Blogging Pedagogy - video games

Technological Nostalgia and the Academic Year to Come

Eric Detweiler — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 18:13:30 +0000

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I feel so out of touch when it comes to video games.

During my time in the Digital Writing and Research Lab, I've worked to incorporate new technologies and media into my scholarship and pedagogy: I've published webtexts, rhetoric podcasts, and--as you might have guessed--blog posts about pedagogy. I've had students in my classes record podcasts of their own, collaborate on wikis, and use digital platforms to create visuals. But despite their vast array of pedagogical possibilities, I've yet to bring video games into the classroom. After all, the most recent gaming console I own is the eight-year-old (eight years old?!) Nintendo Wii, which--let's be honest--I mostly use to watch Netflix.

Except, that is, for a few months last fall when I got my hands on a Wii Classic Controller.

wii classic.jpg

image via Amazon.com

This controller is not exactly a groundbreaking piece of technology. In fact, it's decidedly backwards, a way of retrofitting the Wii's more innovative controller so you can use the console to play games from past platforms. In my case, the game in question was Mario Kart 64, an eighteen-year-old game (EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD?!) and the only multiplayer game at which I've ever been any good. As I lack both the hand-eye coordination required by many newer games and the funds required to purchase newer consoles, Mario Kart 64 still represents--alongside the halcyon days I invested in the Final Fantasy games released for the first-generation PlayStation--the pinnacle of my gamerly achievements. So, following my accomplishment of a key graduate-school achievement, I used the classic controller to descend into a few days of '90s nostalgia. With my good friend Toad, I sped across 64-bit beaches, turnpikes, and boardwalks. I won gold cups and blasted my competitors with heat-seeking turtle shells. I drove, I raced, I karted. And then, eventually, I felt the pull of responsibility, put down the controller, and picked up my copy of Maurice Blanchot's The ~~Racing~~ Writing of the Disaster. Done with krashing karts, I returned to the various spin-outs of scholarly writing.

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image via Fanpop

Which is to say that it's all too tempting for me to shake my head at undergraduates these days, what with their fourth-generation PlayStations, eighth-generation Mario Kart games, Steam accounts, and Flappy Bird victories. Soon, Beloit College will release their "mindset list" for the class of 2018 and surely give those of us who teach them--whether we're 27 or 72--plenty more excuses to panic about students' cultural touchstones.

My hope for myself, though, as I begin academic year 2014-15, is that I can resist such allergic reactions to students' cultural and technological habits. Following the suggestions of John Warner, I'd hope to avoid projecting my own anxieties about and lack of discipline with digital technologies onto my students--at least not without first asking after my students' relationships with technologies new and old. This strikes me as one of the many tensions teachers--perhaps especially teachers of rhetoric, writing, and composition--must constantly balance: Resisting the urge to fume at and dismiss technologies with which we're unfamiliar while also resisting the urge to celebrate technologies about which we know very little for the sake of novelty alone or as part of some dream about the inevitable march of progress.

What excites me about the digital rhetoric classroom--the reason that maybe I should work harder to plug post-millennial video games into my classroom, and that I'm excited about the work the DWRL's new Video/Games group will undertake in the coming year--is how fruitful a place it can be for negotiating and questioning this tension. With any new technology--even the most seemingly ubiquitous--at least a few students in any given class are going to be disoriented by it. And at the very least, perhaps we as teachers will be disoriented by it (or, in the spirit of dissoi logoi, we can pretend to be). The digital rhetoric course, in short, can be a place not for socializing students back into old forms of composition, nor for naturalizing new technologies into institutional structures, but for denaturalizing both our own and our students' expectations about and approaches to various technologies, forms of communication, and ways of being--from the ancient art of Mario Kart 64, to the crystallized realms of academic English, to the technological relations that may only come into existence in the courses we teach this fall and in the future.

Game Controllers and Course Design

Scott Nelson — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:21:56 +0000

Author:

Scott Nelson

Image Credit:

Scott Nelson, 2013, CC BY-NC-SA

So, I've been thinking this week about controllers and controls. The Playstation 4 controller was announced, and there are some significant changes in the design that speak to the changing nature of gaming in general. The new controller has a touch screen and a color-coded light bar to identify different players. Most significant to this post, though, is the missing 'Select' and 'Start' buttons. Since the 1980s, these buttons have been standard on most game controllers, and Sony's decision to replace them with the 'Share' and 'Options' button signals a shift in video games' focus. Gamers have definitely noticed this seemingly small shift, with some making video tributes to the lost buttons.

The earliest computer games were somewhat solitary affairs -- a single human player competed against the computer. Later, with Tennis for Two, two human players could go head-to-head. Competitions in the arcade era focused on beating a high score set by another player at another time. Players had to be in physical proximity to one another to share a game. In the 1970s, though, that changed with the advent of online games where multiple players could compete simultaneously.

However, even through these changes, the basic controller signaled a particular interface with the machine. The relationship between the player and the game was highlighted. You could select from certain options and start the game. Sony's redesign shifts that relationship to one among a community of gamers. With a quick press of a standard button, gamers can share their experience with others through short screencaptures and broadcasts.

So what does this have to do with pedagogy? More than you'd initially think. My particular preferences as a gamer got me thinking about this shift and the design considerations that will surely follow. While pedagogues may not focus on these considerations, video game designers have made it a focus of significant study. Damien Schubert -- the lead designer of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Star Wars: The Old Republic -- made it the focus of his 2011 Game Developer's Conference presentation. In designing for a game genre that by definition brings many people together, how can we still make space for the "lone wolves"?

At least in gaming, I happen to be one of those loners. I have a handful of Playstation Network friends who never hear from me, as I prefer to game alone. And I think World of Warcraft is boring. There, I said it. I'm sure other gamers will say that WoW really gets good after you begin raiding with others, but I just don't prefer that kind of experience. And game designers know that there's enough people similar to me that they should design with us in mind.

