Bianca, I was thinking about that same article, because as with so many moments of Ian Bogost and his beard, I find myself nodding in agreement until a moment when I’m suddenly not. It always happens the same way, and I’m not sure why. I love how he talks about visualizing the simulating in that Atlantic article when talking about Sim City; we are seeing exactly what’s happening, but it’s rendered in a different visual mode, not only in terms of the computing simulation, but all the weird baggage that comes with it, that Bogost tags as uniquely American. But then he begins to veer off, into problems with games — that I agree with; games are wonderful, games are terrible — and comes to the conclusion that games are at their best when there are only systems and not characters. Too many issues, he says. Makes games like books. Give us just the systems. Break away from identity.

Except there’s plenty of research that shows we crave story. We want narrative and understanding, yes, even of those systems — and those systems include people. People who aren’t always predictable. Who don’t follow rules, who are often more interesting when they don’t. Why remove character from all games, Bogost? What do we lose as people when we think only in if-then statements?

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’m not quite sure what to say about the reading for today. It’s familiar territory, having read Bogost for every remotely game-related course I’ve taken, and for a few projects as well. That said, I did wonder about some seemingly loose points in Bogost’s argument from the perspective of digital fabrication (i.e. using digitally programmable machines to create physical things from digital files). In particular, thinking along the lines of electromechanical games (precursors to early video games that ran on complex electronic circuits and mechanical parts), they were programmable in a sense, and thus procedural, but pre-digital. Granted, digital systems facilitate certain things much better than systems that are electronic but not digital (displaying video, for example). And I think that’s ultimately Bogost’s argument, that video games perform procedurality differently than other procedural systems. But I’m inclined to believe that discussions toward the uncomfortable (for Bogost) blending of digital and material systems are becoming increasingly important, and I do find it a little surprising that he doesn’t address such issues in his work more frequently given the type of work that happens at Georgia Tech re: digital fabrication and electronics broadly. That said, I also wonder how prepared/interested RhetComp as a field is in pursuing such questions.

Alright so these questions will be for our discussion at the end of the activities

1.  The most obvious question of all: What is literacy? What does it mean to be literate? Which literacies do we value most in the classroom? Which literacies do we disregard (knowingly or otherwise) in the classroom? How might our answers to these questions influence our students’ learning?

2. Literacy, according to Gee, is “any technology that allows people to “decode” meanings and produce meanings by using symbols”. If our students began to mesh-code as Anzaldúa does in the excerpt provided, would they be considered literate, or would they be considered as not having a grasp of the English language?

3. Gee uses video game communities as models for language acquisition because these communities tend to recognize a wide range of skills as valuable (from helping “newbies” to finding glitches, making mods, organizing strategies, writing guides, etc), allowing all participants to be part learner/part teacher. Is this a viable strategy for traditional classrooms? And, if implemented, how do you ensure that students who are still very new to the domain (such as SLS or first-generation students) get the help they need without the teacher’s voice silencing the overall conversation?

4. Gee talks about passing tests and real understanding: How often we see this with our international students who study for the TOEFL, “pass” in terms of achieving the score needed for admission, and then drown in their composition classes but they don’t have a true understanding of the semiotic domain they’re attempting to skate into (and others where the need for understanding now becomes the determiner for passing). As instructors, where is our responsibility? 

5. One of the main objections to using tech in the classroom is that it often requires teachers to instruct students in an entirely new language set that may never be used again outside of the classroom or “non-real” situations (ie: play rather than work). This includes things like students learning the recipes for Minecraft or the elemental balances of pokemon…etc. Using foreign/less familiar domains can be helpful for getting students to consider contexts they usually take for granted (fish in water syndrome), but it’s also time consuming and takes a lot of effort on the part of the instructor, while also taking some time away from content instruction. What are some practical ways that you have found (or have thought about) that help you create semiotic domains despite these time/content limitations?

