Small groups (see below) may want to watch these videos about protests in World of Warcraft (sorry, Patrick), and/or check out an explanatory piece, linked here: Gameplay protests in WoW

WoW players protest the ban of Swifty

• perspective one
• perspective two

Questions to consider in groups:

1. Kishonna Gray paints a fascinating picture of women breaking the rules of a system in order to resist a system that offers them no protection — but that rule-breaking often constituted griefing, sometimes to game-breaking levels. The title of Gray’s piece challenges readers to determine where the lines may be drawn between resistance and disruption. Are players who ignore/mute others to preserve a game experience in a shared space also demonstrating resistance, in the sense that it goes against a system that includes voice chat? Are players who continually talk, sing, or who are otherwise vocally disruptive resisting in a sense (passively or actively?)? (Obviously, we might want to discuss different motivations in these instances!). Are there student behaviors in the classroom we may be able to similarly classify?
2. Why do the kinds of protests Gray identifies, along with those in the WoW videos, consistently fail? Are they failing, or is empowerment of the protestors a victory in itself? Is there a way to effectively protest inside a game’s system in a way that brings about change?
3. An example of a protest that worked — but was it a protest? In Ultima Online, a player named Chrae forced a change in the game’s design when he crashed the server with an army of slimes. Slimes were low level enemies that split when struck, and Chrae trapped several slimes in a house, used purple potions (which functioned sort of like grenades), hit all the slimes until his computer was on the brink of collapse, and then opened the door to his house. Slimes poured out, slaughtered everyone, and crashed the server. The next day, he identified himself and said he’d do it again if he didn’t get a ransom. No one took it seriously, so he went forward, crashing the server again. On the third day, slimes were change via patch: they no longer split when hit. Was this trolling/griefing, or a (successful) act of resistance? Here is what is reportedly Chrae’s account of the event (old; broken images).
4. While I was not able to verify the removal of posts from Xbox Live about racism and harassment, I went through several forums, and the only place I saw any references were in the ban/suspension forums (under some reasons for action). How does systemic blockage of “unsavory” topics on official forums, as Gray’s interviewees describe it, impact communication and community? (Side question, related to linguistic profiling: on unofficial forums, such as reddit, women have frequently asked about voice-masking technology. What impact might mass/compulsory implementation of such tech have on online gaming systems, identity, and more?)
5. REAL question: What are the implications of games designed for particular genders? What might more inclusive environments for women offer the gaming communities instead? What are the implications of identity exploration in the current game climate, particularly the MMO climate, as you understand it/have experienced it?

1. This was the original, incorrect question: Paul Taylor (wrong Taylor!) writes that all software must exist with a theoretical focus and inside a theoretical framework. How does that apply to some of the games we’ve played together this semester? Does “game” constitute its own framework, or do games like Submerged and Brothers exist within another frame? What about Super Mario Maker? Zork? How can we apply Taylor’s thoughts on flexibility, simplicity, etc. to using games in the classroom, particularly when students are faced with unfamiliar interfaces?

Groups and questions:

• Dr. Sam/Sherri/John 3, 4, 5
• Tony/Sam/Amelia/Jen 2, 3, 5
• Bianca/Ashley/Patrick 1, 2, 4

Bianca brings about interesting criticism in regards to the framework that Taylor employs when investigating the ways and purposes of how women engage with technology and games: we wanna just communicate over tea and donuts. Personally, the gaming community has been a source of self-exploration and an opportunity to shoot things and people and then to write about it.

What I would like to talk about is Gray’s study. I found it interesting that Gray intersected racial profiling and linguistic profiling within the gaming community. Though Gray isn’t a compositionist or a language instructor, I did think, given her experience learning “Spanglish”, that she’d at least highlight the differences between language groups within the gaming community. Linguicism is most prevalent in K-12 education, though, where students are sifted from district to district based on their linguistic backgrounds, where ESL student are not permitted to be in the same classrooms, or schools, as African American students because they don’t speak proper English, where instructors will say how it’s “easier” to teach the “white” ESL students than the students of color. So while Gray thinks that “marginalized communities have a variety of responses to the inequalities they face which since the earliest suffrage movements, some members within these groups have learned to resist”, students at the elementary age aren’t capable of resisting the inequalities they face as a result of linguicism and racism and their parents are likely ill-equipped to do so as well.

I realize my spiel about K-12 education may seem to be a mismatch to Gray’s conversation, so let’s explore what linguiscism and racism means today in a “post-racial” society where the influx of immigrants is at its highest. Imagine that these students matriculate through IN k-12 schools and then take a FYC where they’re expected to take play video games and engage in these online communities: what type of profiling do you think they’ll experience compared to their monolingual peers? What type of resistance are students going to engage in when these situations emerge (as they will)? Can we teach resistance in a classroom? Or do we teach complacency, head burrowing?

