Delwiche’s article was, overall, an “interesting” read. My first issue, though, was that he didn’t branch out in his references to see what others were saying about the use of games in learning. And by others, I mean he left us SLS folks out and it seems Composition people to. Though his article was published in 2006, researchers like Thorne, Sykes, and Reinhardt in SLA were already looking at the use of MMOs in second language learning/acquisition. They were particularly interested in Second Life and WoW, finding high correlations between learning and playing. The other issue I had was his conception of “Safe” and saying that MMOs are non-harming environments, and contradicts himself by saying not all are created equal. It’d probably be a good idea to unpack what safe means for each student. There are, as we know, plenty of occurrences of harassment when playing MMOs, or any online game where people can critique behind their screens. Students should be at least made aware of these possibilities, especially if the classroom is where they’ll first be exposed. I do like the idea of having students conduct ethnography in a video game as a class project.

Moving on to my man Leonard:

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?

MMO Ethnography sounds fantastic. I love reading interviews with gamers about how and why they do certain things, and the choices they make, and the idea of combining that with a study on MMO players takes me back to my long-ago days of MMOing when I would ask people endless questions and read all the forums and study everything. The practices that develop are quite fascinating. I now want to look up similar studies and see who else has worked in this sphere. There’s a lot to unpack. Fascinating here that’s it’s done as classes with new players. I wonder about other ways in.

As for the Leonard, I’m grateful to have such a long list of games here, Sam! I feel like he made my life easier for the Men of Color video. Seriously, though, the end is chilling. Quoting Stormfront – what a way to demonstrate the impact of games. Still, I very much enjoy his different reasonings for studying games and their position in culture and what all that can reveal.

1. I should be more grateful for scholars like Leonard who are willing to call out the video game world and its inability (or specifically, fear?) to address race and gender in equitable ways.

2. I should be more grateful that people are willing to explore and contribute to rich conversations about games and to develop metagaming theories and articles.

3. I should try to remember that for some people (read hetero-cis white men–4Chan’s elite) the representation of intersectionality in games can be easily ignored and, when it is acknowledged, unappreciated for the designers’ efforts.

4. I should be more generous to articles published in 2006 that only had a handful of games to use in their examples because gaming had yet to become the universally recognized cultural artifacts worthy of quality production and interpretation.

5. I should be excited for the affordances that video games give to writing and to classrooms as texts, which unlike their literary, artistic, or musical counterparts, offer an excellent combination of various arts to allow for engagement and access to social/political/historical issues on several subversive levels.

Perhaps I didn’t know these things when I first began learning about video games in academic contexts with Dr. Sam, but now they are ingrained in my experience with and around games. Is the conversation still happening in our journals in the same ways it was almost 10 years ago? Has academia become fatigued with WoW (as Patrick feels) and we should just wait for the next wave of academic articles? Since I don’t know if recent games (2010-2015) are being discussed in academic contexts and since academia is SLOW, maybe I am just being knit picky. I’m sure Dr. Sam will tell me.

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.

So, I apparently misread the course calendar and read/posted ahead. So last week I posted about part III instead of part II, so I’ll be writing about something in part II today.

I’m a bit torn about Benjamin Miller’s article “Metaphor, Writer’s Block, and The Legend of Zelda.” On the one hand, the metaphor is totally apt, and I can see the connections Miller is making quite easily. I’ve always thought of writing/school in terms of games, because so much of my life is bound up in game-like thinking. So, I’m totally on board in that regard. But I’m not so sure about using this metaphor in the classroom. I already get enough resistance when I try to bring in activities or projects that are games-oriented. I’ve tried using games metaphors before, and I’ve run into some issues with students not having any experience with the games I’m talking about (even games that seem totally common, like Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros.) A metaphor only really works when one relates something less familiar to something more familiar; it all kind of falls apart if both items are unfamiliar.

I will say, though, I totally agree with approaches to course “mechanics” and syllabus design could take a few cues from game design. I really like the idea of revisiting readings later on in the semester and having students measure the differences in how they understand it. Then again, games do a great job of making sure revisiting an area is worth the player’s while (power-ups, hidden things, progression through the game, etc). How—if we have a hard enough time getting our students to read things the first time—do we incentivize them reading the same thing once again? Any approach to syllabus crafting is difficult, but this article at least has left me a small problem to solve

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?

