Despite my general WoW fatigue, I enjoyed these readings quite a bit (a big improvement over last week). The readings made me think in particular about Metagaming through their various arguments for continuing game studies as critical necessity.

Metagaming (which I wrote my MA thesis on and still is a constant obsession of mine), is generally definable as things from outside a game affecting the play within; the outside or intersecting play impacting the inside. The Mortensen piece made me think of Metagaming in its discussion of online role playing because Metagaming, by its nature, is despised by hardcore role-players. Because (hardcore) role-players strive to “become” their character, they often scorn those who bring any knowledge from real-life into their game, even things like using “real world” nicknames for items or phenomena (Grok the Orc warlord would know what shampoo is, Dave). Role players, in seeking to protect the pristine play-world, actively seek to keep the real world out.

The irony of this viewpoint, at least from my scholarly vantage point, is that Metagaming is precisely what enables role playing (and all play for my money). In order to immerse oneself in a character of someone other than oneself, you have to get the knowledge of how that character would act from somewhere, whether it be one’s own experiences or some (however stable or faulty) perception of the other.

That is why I think Leonard’s piece is so powerful and Metagaming is still worth studying. The arguments of those who wish to portray gaming as a-political or who want to “de-politicize” gaming are ignoring the inherent links gaming has to the “outside” world and the reciprocal relationships they have with each other. They make the same argument the role-players do: that the game world is separate and doesn’t/shouldn’t affect the “real lives” of anyone (as evidenced by TOA’s argument that they were only rewriting “their” story, not anyone else’s). To Leonard’s point, Where do racist and sexist depictions of women and minorities come from if not the minds of their creators?  The racial and gender tourism that Leonard critiques, as presented in quotes from Collins, is enabled by the players dismissing the destructive metagame it plays into by refusing to interrogate the white-male viewpoint. Acknowledging the presence of metagames and the way they interconnect issues and discourses along with studying the processes of Metagaming can provide critical inroads to studying this destructive behavior as well as examining the positive educational effects games can have.

Super Mario 64

Let’s Play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us9SbwqlWlI&index=15&list=PL2DxTTRCgIYUJoaJmZREDzx4i7HlCiSME
Speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qM278YSN2s&list=PLjLL281mHfFLiO00DhgQR5UumwLHx82k2&index=3
(Starts about 2 minutes in. King Bob-Omb fight starts around 20 minute mark; you don’t have to skip right to it. Around the 40 minute mark he breaks the game with his play)

Super Mario Land 2: Yoshi’s Island

Let’s Play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT00aCO-qPI&list=PL2DxTTRCgIYUJoaJmZREDzx4i7HlCiSME&index=14
Speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOrA91_xg4M&list=PLjLL281mHfFLiO00DhgQR5UumwLHx82k2&index=4

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Let’s Play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJax0YPEDLA
Speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M7IINwTFVw&index=1&list=PL2DxTTRCgIYUJoaJmZREDzx4i7HlCiSME

Activity: Take out a piece of paper, turn it horizontal, and write play at one end and rhetoric at another. As your team discusses the questions, map each term and look for connection points where possible.

1. Bogost says that gamified “exploitationware” replaces reciprocal relationships between games and people with one-way, mindless connections. What relationships and connections have you formed to you favorite games and why? What relationships are on display in the gameplay videos you’re watching? How does that contribute to meaning? Also, Bogost’s argument relies on a fairly shallow definition of rhetoric. If you want to discuss/vent about Bogost for a bit and report back to the class about that, I welcome it.
2. Schrimer compares play to techne, a loaded term in classical rhetoric that translates loosely craft or art, in that play is flexible while reaching a linear destination, acquirable in specific context, and fulfills some creative desire through attention to form and content. How is the play in these video creative,  artful, or inventive? Does the comparison to craft ring true to any of your experiences playing your favorite game?
3. These games are, admittedly, not the best to talk about queer identities and gender performance in-game and out, but that doesn’t mean they are the worst, either. Broadly, a (good?) game can let the player express something about themselves through play. How do these players express something about themselves or “write”  through playing them, either through role-play or interpretive action? What “Style” of player are you and how do you express that through play in games?
4. Owens’s article about Mr. Moo and RPGMakerVS.net highlights the processes specialized communities go through to produce knowledge and critique for productive ends. What aspects of community are on display here and how do they contribute to the play in these videos?
5. In what ways are or aren’t the previous readings we’ve done on games, learning, and rhetoric apparent in this book or not? What about the videos?
6. How does this book treat rhetoric? Is it’s treatment of game studies satisfying? How does your own conception of rhetoric reflected or not in this book? How about play?

