As a musician, I find myself thinking a lot about the Rickert and Salvo article, especially their discussion of musicians as being “at the forefront of the new media revolution…artists and musicians have been collaborating and mutually influencing each other, creating feedback loops and immersive media worlds, for quite some time…there is a technological component to these extensions, dispersions, and feedback loops” (298). I feel like the collaborative nature of these technological, aural feedback loops are really important, especially when we think about “how we hear and experience sound” and how interrogating this experience “promises far more for composition, invention, and pedagogy” (299), which is what McKee mentions as well:

With the continued development of digitized technologies, sound is also becoming integral to our writing processes as well. Digitization and the increased convergence of computerized technologies enable the integration of visual, aural, and textual elements with unprecedented ease…How should we develop understandings of the sounds in which we’re immersed and that increasingly shape how and what we write? Given this move to even greater multiple modalities in composition, what are writers and writing teachers to do? (336)

And after reading all this, in thinking about how sound and music shapes how and what we write—because I know that playing music has definitely shaped the way I write—I think the collaborative nature of music and how this type of collaboration might inform our writing processes is what I really want to hear (pun intended) more about in and after these readings. And I’m wondering how our understanding of music as a process of meaning-making might inform the way we think about writing as a process of meaning-making.

One of the things I find myself continuing to think about is Gitelman’s argument that “all new media emerge into and help to reconstruct publics and public life, and that this in turn has broad implications for the operation of public memory, its mode and substance. The history of emergent media, in other words, is partly the history of history, of what (and who) gets preserved—written down, printed up, recorded, filmed, taped, or scanned—and why” (26). This idea of “the history of history,” of who gets to be preserved, and how, and why, seems pretty interesting, especially the fact that thinking about emergent media’s role in all this allows us to consider how it is that an emerging form of media can be “less a causal agent of change than it [is] fully symptomatic of its time” (29). And I think that’s it’s interesting that Gitelman explores, specifically, aural media and the manner in which “the early history of sound recording makes visible the ways in which new media emerge as local anomalies that are also deeply embedded within the ongoing discursive formations of their day, within the what, who, how, and why of public memory, public knowledge, and public life” (29).

As someone who collects records, this has me thinking about the tangibility of sound and how aural texts might be made material through something like tinfoil—or an iPod—for as Gitelman explains, “Tinfoil offered a new, precise sort of quotation, in effect, or a way of living with the question of quotation as never before. To put it another way, the tinfoil souvenirs suggested that oral productions might be textually embodied as aural reproductions, rather than as the usual sort of graphic representation, spelled out and wedged between quotation marks on a page” (40). I wonder if this speaks in any way to Levy’s discussion of podcasting as a “democratizing agent” (246); are podcasts, like tinfoil “textually embodied as aural reproductions,” and is it this embodied reproduction that helps it to be this democratizing agent?

In “Where the Women Are,” Taylor points out the manner in which women’s use of technology and enjoyment of games are often (problematically) framed: “Women’s general use of technology and the Internet often is framed around how they enjoy communicating with others and how engaged they are with experimenting with identity. Similarly, this is the major focus when women and gaming are discussed” (94). Such a framework, of course, operates off essentialist assumptions—assumptions that all women are the same and that all women play games for the communal, identity-exploring aspects that exist in such spaces—and such a framework seems to work to erroneously emphasize false constructions of gender difference and gender binaries. But, as Grey highlights, the actual gaming communities in which women play may not be entirely open to their presence in such spaces, and so women’s play may often have different goals, such as the goal of being disruptive, for the groups she researches use methods that “are actually reminiscent of groups who traditionally protest dominant structures; their resistance strategies, no matter the choice, are a means to combat the oppressions experienced within the space.”

This seems to converse well with Taylor’s findings:

In many ways, women play in spite of barriers to entry. Women gamers are finding fascinating and complicated pleasures in online games, and while most of what we have seen in the literature so far points to the social aspects that draw women in, it is clear that this does not tell the full story. Games like EverQuest appear to be offering venues for the interesting exploration of activities typically bounded off from each other—sociability and power, mastery and cooperation—and women are finding dynamic ways to inhabit these virtual worlds. (123)

And one such way, it would seem, is the type of disruptive resistance Grey discusses: “The first half of our griefing exercise was spent killing members of our own team comprised of all males who spoke Standard American English. This type of griefing behavior, although annoying, seriously disrupted the enjoyment of the males within the game. I could hear them through speakers in the television as they were lashing out.”