After what feels like ages, I was finally able to identify my discomfort with parts of this book as I read Larry Beason’s “Grammar Interventions in Gaming Forums”: it comes down to a matter of ethos, I think, or can at least partly be categorized in that way. I was excited to read this chapter, having been an active member of dozens of communities over the past few decades, both as editor/writer/moderator and forum user, and the setup for the chapter made me think I might see more comparison between the way errors are perceived in writing in the classroom and in online forums (a connection that is made here, but thinly). But I was immediately distracted by some things, such as the reference to the comment sections of Joystiq and other sites as forums (they are not), and comments such as the rarity of locking threads (where? Some forums have heavy mod hands and there are locked threads, multiple, daily). These loose generalizations seem to have been made for an academic audience, one who may not be as familiar with the intricacies of gaming forums, but there doesn’t seem to be enough explanation here for an audience completely unfamiliar, and there’s too much generalization and in fact incorrect information for anyone who is familiar. I also felt like there was little difference between what he considered a “moderate” intervention (which was insulting but not directly so) and a more severe intervention (which was more directly insulting), and that seemed to derail the spectrum of his argument for me, as there was no real range presented (as I read it). This could also be due to the fact that I have seen and even participated in hundreds of these interactions over the years.  In the end, I found myself questioning then nearly everything Beason said; I could not concentrate on his conclusions or opinions because I did not find him particularly credible. How well did he know forums? Gaming communities? Did he only use the examples listed? Because Gamespot’s forums are notoriously terrible examples of community, which would really skew results, I fear.

I wonder now, thinking back over this book, if I’ve felt that way about many of the chapters, if they exist in some gray space that isn’t quite deep enough to really talk about gaming, and isn’t quite presentation of solid scholarship. It feels odd for me to critique something in the latter sense, as I am so early in my career, but when compared to many of the other pieces I’ve read even in this class, not to mention others, this seems very thin in places, with research that often doesn’t cut broadly or deeply. But could it be that I’m in that place “gamers” so often occupy, where slight errors or misrepresentations or disagreements are used to upend an entire argument that is otherwise well-researched? Can I just not get past Beason’s reference to a comment section as a forum? Was it indeed a forum in which every article served as the first post? As a former contributor and editor for Joystiq, I can say that in my time there, we never referred to them as such (though there was discussion at one point of developing forums). But does my own background too heavily influence the way I read these pieces?

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?

Thinking about Sherri’s post, as well as the last third of this edited collection, I was curious to know where the authors were writing from, and where they’re situated in the field (or outside the field). Although I normally skim through the author bios for collections like this, I was particularly interested in seeing what areas of study the contributors were writing from given the situation of this text within Composition. In particular, it strikes me as a little funny that Bogost is contributing to a collection like this, despite the fact that Georgia Tech’s Digital Media program doesn’t offer courses in writing or written composition (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing by itself), and it makes me wonder about his intentions. I also attended the CCCCs presentation he refers to in his chapter (I believe Sam was on that panel as well), and from what I remember, the question from the audience was slightly out of place, but it also wasn’t surprising that someone in Composition hadn’t read his work (at that time, and given the broad audience that CCCCs brings together). So in that context, I’m wondering how we fit all these people together (not just with their ideas, but with the situations they’re teaching in, researching in, and who they’re ideally targeting). Furthermore, this collection of authors from different disciplines writing towards a narrower audience makes me consider how I’m currently situating my own work within composition, and what that means for what I take from this class. This book seems different from other edited collections in Composition I’ve encountered, which tend to be a bit more homogenous in their representation of scholarship within the discipline. That is, I wonder how to situate hacking as play, alongside multiple ways of constructing realities and applying principles of digital media to creating tangible media (and whether/how that’s [still?] Composition), or if the fact that I acknowledge writing in the sense of words on a “page” is part of the process is what’s tying things together for me. I’m not sure if that makes any sense, but that’s what these readings lead me to think about.