I honed in on Lee Sherlock’s chapter right away, because I was hopeful that there would be a greater discussion of embodiment in role-playing games. World of Warcraft was one of a long line of games where I played as a female avatar; it was, for me, a space where I could explore acting in a body that was not my own. Being able to embody virtual female characters was and continues to be an important aspect of playing games for me and I attribute the opportunity to explore gender expression virtually to my understanding of my own gender identity today. Last week, I talked a bit about how I’ve grown less fond of character creation over the last few years. This is mostly because of my growing frustration with the gendering of character creation—you often have two choices swole male body or petite female body, and your clothing choices are then limited based on that choice. And that is deeply frustrating to me.

I was hoping that Sherlock’s piece would talk a little bit more about how the design of game engines limit gender/sexual expression through what players are/are not allowed to do. I do appreciate the attention paid to how LGBTQ players are able to subvert the limited options afforded to them in order to outwardly express their queer identities, however, I wish more attention was paid to how game engines limit expression.

Like Patrick, I’m afraid I may have a litany of negativity here…. I’m also very frustrated with so many people returning to Bogost. Why? Is he literally just the first person they turn up when they start doing research? Where’s the solid reason to rely on Bogost for anything?

Mark Mullen’s lamentation of a master critic (to rely on Klosterman! really!) really got this off to a cracking poor start. Sure, if you’re looking at mainstream gaming media, there are fewer name reviewers… but only at the very limited time Mullen was surveying. Yahtzee Croshaw was the central name only for a span of a few years; before then, there were some Name Reviewers at IGN (before they scattered to the winds), and find me a mainstream “gamer” who doesn’t know Jeff Gerstmann and I’ll eat the hat of your choosing. But the rise of YouTube and video reviews birthed a lot of personalities who exist solely on their names, and with the spread of Let’s Plays, we are getting “feelings” about the games, even if they’re performative and sometimes ridiculous.

But the consumerist breakdowns is what many gamers want. Those who don’t, or who want different games, go to people like Brendan Keogh, Cara Ellison, Leigh Alexander — also big names in different spheres of gamers. So I have a hard time accepting what Mullen is saying here because I feel his early arguments fall apart before they even begin. There are so many models for what he wants (and better models than Klosterman, egads).

As for Johnson and Colby, I get their early anecdote — I know games studies can feel overwhelming to people not involved in them. I’ve talked to folks about it! But that’s also because games themselves are overwhelming and I think it’s ludicrous to ignore a media and cultural powerhouse in the classroom. Otherwise, this feels like an extended argument with someone who just wants to preserve the teaching of writing for writing’s sake, as though the field (and writing itself!) isn’t constantly changing. And once they start talking about games and teachers making assumptions? The writing felt so empty, as though “games” could be replaced with, I don’t know, goats, and the chapter would be the same. Meh.

Miller’s Zelda piece was fascinating, but Zelda also feels interchangeable here, chosen because the author felt like choosing Zelda over another fantasy experience. I’m not sure it actually does the job it sets out to do. The premise, absence “yay, Zelda!” is rather thin.

The chapter on WoW as class-focus was by far the most interesting to me here, not least because we discussed that earlier in this semester with Neverwinter as a possibility and it was fascinating to see it play out, but I am disheartened by the assumptions made in designing the class in regard to female students. The study, limited as it is, is very useful, but what are we going to do about these things, as teachers? The end of this chapter seems to lead to more assumptions, rather than solutions, with the idea of who has what gaming literacies and that women’s and men’s will always be different.

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 find myself reacting negatively to a lot of the articles from section two of this book, not because I don’t believe in what they are arguing for, but because of the mode of their arguments.

Johnson and Colby’s article arguing that scholars need to play more games to critically engage with them in and outside of the classroom and that game studies is under, instead of over, represented in composition studies, supports my own feelings on the subject and resonates with my motivation for studying games, but the framing as a “study” is embarrassing, and the reliance on Bogost for definitional value of games is short-sighted, limited, and defies my love for games and education/rhetoric.

Miller’s article on composition metaphors and the Legend of Zelda is charming and persuasive to me, but that is also it’s biggest weakness: it’s persuasive to me as gamer with a certain background and value for certain games (and games period). The similarities between composition and Zelda dungeons offers some valuable insight into both, and I am excited by the idea of motivating students with video game analogies, but it also makes me think about who those students are that it will motivate: probably students that are not at broad risk of failing in the first place and possess the literacy to understand what I am telling them in the first place.

Shultz Colby’s piece on female gamers in her composition class provides the best jumping-off point of all the articles in this section, for my money, because it states, in plain terms, the hardships female gamers face and the underserved nature of non-male gamers in classroom spaces. Yes, as a study it is also middling, but the case-study testimonials of the students gives great insight into the real barriers gaming puts up to certain groups of students and opens conversation to addressing them. It also gets at the real problem facing the broader acceptance of games in education: the gatekeeper nature of gaming literacy. That is the gap that needs to be bridged, and it has to do with gaming itself as much as our approach to it.