But what is seriously frustrating is the fact that it’s this resistance that gets policed and punished as opposed to the larger structures of racism and sexism that such acts seek to disrupt:

ThugMisses: Well they usually delete the forums as soon as they’re posted.

Mzmygrane: Why is that?

MissUnique: Because, and I quote, we are violating terms of service. Talking about gender and race may incite racism and sexism they claim.

And, as Grey argues, the problem with this is that “by deleting the forums, it reifies power structures along the lines of race, gender, and class.” And in doing so, it places the onus of responsibility and the blame on those critiquing racial, gendered, and classed power structures instead of those acting on and perpetuating them.

So, in a nutshell, everything sucks, and I’m going to go scream into a pillow, bye.

1. In Delwiche’s discussion of his use of the game “Mafia” as a means of “discussing the mechanics of game design” (164), he explains that after playing the game face-to-face, “students attempted to replicate the game within the confines of Second Life. They immediately realized that the virtual world made it almost impossible to play according to the traditional rules. Hashing out design solutions in their web logs, students developed a second version of the game that was quite successful in the on-line environment” (164). Now that we’ve played the game face-to-face, how do you think the game might translate to a digital environment? What challenges do you think Delwiche’s students might have faced in doing so, and what do you think might be lost and/or gained in such a translation?

2. Delwiche goes on to argue, “Virtual worlds are safe. The player’s avatar may be exposed to an array of in-game dangers, but the human being is never at risk of physical harm” (166). Does our engagement with Leonard’s discussion of games as “something more than entertainment…cultural projects saturated with racialized, gendered, sexualized, and national meaning” complicate in any way our understanding of digital spaces as supposedly safe (83)?

3. Sticking with Leonard’s article, Leonard, writing in 2006, concludes by asking, “So, why game studies now?” (87), answering his own question by saying, “Because the refusal to engage critically such ‘kid stuff’ has dire consequences, whether with domestic policy debates—more police, more prisons, less welfare—or foreign policy decisions—more bombs, more soldiers, less diplomacy. Video games teach, inform, and control, mandating our development of tools of virtual literacy to expand pedagogies of games as part of a larger discursive turn to (and within) game studies. We need to teach about games because games are teaching so much about us . . . and ‘them’” (87). How might we engage with Leonard’s discussion of the importance of game studies and of the importance of interrogating race and gender in games? Why game studies now—in 2015?

4. And speaking of games, it seems that today’s readings also make specific arguments about the types of games worth exploring, whether it’s Mortensen’s discussion of WoW and MuDs as spaces that allow for “a kind of gamer creativity” (411), or whether it’s Delwiche’s argument that MMOs make use of situated, collaborative learning due to the centrality of “social interaction, cooperation, and knowledge sharing” in the ways we enjoy them (162). Are there other types of games that might allow for such things?

5. And finally, Delwiche argues that the implementation of “an MMO-based curriculum should be more than a gimmick…these virtual worlds are used most effectively as a bridge between overlapping communities of practice” (169). How might we work to make the use of games in the classroom non-gimmicky? What kinds of strategies have we and/or can we use to work with games in our classrooms in ways that bridge “communities of practice”?

One thing I find myself getting hung up on is Delwiche’s argument that virtual worlds are safe:

Castranova (2001) identifies three defining features of virtual worlds: interactivity, physicality, and persistence. To this, I would add a fourth characteristic. Virtual worlds are safe. The player’s avatar may be exposed to an array of in-game dangers, but the human being is never at risk of physical harm. Furthermore, in most massively multiplayer games, the characters themselves do not experience permanent death. The character may lose experience points or a modest amount of wealth but, as Grimmelmann (2003) points out, virtual death “doesn’t really seem very deadly.” He notes that this dimension of safety is what makes virtual reality an effective therapy for agoraphobia and other anxiety-related disorders (Vincelli et al., 2003). It is also an important component of education. (166)

And I just don’t know that I totally buy this, or, at least, I don’t know that this is the case today. Indeed, while virtual death might not seem very deadly and while people may not be at risk of physical harm within the game world, it seems to me that other forms of harm (i.e. psychological, emotional) might be possible and, thus, it seems that Delwiche, here, privileges physical harm over other forms—forms that may be just as damaging.

As such, I wonder if virtual worlds are really as safe as Delwiche seems to believe—because to highlight these spaces as being safe seems to imply that this is a way that digital spaces differ from physical ones. And are they really all that different? Are digital spaces really any safer than physical ones?