I suppose what I’m getting at is that many of these conversations need to be broadened to include other Others, especially when we’re looking from a pedagogical POV.

I feel like I’m in a really weird place after reading Gray’s piece on methods of resistance and protest in online gaming spaces. I think there is a significant challenge in making one’s voice heard in these games and the forums that surround them—especially so if yours is a marginal perspective or identity. With that in mind, I was really excited to hear about how two groups would approach this really unique problem in a way that could potentially affect change. Instead, what I saw was a group of gamers who just liked being assholes. Maybe I’m misunderstanding how these “protests” worked, but from what I gathered from Gray’s description is that the Puerto Reekan Killaz would go into a new game and, apropos of nothing, start team killing of glitching. I guess maybe I could see the value in doing this stuff as retaliation for someone making a racist/sexist/homophobic comment in chat—in that case, there’s a clear connection between stimulus (dudebro gamers being pricks) and response (retaliatory teamkilling of that particular member). But when you go into a game and disrupt it when no one in that game has slighted you, what does it actually do to promote your cause? If I’m playing a game fairly and quietly, and someone starts griefing and talking about how I apparently hate women gamers, is that going to help my opinion of women gamers or harm it? It seems like those tactics would end up doing more harm than good. Honestly, it just kinda feels like finding a convenient and self-righteous excuse for being a dick. Again, this all changes when it’s retaliatory—at least then the offending person can draw a connection between “Oh hey. I was a dick to these women, and they absolutely slaughtered me. Maybe I shouldn’t be a dick.”

I feel really…weird, criticizing someone’s unique form of resistance. Because, I mean, what other ways can they fight back when their reporting of racist/sexist/homophobic behavior goes unheeded? I like the tactic of sharing stories of harassment on the forums, but if those get deleted, it feels like a truly Sisyphean task to keep at it every day. Boycotting games that are massively popular like GTA also doesn’t feel like it would make a huge impact. So, I can see the allure of these disruptive tactics because one can see immediate impact through the gamers’ reactions. But while it’s effective in getting a rise and causing frustration, I have to wonder how much good it’s doing. How much positive change can really be affected in this way?

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.

I didn’t get to post a response to the readings for Tuesday before class, but I think writing through my thoughts on two virtual ethnographies here, in relation to Leonard’s article, will be helpful. While reading the Gray piece for Thursday, I was glad to see far more attention devoted to methodology than Delwiche provided. As pretty much everyone pointed out on Tuesday, Delwiche had some major issues with framing “safety,” but I also thought it was problematic to consider observing two semester-long classes ethnographic work, and I ultimately wasn’t convinced by student self-reflections as the primary form of evidence to support Delwiche’s claims. In addition to that, I wondered about issues of transfer from video games to other contexts. That is, there’s work to support that video games are educational and can be used effectively as instructional technologies. What I’ve encountered less of (which is not to say it doesn’t exist, rather that I’ve not seen it yet) is scholarship that addresses issues of transfer. For example, students might learn how to conduct ethnographic research effectively within a game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they can identify or successfully carry out ethnographic research in a different context. Delwiche addresses this question to some extent on pages 162 and 163, writing, “The next step is to link student engagement in the game world to engagement in an overlapping knowledge community that is connected to the theoretical concerns of the course in which the MMO is being used. Once students are highly engaged in the process of role-playing and information seeking, it is relatively easy to convince them to role-play as apprentice participants within a higher-level theoretical community. The students can also be encouraged to make the critical leap into meta-reflection about the similar learning processes embedded in both domains.” I’m curious to see what this looks like, or how Delwiche conceptualizes that next step.

Gray, by comparison, takes a methodologically stronger approach, although her results are a little disappointing/unsurprising. At first, I thought, “This is going to be really interesting! I didn’t even know clans like Conscious Daughters or PuertoReekanKillaz exist.” But, I say the results weren’t surprising in that the clans’ methods weren’t successful. When I regularly played COD, I muted all other players at the beginning of every match out of habit, because it was inevitably distracting or irritating to hear people swearing, slurring, and generally making annoying sounds with their mics. Even as a white male, I assumed that whenever I played using a mic (usually only when I was in a match with a friend), every other player muted me (except the friend). Anyone teamkilling, AFK, or generally disrupting the game was undoubtedly reported or blocked. And while this is problematic, in that far fewer players were reported (or blocked) for having racist screennames or generally being assholes, the failure to get people to listen in this context seems to have more to do with how games are defined than people not caring about the experience of other players. To clarify, if someone streaks on a football field, there’s a pretty rehearsed and expected response. Streaker runs around, eventually gets tackled, is ejected, and the game resumes. But if players shout racial slurs at each other on the field, the game doesn’t stop. Which is not to say that this is right, or justified, but it’s generally disruptive for an individual player, and doesn’t procedurally jeapordize the operation of the game (although it does discourage/exclude players and has a broader impact) in the same way that streaking or teamkilling does. I would be curious to see how an approach that played within the rules of the game, while still bringing attention to an issue, would work (I’m guessing not any better, unfortunately), or what that would look like. At the same time though, this circles back to the issue that Leonard, quoting Collins, so eloquently brings up:

