After Tuesday’s conversation with Ashley, Alisha, Sherri, and Dr. Blackmon, during which we considered the example of Neverwinter and the manner in which such a game might be used in the classroom, I am struck by all the different pedagogical applications for such a game. Whether it’s using the game to discuss research practices, or thinking about it as a site of communication and language, or using the game as the catalyst for conversations about things like audience, discourse community, representation, historical/cultural context, etc., it’s fascinating to think about how a video game can be so pedagogically generative. This actually brings to mind a comment made in “Reading between the Code: The Teaching of HTML and the Displacement of Writing Instruction” in which Mauriello, Pagnucci, and Winner point out that their various uses of technology in their classrooms led them to realize that “no one method is, as yet, the best approach” (416).

I’ve also been thinking about—as Sherri brings up in her post as well—the ideas of struggling and comfort levels in relation to the use of games with students. It seems to me that the conversations around the struggling seem to be helpful as well, for they may allow us to think about why it is that we struggle as well as what sort of implications our struggles might have for the way we think about our interactions with video games. Perhaps this speaks to something Rea and White highlight in “The Changing Nature of Writing: Prose or Code in the Classroom”: “To work effectively within the medium, both instructors and students need to understand the medium itself, because it is not only changing culture, but also the means through which people communicate and share information” (423). And maybe the various methods of engaging with Neverwinter that we all talked about together in our group are all different ways we might begin to “work effectively within the medium” in an effort to think about how we communicate and share information and how video games might mediate such communication.