I was a little surprised at first when I was assigned to the game group on Tuesday, but quickly realized that while I could see easy applications for both Second Life and MOOs, I couldn’t really come up with anything for a game like Neverwinter. Lesson: never doubt Sam, I guess. Someday I’ll learn that one.

This week I’ve been confronted with a lot of interesting ways to think about games in the classroom. Though I’m obviously very interested in games, it’s always been a little difficult for me to see beyond the most basic applications of games in class — narrative structures, for instance, characterization, presentation, design, but after someone else got me thinking about how games can teach failure (and thus revision), I was in a really good place to open up to all kinds of angles Tuesday during class. Listening to Sherri talk about different uses for Neverwinter, and to Ashley talk about SLS students and language acquisition got me doing some new thinking about how we approach games, how quickly we pick up the language unique to it (or create our own), about how we learn and begin navigating what can be a completely foreign space, and how that correlates to class. And wow, this all feels so basic, like obviously I should have been thinking about this, what an idiot am I, but I have to keep reminding myself that I’m new to this. That these connections aren’t always obvious, that they do require thinking and study.

I guess what I’m saying is I’m grateful to be here. Oh, and Sam is pretty much always right, mostly, usually.

UPDATE: because my post posted without everything, somehow, I guess (sigh):

Today in my 106 class, we were having some conversations about this, about how we use language and how that language shifts between groups/classes/contexts, and as I was trying to get them to think about purpose in a rhetorical sense, I noticed that my co-instructor in Tech 120 had left a template on a board on the other end of the classroom: [USER] needs to [USER’S NEED] because [INSIGHT/BENEFIT] or something similar, and despite possible missing words, I turned their attention to this simple template. Consider that, I said, for your papers. What do YOU need to do and for what reason? What do you want? What do I need you to do, and for what reason? If you’re writing a resume, why are you doing it? What reason does that document have for existing in the world? I raise all this because these repetitive questions reminded me of repetitive actions, too, in games, in code, in so many forms of creation/interaction. All the crossover we’re pushing in 106E is bleeding into other modes of my life and I am learning as well.