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?