I find myself reacting negatively to a lot of the articles from section two of this book, not because I don’t believe in what they are arguing for, but because of the mode of their arguments.

Johnson and Colby’s article arguing that scholars need to play more games to critically engage with them in and outside of the classroom and that game studies is under, instead of over, represented in composition studies, supports my own feelings on the subject and resonates with my motivation for studying games, but the framing as a “study” is embarrassing, and the reliance on Bogost for definitional value of games is short-sighted, limited, and defies my love for games and education/rhetoric.

Miller’s article on composition metaphors and the Legend of Zelda is charming and persuasive to me, but that is also it’s biggest weakness: it’s persuasive to me as gamer with a certain background and value for certain games (and games period). The similarities between composition and Zelda dungeons offers some valuable insight into both, and I am excited by the idea of motivating students with video game analogies, but it also makes me think about who those students are that it will motivate: probably students that are not at broad risk of failing in the first place and possess the literacy to understand what I am telling them in the first place.

Shultz Colby’s piece on female gamers in her composition class provides the best jumping-off point of all the articles in this section, for my money, because it states, in plain terms, the hardships female gamers face and the underserved nature of non-male gamers in classroom spaces. Yes, as a study it is also middling, but the case-study testimonials of the students gives great insight into the real barriers gaming puts up to certain groups of students and opens conversation to addressing them. It also gets at the real problem facing the broader acceptance of games in education: the gatekeeper nature of gaming literacy. That is the gap that needs to be bridged, and it has to do with gaming itself as much as our approach to it.

1. Bogost describes rhetoric as a “general field of inquiry” concerned with persuasion and inscription of persuasive arguments. He distinguishes between many types of rhetoric (oral, written, visual, digital, procedural) based on the mode of inscription or inquiry they privilege. How does this position rhetoric in Bogost’s writing? Is it important as a standalone concept or must it be linked to something else always? How does his choice of classical philosophers as representatives of rhetoric affect its presentation and the role it plays in his writing? What are the importance and capabilities of rhetoric, according to Ian Bogost?
2. The key to procedural expression, according to Bogost, is that procedures are inflexible when they are performed by machines and programs. Bogost attributes a lot of expressive power to processes and machines themselves. How does this reshape or reconfigure the relationship between computers and writing? Is there evidence of this inflexibility controlling or influencing work and production in our previous readings on computers and composition in classroom settings up to this point?
3. Bogost compares procedures to bureaucracy, laws, and indicates “they are… crafted from the top down.” When defining play, Bogost relies on Salen and Zimmerman’s definition of play as a space of possibility within a rigid system (see attachment). For Salen and Zimmerman, that rigid system is largely constituted by what they call “rules,” similar to Huizinga’s conception of rules. What distinguishes rules from procedures and how do procedures and rules differ in practice? What makes procedures instructive or expressive in a way rules aren’t?

1. Bogost chides digital rhetoric scholars, saying “for scholars of digital rhetoric, to “function in digital spaces” often means mistaking subordinate properties of the computer for primary ones,” meaning they often misinterpret the communication functions computers facilitate is a misguided attempt to map oral rhetoric onto machines, when their true rhetorical potential lies in their computational abilities. Based on our other readings thus far on digital rhetoric, is it fair for Bogost to critique digital rhetoric scholars this way? How does taking a more machine-centric look at rhetoric change the parameters of digital rhetoric?
2. One of Bogost’s stated goals at the beginning of Persuasive Games is to argue for video games as a respected art form, and that the quality of life the art of video games reflect is procedurality. Procedurality, according to Bogost, is “the logic by which something works,” which he extends to social and cultural phenomena. Is this the key relationship of video games to real life, and is this what elevates video games to a higher art form?
3. What is the role of humans and human elements (or interference) in Bogost’s system of rhetoric?

