people discuss learning to play the guitar by using the PlayStation 4 game Rocksmith with the support of an online affinity space dedicated to this game. The research question for this study is: How do people discuss learning to play the guitar through Rocksmith in an online affinity space?In order to answer this research question, user posts were collected from the official online discussion forum dedicated to the game and analyzed using discourse analysis and multimodal analysis in order to identify how people discuss learning to play music through playful technologies (such as the Rocksmith game) with the support of a dedicated online affinity space.