See here.

In general, I’m enjoying this read – it’s allowing me to continue to look at aspects of learning differently, and as always in the context of L2 learning. These ideas of Facebook as a game and setting up a class as a game and avatars and identity are thought-provoking. While I’m still just ankle deep in understanding gaming studies, it was interesting to reflect on the ways I’ve used some of these approaches in an L2 context already; especially when thinking about Facebook and L2W instruction. Maybe I’m a bit more than ankle deep after-all. In the past, Facebook was in my classroom as a way to acquaint L2 learners with this idea of audience and the rules of engagement – it seems to me that the approaches Alberti discuss are similar. For example, he contends that:

Rather than a goal-directed game in the sense of working to achieve a predefined objective, Facebook represents a social-directed game whose goals are not singular but multiple, not linear but holistic: the sustaining of a viable, functioning discursive community. (p.11)

In the sense that my ideologies of writing are primarily rooted in sociocultural/socio-cognitive perspectives, I agree. Viewing writing fro this socially-directed perspectives may encourage students to reflect on the ways they already use writing: who are they communicating with? what is their message? how are they conveying it? are they successful in sustaining themselves within this community? why or why not? This leads to Alberti’s assertion that:

In Facebook and similar social networking sites, we find participants engaged in moment-to-moment rhetorical play and decision making that feels as meaningful in that moment as any other supposedly more significant kind of writing. (p.19).

Rather discarding what students find to be significant or valuable writing, engage with them using the modes they’re most familiar with and transfer those rules to the overall objectives of the course.

As a final thought, I love collaborative learning. Collaborative pair/group work has become a structural constituent in L2W classrooms as research continues to examine the effects of it on students’ language acquisition and written products (Bastone, 2010; Shehadeh, 2011; Storch & Wigglesworth, 2007; Storch, 2005). Situated in theoretical and practical application, collaborative learning is noted for creating student centered environments of exploration and application in which students share intellectual effort, mutually search for solutions, meanings, understanding, or create a product (Smith & MacGregor, 2009). What better way to promote this [collaborative learning/language acquisition/intercultural communication] than by implementing more “gaming” into the classrooms as Hodgson demonstrates. Of course I don’t agree with everything; but I like finding the areas where cooperation between disciplines can emerge.

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.

Eds. Richard Colby, Matthew S. S. Johnson, and Rebekah Shultz Colby

Notable Works Mentioned:

Jonathan Alexander. “Gaming, student literacies, and the composition classroom: Some possibilities for transformation”

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames

James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Jesper Juul, Half real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds

Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word

Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher, Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century

Core Investigative Questions:

1. How can playing a video game encourage students to (re)consider how they write, read, and research?
2. How do gaming spaces function rhetorically and in what ways can/do gamers conduct rhetorical readings of them?
3. How do video games represent identity and community and how are these representations interpreted by gamers?
4. How do video games and gaming serve as metaphors for written discourse and writing?
5. How do video games’ rhetorical techniques differ from comparatively traditional texts?
6. In what ways do video game designers take into account audience (beyond its commercial function of consumption)?
7. In what ways do electronic games help us to reconceptualize classroom spaces?

Important Quotes to Consider:

Introduction

“We not only accept that video games are transmedial, but we also argue that they have certain unique qualities. For one, video games respond to player interaction regardless of whether the player is playing alone or with others” (3).

Play

“[T]heorizes the nature of play and game itself to better elucidate the intersections between playing, writing, and the teaching of writing” (5).

Composition

“[E]xplores how games can shape specific teaching practices and how they influence student (and teacher) learning” (5).

Rhetoric

“[A]nalyzes games through a rhetorical lens, considering specifically what we can learn about rhetoric from looking at games, and about games from looking at them rhetorically” (5).

Afterward

“[T]here is no going back over the old (and presumably defunct) arguments about whether violent games promote violence in players or whether games are or are not narratives, or even whether games are productive or just a waste of time. These questions appear settled—at least from the perspective of the authors of this book” (205).

“For many of the contributors, games are not just another way to teach academic writing; they are a legitimate form of academic writing. The book thus has particular theoretical and practical advantages for anyone considering teaching a game-oriented class” (206).

Day 1: Read through the quotes provided on your handout. Working with your partner, discuss the chapters and find ways that the two overlap either explicitly or implicitly.

Then create a shared Google Doc where you begin brainstorming an in-class activity or assignment for a first year course (it does not have to be FYC) that demonstrates the overlaps/values/interests/approaches you discussed. Set small goals for today, but try to leave with a solid activity/assignment. The activity will continue on Thursday with work time and discussion of your plans.