Salen and Zimmerman_Rules of Play_Game Design Fundamentals_2004_ch10

Agonism is a concept I always have a hard time accepting. On the one hand, I think there’s something to be said for learning from adversity and hardship, but I suspect agonism has more in common with hazing than instruction. I enjoy games that are brutally difficult, like Bloodborne or Roguelikes because of the laser-focus on trial and error and detail-oriented iteration of technique, and desensitization to the idea that failure will kill you, but that’s me. I don’t want to ask my students enjoy what I enjoy like that. Agonism has a tendency to discourage people from playing as much as it does to teach them about failure. I much prefer Jesper Juul’s account of failure-game relationships wherein a good game teaches the player to overcome failures before them in a safe space. Huizinga’s recount of agon in his section on ritual “games” or “play” that give life and society meaning through their underlying themes of sacrifice, of course, makes sense, but I question it when we talk about application to education. If anything, I’d like to see Huizinga take up the concept of eristic games, instructive countering of moves/arguments simply to see them played out. Not only is it a solid metagaming activity that instructs players on the limits and possibilities of the game, it can be coupled with reflection to show why some moves are better for others, not just for the sake of the game but for the sake of the players. Above all else, eristic exercises can be instituted in a more safe way than agonism, which assumes that conflict is ever-present and pervasive. I see why Huizinga doesn’t take up eristic games: they’re not ritualized. I admire Huizinga’s project to show the “seriousness”
that comes from games and their contributions to society, but it’s also important to focus on the play that happens on small scales and doesn’t always result in great singular meaning.

I find the pairing of these articles a bit weird. It’s tempting to say that they are common to each other in that they provide dissenting or alternative viewpoints to the persistent drumbeat of “rah rah technology is cool” articles, but I don’t think that’s quite fair to these two articles individually. Aschauer, particularly, is more redemptive of technology in that she seeks to revise the category by making it more experiential–thinking about technology as something that seamlessly integrates with our experiences in order to revise women’s relationship to it as something they possess mastery of. I’m a fan of this strategy, since it capitalizes on mastery a group already possesses and doesn’t task them with playing “catch up” as the only road to equality (as she says, that viewpoint is inherently deterministic). I like her attempt at reconciliation with Haraway. I, too, hold Haraway’s notion of the cyborg dear to me (although that’s not really what a cyborg would do, I guess), but I agree that it must come from theory and practice of everyday life, and not broad abstractions.

It’s tempting to dismiss Chapman and his admitted Ludditism, but I paused after on line in the last paragraph: “We may be able to avoid the Siren call of the Web as we avoided the false promises of televised classes in the 1960s and computer tutorials in the 1970s” (emphasis added). I know this is thinking way past what Chapman is arguing against in this article, but t made me think of, in the immediate, MOOCs. Education delivered over the TV seems like a monumentally bad idea driven by the same efficiency and monetary concerns as the recent push for widespread MOOCs and general downsizing of educators going on right now. In that context, it’s easier to see how Chapman, who I assume is an older faculty member (probably white, yes?) would see web technology as another mass broadcast system being collectively promoted as the Next Big Thing in education without any firm grasp on why and no clear vision for how. While I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong, what remains more crucially unclear if that’s a bad or good thing, either in 1999, or now.

I almost hand-wrote this in HTML, but this handy WordPress UI does such a good job of visualizing what my text will look like as I read it, i thought, “why bother?”

In all seriousness, though, the coding vs writing tension still resonates with me because I see code languages as writing languages, but I now, nearly 15 years after this debate was in full swing, wonder if that’s enough. Yes, people write with them, but how much of the learning to write with them is the equivalent of learning proper grammar so the machine will properly interpret your code, for instance? If what we’re teaching is communication and “critical thinking,” does knowing the proper syntax for HTML contribute to that directly? Probably as much as grammar does to English, which is to say a lot, but in ways that are imperceptible to the reader unless it’s wrong, and modern FYC tends to only cover grammar when absolutely necessary. So the question I’m left with is, why would we do that so much for markup languages like HTML, for instance?

I think the answer lies in the fact that significantly fewer students come to FYC knowing HTML than English, as it represents a weakness in their functional literacy in the 21st century which, we keep telling ourselves, will ultimately draw up lines of power between those who can “code” and those who can’t (like us). Ergo, teaching coding and web markup can be seen as part of our charge to prepare students for writing in their lives henceforth.