In “Exploitationware,” Bogost argues that the appeal of the idea of gamification has “everything to do with rhetoric, and nothing to do with games. We like to think that the substance of ideas matters more than the names we give things, but that’s not true. Names offer powerful ways to advance a position” (139). While I’m with Bogost on the important role of names, I wonder if his argument here doesn’t run the risk of doing the same thing he’s arguing against (albeit in the opposite direction) in that it might run the risk of privileging the importance of rhetoric and names over that of games and “the substance of ideas.”

I have some similar concerns regarding his discussion of serious games:

After the initial calm the term provides, “serious games” fails to quell the resulting storm. And unfortunately, as serious games have progressed only a few have succeeded at riding the thunder. There just aren’t enough high-quality games that also serve serious purposes effectively. Making games is hard. Making good games is even harder. Making good games that hope to serve some external purpose is even harder. (141)

While I appreciate the manner in which Bogost challenges and troubles the way “serious” games get privileged, again, I wonder if he’s simply privileging other types of games instead—games that fit his own criteria regarding what makes a game “good.” I’m concerned, here, in the same way that I’m concerned with Gee’s discussion of so-called “good” games—what does it really mean for a game to be “high-quality” or “effective” or “good”? What does it really mean for a game to “serve some external purpose”? What kind of purpose is a good one? Who gets to establish these criteria?

In my blog post last week, I talked about some of the problems I have with Hodgson’s discussion of content as being important for course design and experience as being important for games. I’ve found myself continuing to think about this problematic divide, especially when encountering one particular moment in Mark Mullen’s chapter:

I had built this course primarily around questions of audience. To that end, I had encouraged students to write their review based on the game that had served as the case study for their research paper and to think about how they would adapt an academic argument for a specific public audience. Looking at the spread of casual games contained in the Casual Girl Gamer post, I now realized that I had fallen into the classical educational trap, the belief that knowledge is all about content. I had been assuming that in order to write a more critical review it would be necessary to have a detailed background in games and game issues and to have researched the game object extensively. I now realized that in fact what this project had always been about had nothing to do with games: it was all about what it means to adopt a critical perspective. (78)

So, I found it interesting that Mullen seems to address, here, the problem with the pedagogical privileging of content and the manner in which experience, too, might allow students to more fully and successfully “adopt a critical perspective.”

Shifting topics a bit, I also find myself having some conflicting feelings about Rebekah Shultz Colby’s discussion of gender and gaming. While I appreciate her efforts to address gender disparities in a games-oriented composition classroom, I’m not sure that I find her conclusions or assumptions to be entirely satisfying (although, I don’t know that she does either). For instance, while Colby argues that “it seemed that females were consistently put at a disadvantage in a class that used the gaming literacies of WoW to teach academic research and writing literacies” (124), I’m wondering about how this idea might be complicated by the argument that many students who lack other sorts of cultural knowledges or literacies might be at a disadvantage in different ways in the composition classroom. And if the goal of such a classroom is to help students in these regards, it would seem that these various levels of gaming literacies are just another part of the spectrum of literacies that might be addressed.

Colby, it would seem, addresses this by concluding, “If as a field, we continue to explore the use of games to teach writing, we need to pay more attention to discovering the gaming literacies females already possess as well as the literacies they are able to learn in ways that also increase their engagement and learning in the classroom” (136). On one hand, I hear what she’s saying and agree that we need to pay more attention to such literacies, but I also wonder if Colby’s configuration of literacies, here, also serves to perpetuate a binaristic understanding of literacy—that men and women have different gaming literacies. And I also wonder, then, if all this reifies the gendering of gaming literacies. So, ultimately, I think I’m left with lots of questions—how might we, instead, work to disrupt such gendering? How do we challenge these binaries? And how might we, instead of constructing and addressing literacies in gendered ways, work, rather, to dismantle the structures that allow such assumptions regarding gender and games to persist?

I’ve been thinking about the course Justin Hodgson details in the fourth chapter. But, more specifically, I’ve been thinking a lot about what he says about the difference between games and course design: “[W]e must keep in mind that there will always be some disjunction in transferring principles between the two systems as content is often the most important thing for course design whereas experience is for games” (48).