“Beyond the fact that ‘the largely white male elite owners…derive wealth from the circulation’ of racist and sexist imagery, virtual reality and its inscription of controlling images ‘makes racism, sexism and poverty appear to be natural, normal and inevitable part of everyday life’ (Collins, 2000, p. 68). As argued by Mark Anthony Neal (2005), ‘The fact that these images are then used to inform public policy around domestic images that adversely affect and [sic] black and brown people’–the war on terror, policing the border, welfare reform, the military industrial complex, global imperialism, the existence of the welfare state, the prison industrial complex, unemployment, and so on–‘further complicates what is at stake’ for game studies (p. 51)” (87).

That is, the fact that griefing is normalized, and the response so mechanical, while issues of race, gender, and sexuality are systematically ignored, are major issues. But they’re not issues local to the game itself. They’re societal/social issues recreated through the games and enforcement of rules. But I’m also not sure it’s this simple, or if there’s any way to draw a line between a game as virtual space and any other constructed space. I don’t think I’ve done a good job of articulating why the tactics Gray discusses weren’t effective, and why that they didn’t succeed seemed obvious to me, but I think it has to do with differences between playing a game disruptively, disrupting a game, and not playing at all.

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”?

The takeaways from today’s articles all sparked similar reactions. Leonard and Mortenson, both with articles from the maybe-less-relevant-to-the-field-of-composition journal Games and Culture point out that representation matters a lot and should matter a lot, and that everything has history and context, respectively. Okay. That’s all well and good. These points are useful, and they’re being used. Cool.

The pedagogical bits in Delwiche’s piece feel even more useful, potentially, for me right now. Looking at games and game worlds to see that “these environments are complex discursive communities characterized by a ‘full range of social and material practices’” (161) is neat, and “MMOs have instructional promise because they immerse students in complex communities of practice, because their immersive nature invites extended engagement with course material, and because they encourage role- playing” (162). Okay. That’s all well and good. And the students learned. Awesome.

I was also glad Delwiche finally got around to including a nod or two about the risks of addiction and life-disruption that go along with some of these games. The way he deals with it feels tacked-on, but I’m glad it’s there. (I just finished reading Felicia Day’s memoir, which includes an account of her own game addiction, and maybe that’s why as I read this article I couldn’t help but cringe a bit, thinking what if some student in this class gets sucked in and can’t get out?)
Bianca has already called out this author for the unquestioning way he seems to accept game spaces and virtual worlds as “safe,” and along with that, and other points that have been made about the pros and cons and complexities of the kinds of courses that can be designed around games, I think we can’t take all the games and gamer-y enthusiasm at face value.  Yes, they are cool tools and spaces. We can learn in and through and around them a lot about composition and rhetoric and society. They have their costs, just like everything else. But onward we go, writing and teaching with all the writing and teaching technologies that make sense to keep using.

I find myself a bit torn when reading Delwiche. I love the idea of building a course centered around ethnographic studies in virtual worlds, but I am concerned with the steep learning curve that MMOs tend to have. I would imagine it would be difficult to build out salient research questions about a virtual world when one has only spent a five hours a week for a few weeks playing. To me, that feels like visiting a country for a week and then proposing a research project based on the culture you’ve observed; yeah, that’s probably enough time to pick up on a few surface features of that culture, but it takes considerably more immersion to get at research questions that aren’t grasping at surface-level stuff. But perhaps this isn’t as much of an issue as I’m anticipating?

I’m not a big fan of the idea of using Second Life or other sandbox games for game-creation, however. If you’re going to teach a course on virtual game design, and you’re asking your students to learn a new platform for creating games, why wouldn’t you instead teach something like GameSalad or Game Maker Studio? I just hate the idea of spending a whole class teaching students to create within a platform that likely won’t be used again outside of the course. Yes, there is the possibility of significant transfer of skills between game design in a sandbox game and actual game design, but I guess I just have a hard time justifying teaching how to use a set of tools if those tools are going to be largely useless outside of the confines of that specific class. Considering both game-maker programs and Second Life will likely have some learning curve involved, wouldn’t it be better to teach using the medium that affords students the best chance at continuing their work after the course has ended?

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?