One of the reasons I have my ICAP students do a rhetorical analysis of games is because of the rich visual/aural/mechanical languages games tend to use to convey meaning to their players. Because most games start with tutorial levels and are designed to scaffold information in an accessible way, games provide an interesting space in which students can quickly become privy to the design language being employed by the developers. Because the teaching of how to interact with a game is part of the game itself, analysis of how the game communicates with the user can be a great jumping-off point for having students critically examine other visual mediums that are not so inherently didactic. It’s also a great way to talk about internal design grammars among genres of games. If a game expects the player of a platforming game to run to the right and press A to jump, these are internal design grammars that are inherent to the genre. Students who are less familiar with games will recognize these assumptions as breaking points, where the in-game instruction fails to consider novice players’ lack of knowledge about these conventions. By talking about how designers make assumptions about what their players know, we can start to identify assumptions that designers in other mediums make about the literacy of their users.

not having dates on these chapters made it a little hard to situate them in what little I know about the history of games studies. I figure that Gee was pretty foundational. he certainly spends lots of time carving out a place for games and pedagogy and all that in these books.

the problem of content Gee points out in the Semiotic Domains chapter seems so familiar to rhetoric, right? from Socrates it’s been debated–what are we really learning when we learn to rhetoric? there is no “content” to it– no unique substance– unless we say that the content is everything, which isn’t always useful to say.

maybe it’s that as Gee points out, “Critical learning, as I am defining it here. involves learning to think of semiotic domains as design spaces that manipulate us (if I can use this term without necessary negative connotations) in certain ways and that we can manipulate in certain ways.” (43)

I think that’s what we are hoping to keep learning about and teaching about as rhetoricians. so it’s okay for us to not have our own content…

and as people in the world, we can make a difference in whether this critical learning happens for everyone around us, not even just students. this snippet was sort of encouraging (though I do recognize that not everyone is into the endless picking-apart-of-things that we academics so often are): “If these people encourage reflective metatalk, thinking, and actions in regard to the design of the game, of video games more generally, and of other semiotic domains and their complex in­terrelationships, then this, too, can encourage and facilitate active and critical learning and thinking” (46-47)

how we do that is another question, and I imagine we all have our own ways.

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).

As I was reading Gee this week, I kept thinking about building worlds. I appreciated the care with which he framed the Pikmin example in particular — and the paths he took in explaining everything necessary to come back to it — as I am still very new to learning about how to view games as learning mechanisms and I appreciate these very clear breakdowns. It’s sometimes hard for me to see beyond 1:1 ratios, because that’s how I learn a lot of things (math, for example: I have a very hard time deviating from examples): through repetition and mimicry, so instead seeing how something can be practiced and modeled in one world (and then leaping to how it could be translated in another) is helping me see past my own inherent limitations. But I have been replaying some State of Decay lately, and thinking about the Sims and Civ, all games in which we build in various ways. In SoD, we construct survival; in the Sims, homes, neighborhoods, and more; in Civ, whole populations. In each case, different knowledge is necessary for the most basic methods of play, but then they branch based on player-created scenarios. We’re not just building the worlds, but building approaches to them within those worlds. I don’t like to play the Sims, so I only build for purity of design; on the occasions when I do decided to “play” for a while, my houses are much different, designed to allow my Sims to meet their needs efficiently, but the houses I prefer to build are elaborate and beautiful, and I don’t care if it takes my Sim three hours of gametime just to get outside. I’ve set different conditions that required reading the situations differently. Just as Gee moves through contextual definitions of words, the game context changes for me as I play in various ways.

I’m very fascinated by all the ways in which we create our experiences, from those intended (as above) to those that are not particularly essential (assigning personal narrative importance to arbitrary things in order to beef up a lacking story, for instance), and I’m often frustrated with games that impose a lot of limitations because there’s so little of that flexibility. But I’m getting off track; what I wanted to say was that I appreciate that Gee spends so much time thinking about all these different ways we operate in the game space, and what it can mean for us.

p.s. man, does Gee have a knack for picking some occasionally eyebrow-raising examples.

I have read Gee before, but not his chapter SEMIOTIC DOMAINS: IS PLAYING VIDEO GAMES A “WASTE OF TIME”?.” In the chapter, he develops a rich definition of critical learning and its relationship to semiotic domains.

For active learning, the learner must, at least unconsciously, understand and operate within the internal and external design grammars of the semiotic domain he or she is learning. But for critical learning, the learner must be able consciously to attend to, reflect on, critique, and manipulate those design grammars at a metalevel. That is, the learner must see and appreciate the semiotic domain as a design space (40).

The definition of critical learning considers active learning as an elementary consideration of the types of learning possible in the classroom. Although video games may not be the medium in which I have students engage in critical learning, I appreciated how careful Gee is in his definitional work. The five principles that he closes the chapter with are especially helpful when considering other opportunities for learning with visuals. I could imagine using these to design a class on new media, print media, and document design.