Share the link to your Google Doc in the comments section of this post.

Several things immediately excited me about this text: the definition of game introduced up front, and the discussion of Facebook as a learning tool, and these ideas of avatars and representation. These are all things I’m into lately, and to see them all in a single chapter was really exciting.

I wanted to speak to Alberti’s notions of Facebook as learning tool just on the face, because I talk about this kind of thing a lot with my students from semester to semester, particularly in addressing the common idea that “people don’t read these days,” which of course means they don’t write. We’re reading and writing all the time, and even if it’s Yik Yak or text messages or reddit or whatever, we’re still participating in these discourse communities, and they all require some construction of identity as well as approach to a rhetorical situation. What I hadn’t thought about, though, was social media as play, and I’m fascinated by the way Alberti fits that in here. While I don’t think I’d use Facebook, I have been thinking more and more about addressing social media through exercises in the 106 classroom (I’ve done it in 420), and this really cements my desire to do so.

John and Amelia’s digital handout.

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

I’m really drawn in by Bogost’s section on rebuttal or raising objections to the arguments made in the design of a game. He responds to players’ seeming lack of ability to raise procedural objections in two parts: 1.) user alteration of a game’s procedures is usually not allowed but one can try to poke at inconsistencies in the design to play it how you will, and 2) since most texts are not dialectic, one can simply create their own game in response (easier said than done, Ian). Response 2 is a bit disingenuous, considering the considerable obstacles that stop the average player from creating and distributing a game that responds in a meaningful way. But I wish Bogost would have expanded a bit more on subversive forms of play; the ability to resist the procedural arguments that a game designer makes is one of the more rewarding aspects of playing and responding to games.

In Mario Maker, there is a sadistic, evil level creator that likes to make levels that are tediously difficult and tricky, but one level in particular stood out as being truly sadistic: a level with a series of puzzles that each necessitated killing Yoshi to proceed. One player was so offended by the design of this level that he found a way to exploit each puzzle so that Yoshi would survive every encounter, while still allowing the player to advance to the next puzzle. The player was able to subvert the will of the designer and completed the level in a way that ran completely contrary to its intended experience.

Bogost’s examples make me think even more about the blurry line between games and life. simulations of work environments or political situations or prison infrastructure? simplified and gamified, sure, but like Sherri says in her post, it isn’t hard to see the “serious messages about corporations and politics” in these kinds of activities. I wonder if that should help us feel more able to do anything about the real procedures and issues that we face in this world, or what. recognizing procedural rhetoric in a game is cool. do we recognize it everywhere else, too? maybe the simplification gets in the way.

I’m about to teach my 420 students to write proposals and argue for small changes in the imaginary business contexts they’ve chosen to work in this semester. written proposals are one thing… boring, maybe, but conventional. if I had more time and were a more gamer-y type of person, it might be cool to ask my students to re-mediate their proposals into a game. maybe it would be a fun thought-experiment, at least.

I think Bogost’s article just summed up, in an academic nutshell, my issue with “serious” games. Serious games like Depression Quest, The Day the Laughter Stopped, or September Twelvth are the social justice equivalent of the cereal box game Bogost describes; they mimic procedures and procedural behavior, but the available choices are so limited that the player quickly “gets the point,” and no longer feels driven to play. This is because there really is only one point…the players were never meant to have any other possible interpretations.

It’s an interesting way of exploring concepts, but they are more like interactive articles than games. While it’s immensely difficult to really offer multiple endings to any game, when a game developer focuses so intensely on sending players a message, they eliminate the opportunity for the player to learn or create anything for themselves.

I think that’s why I love Simulators (Sims) so much. Games like Prison Architect are fascinating in that they explore the procedures of building and expanding prisons. Certain rooms or staff must be obtained before you can move on to more advanced levels (such as needing to get a Warden before you can modify the prison schedule or offer prisoners parole, since paroles only happen when the prisoner sits with the Warden for an exit interview). There are limits to your resources, and goals that you are urged (if not required) to obtain. But, unlike other more brute-force games, there are multiple ways to succeed. Hence why you can find any number of YouTube videos of various types of prisons…everything from minimal guards, to beautiful grounds, to most-likely-to-cause-massive-riots.

I know Bogost isn’t limiting his discussion to sims, and procedural rhetoric definitely exists in games of all complexities, but for classroom examples or useful learning tools (not to mention a personal addiction to playing them), my mind tends to go towards simulators. It’s also one of the only types of games I’ve tried to come up with scripts and ideas for….and one of the most impossible genres to work on, alone. The sheer volume of options needed to give players the freedom to explore is exhausting.

I can dream, though.