If I seem super cynical on this point, it’s probably because I want to keep myself invested in the argument by questioning myself. I particularly sympathize with the Mauriello, Pagnucci, and Winner piece and it’s lamentation of class time lost to technical instruction in search of expanding the domain of composition, and the need to create research networks to work on the problem. When I teach my Minecraft narrative remediation assignment, I routinely lose 2-3 class periods overall to technical problems, either with firewall, backup, or networking issues, and I have to constantly remind myself that it’s in service of the students’ enhanced literacy that views language, narrative, and code together and not separated, not just for their good but for the (STEM) disciplines they will go into. At a time when people are worried for the future of the humanities in the face of STEM dominance and corporatization of the University (and if you’re not than you should be), I think teaching with digital composition mediums, particularly game design, is one of the better defensive moves composition can make to not only a) show relevance of humanities to STEM but b) keep humanities values, like critical thinking, argumentation, ethics, emotion, and logic, alive in STEM, which is what we really want, at the end of the day. Instead of retreating back to text-and-text writing, purposeful integration of technology into humanities will achieve integration of humanities into tech via the students that join the STEM workforces. In that paradigm, we are “contributing” on par with technical instruction. If we treat our own field as a “service” that provides “value added” to STEM fields by teaching writing divorced from “weird” composition mediums, there will be nothing to stop administration from fully transforming humanities professors and adjuncts into contingent labor, replaceable with the drop of a hat.

I kept thinking, as I read these articles, how deeply ingrained play and games are in learning itself, and how the dangers that come along with it are enhanced as much as the benefits by new technology. I’m thinking mostly of the Daisley piece, where the playful nature of the students is opened up, facilitating conversation in some instances, and shutting down it down with vicious comments in the next breath. Daisley acknowledges some of the hard questions, like “is abuse part of the game?” but doesn’t answer them all in-depth. I suspect that’s because her aim is to achieve acceptance of games and play as legitimate learning activities, and she doesn’t have the necessary space to gain acceptance for games and talk about handling the destructive behavior they enable. It is our job in the present, I suppose, to account for and develop strategies for handling those behaviors. Like Aristotle says of rhetoric, just because rhetoric can be used for bad purposes doesn’t make it unworthy of study. If anything, it makes it all the more paramount to study things that can cause as much harm as good so we can learn the difference between the two and make good decisions in our lives.

When I use the workstation in my class, I’m mostly trying to keep the classroom experience consistent and unobstructed. As Moran demonstrates, this usually means planning things out before hand or limiting myself to things I know how to do well already. I most often make use of the following in preparing my course and classes:

• Blackboard/Drupal for CMS and student-facing documentation
• Google Drive for attendance charts, daily agendas, conference schedules, and other miscellaneous, short-term assignments (sharing the view link on BB makes it very easy to import assignments and edit them on the fly
• Word/InDesign for syllabus and assignment sheet design. I never draft in them, only lay out
• Google Drive (again) for drafting things and prepping them for layout
• Sciverner for long-term or (meta) planning for the whole trajectory of the course
• Dropbox for storing readings, and backing up all of the previous things on the list. I pay for storage because it’s worth it.

These readings made me think about how I learned to write on a computer when I was a kid, and how I taught non-traditional students to use a computer for writing during my time in Florida. On the one hand, I sympathized with the students who envisioned good writing as error free or “clean.” I remember thinking, hoping, as a kid that as long as I got the spelling and grammar correct, my writing would be “good.” I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that was a “bad writer” as a kid, but I can’t recall when the changeover happened and I became interested in conveying ideas and thought process. I know that, by then. I’d learned to compose with a computer almost exclusively, so I also count myself in the camp of writers who benefitted from computer writing in that I didn’t have to make copies. Even at a young age, I hated copying things by hand–although I do acknowledge that it made me slow down and consider my writing more. Perhaps that’s why I hated it.

I say this reminded me of teaching non-traditional students to use a computer, doing things  like double-clicking and moving the cursor with the mouse to avoid wiping out whole lines of text to fix one typo, because it highlighted for me how much of a burden using the computer was on their writing, and how inextricable from the act of writing that computers have become. It made me sad, but more than that, it showed me that teaching how to use a computer is no longer the job of the “tech” in the writing class, but that computer use is a domain of writing instruction. Keyboards and user interface as just as much an extension of writing as pencils and pens, if not even more so.