I’m not sure I completely agree with this, and I wonder if content really is the most important pedagogical concern. And I guess, similarly, I also wonder if experience is the primary concern of games. Indeed, even Hodgson seems to backtrack a bit here, albeit in a bit of a hurried, haphazard way: “It could just as easily be argued that we should be designing courses as intrinsic experiences for students, and perhaps many do, but that argument is beyond the scope of this specific work. What is important here is that we recognize (1) there are core distinctions between games and courses, and (2) there is great potential for bringing games (and game design principles) to bear on pedagogy and course design” (48).

As such, while Hodgson’s two recognitions of core distinctions and pedagogical potential do seem important, it also seems important to unpack a bit further the importance of content and experience and the manner in which the two might inform each other and overlap in both course design and games. In this way, perhaps such an engagement really shouldn’t be beyond the scope of Hodgson’s discussion (or ours), as he seems to believe.

One thing that I find myself continuing to think about is Bogost’s discussion of procedurality and the manner in which the idea of procedure is often negatively constructed:

The word procedure does not usually give rise to positive sentiments. We typically understand procedures as established, entrenched ways of doing things. In common parlance, procedure invokes notions of officialdom, even bureaucracy: a procedure is a static course of action, perhaps an old, tired one in need of revision. We often talk about procedures only when they go wrong: after several complaints, we decided to review our procedures for creating new accounts. But in fact, procedures in this sense of the word structure behavior; we tend to ‘see’ a process only when we challenge it. (3)

This discussion brings to mind Huizinga’s discussion of seriousness in play, and it also makes me think about how our understanding of play might be impacted by Bogost’s discussion of procedural rhetoric and “using processes persuasively” (3).

But I’m also wondering about what Bogost says about procedural representation and the argument that it “takes a different form than written or spoken representation. Procedural representation explains processes with other processes. Procedural representation is a form of symbolic expression that uses process rather than language” (9). I’m struggling with this demarcation between process and language and the fact that Bogost seems to be separating the two when he says that procedural representation uses process rather than language. So, I guess I’m wondering—are process and language really necessarily mutually exclusive? Or don’t they often intersect and inform each other, especially within the context of the process of writing?

And finally, I’ve been thinking about the types of games that Bogost explores and the fact that he states, “I am interested in videogames that make arguments about the way systems work in the material world. These games strive to alter or affect player opinion outside of the game, not merely to cause him to continue playing. In fact, many of the examples I will discuss strive to do just the opposite from arcade games: move the player from the game world into the material world” (47). I’ve been thinking about this in the context of an article Bogost wrote earlier this year that I read a while ago in which he seems to argue that, as the title itself pretty explicitly reveals, “video games are better without characters” based on the argument that games are better at constructing complex systems instead of individual stories about people. And I’m not sure that I agree with the types of games that Bogost seems to often privilege because perhaps such stories can also “make arguments about the way systems work in the material world” and perhaps larger systems can tell stories themselves.

I think that Gee’s discussion of literacy and video games in “Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video Games a ‘Waste of Time’?” could be a helpful framework through which we might continue to think about video games as a pedagogical tool. Indeed, it seems important to note Gee’s argument that “[w]hen people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy. Of course, this is not the way the word ‘literacy’ is normally used. Traditionally, people think of literacy as the ability to read and write. Why, then, should we think of literacy more broadly, in regard to video games or anything else, for that matter?” (13).

Perhaps one reason why we should think of literacy in regard to video games is that doing so might allow us to challenge the manner in which certain types of knowledge and learning are often privileged:

Important knowledge (now usually gained in school) is content in the sense of information rooted in, or at least, related to, intellectual domains or academic disciplines like physics, history, art, or literature. Work that does not involve such learning is ‘meaningless.’ Activities that are entertaining but that themselves do not involve such learning are just ‘meaningless play.’ Of course, video games fall into this category. (21)

This resistance to types of so-called “meaningless play”—play that, Gee notes, video games often come to encompass—also brings to mind Huizinga’s discussion of seriousness and play, and it also makes me think about the fact that it seems that it’s not just certain learning activities (i.e. the more “serious ones”) that can be privileged but the disciplines as well, for even though Gee lists physics, history, art, and literature as examples of important domains of academic knowledge, perhaps some of these domains are often viewed as being “more important” than others.

As such, Gee’s discussion of games, here, is making me think a lot about the hierarchical nature of the ways we think about knowledge and learning. And I think that Gee’s presentation of an alternative perspective to knowledge production could be helpful too: “The alternative perspective starts with the claim that there really is no such thing as learning ‘in general.’ We always learn something. And that something is always connected, in some way, to some semiotic domain or other” (22).