The same can be said for our classrooms. Digital Media production invites collaboration, as it can be too complex for a single student's workload. However, not all students thrive with those constraints. We should be careful to nudge students outside of their comfort zones, but also be mindful of the lone wolves out there. Not all students' careers will require them to collaborate often, and some web technologies are allowing us to work together, yet separately.

One way I mitigate these different learning styles is to design unit projects with options -- students can opt for simpler, individual projects, or for more complex group projects. The pull of the larger projects tends to be their "wow" factor. Some students would just prefer to make a video over a static image.

The other way is with something I call "Nelsonslist" (after the classifieds site Craigslist). I ask students to post on the course wiki a brief introduction to both their current digital media skills and skills they'd like to pick up. Students are then invited to network with others of similar interests. Over three years, it's worked quite well. Some students form affinity groups while others express their desire to work alone.

Though Web 2.0 technologies encourage us to share more and more of ourselves online, we can't assume all who participate in these communities enjoy posting their meals, high scores, and random thoughts. Lurkers make up an important part of those ecosystems, and we'd do well to keep them in mind when designing assignments.

Rhetorical Video Games

Prentice — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:06:57 +0000

Author:

Chris Ortiz y Prentice

Image Credit:

via James Vaughan

I ran my Mass Effect 1 lesson plan today, and I must say that I’m all fired up about it. Why? Because it worked. Turns out, you can use a video game to teach a rhetorical concept, and not just as a medium that can be rhetorically analyzed, but as a modeling technology that enables (indeed requires) the cognitive work rhetorical concepts entail. (See, e.g., John Albierti’s recent article in Computers and Composition).

Don’t get me wrong. I ran the plan because I thought it might work, but there was a part of me that was anxious about bringing a video game into the classroom; anxious that I might alienate some of my students; that the students wouldn’t take the lesson seriously; that the game wouldn’t demonstrate what I thought it would; that the students wouldn’t get it; wouldn’t care to get it.

I’ll just say that my students allayed my anxieties. Sounds like I’m patting myself on the back here, but truth is, it wasn’t a perfect lesson plan, nor was it perfectly executed, nor was every single student totally into it. But I was surprised by my students today. Their responses to the game showed me possibilities for using Mass Effect in the classroom that I hadn’t recognized before.

One thing I learned is just how incredibly rhetorically-minded BioWare’s Mass Effect series is. Mass Effect is the cutting-edge in the quest-driven, single-player Role Playing Game genre (so: save the universe from the bad guys by developing your avatar’s skills and equipment). What distinguishes Mass Effect from its predecessors is BioWare’s innovative “dialogue wheel” system, which gives Shepard the last call on how to articulate the gamer’s rhetorical decisions. Instead of mimicking the phrasing of the rhetorical option presented on the screen, that is, Shepard utters something which accomplishes that rhetorical task but not always in the way you expected. The player must therefore take into account the entire critical situation—who is the audience, how might the audience react to certain decisions judging from what has happened in the game so far, how might Shepard translate the prompt into actual language, and how might that language exceed the original rhetorical intention—before providing an additional rhetorical stimulus.

In the scene I had the students play, the character/avatar Shepard has just taken over command of the starship Normandy and s/he’s giving a speech to rile up her crew and to shore up their confidence about the mission they’re about to undertake. I had five different students play through the same scene while we considered how Shepard’s speech develops along different paths depending on the rhetorical prompts chosen. (It was fun.) As the speech goes on, the camera cuts to Shepard’s audience throughout the ship. The shots shown are also governed by the rhetorical decisions the gamer makes.

For instance, when one of my students selected “Humanity is in this alone” as a rhetorical prompt, Shepard says that “None of the other species has got the guts, grit, or balls to get this mission done.” The camera then cuts to the engine room, where two humans are standing with an alien species. The alien turns slightly away from the humans and crosses his arms. On a second run-through, a student chose a different tactic. She selected “Humanity must do its part,” which makes Shepard talk about how humans and aliens will have to work together to defeat Saren (the bad guy). When the camera shot to the same engine-room, the alien opens up his folded arms and turns slightly towards the human characters. (What delights me is that I didn’t catch this difference; one of my students did!)

I led a discussion in which we talked about the concepts of invented ethos (how the decisions you make change Shepard’s character; how the crew responds differently to Shepard depending on the ethos s/he develops in the speech). We also talked about the relative advantages and disadvantages of going different ways with the speech: namely, you can alienate the alien crew members and thereby build a strong connection to the extremist pro-human humans on the ship; or you can lose those humans’ support but gain a broader inter-species base of support throughout the ship. Finally, we talked about how persuasive writing is “modular,” in that rhetorical decisions one makes have differently weighted consequences. So a decision you make at the beginning of a paper affords certain decisions you can make later on, and closes off other decisions that would have been afforded by making a different decision at the beginning.

This is a relatively complex notion, but it was not difficult to explain to my students, because they had just been playing around with how the rhetorical decisions you make for Shepard afford X decisions and deny Y decisions. By the final play-throughs, students were saying things like, “Oh, we missed our chance to say that because we chose…” and “Next time, let’s choose that option because it gives us all those prompts we haven’t tried.”

I’ll mention, finally, that there is no “correct” way to go through the scene. Different choices are “scored” with either paragon or renegade points. Why certain ways of making the speech warrant either paragon or renegade points was one of the topics we discussed in class.

My point in all of this is that Mass Effect is a rhetorical game: it models rhetorical situations, and then gives the gamer a chance to play around in those situations while at the same time providing a perspective “outside” the game from which the player can observe the consequences on the audience of making these rhetorical decisions as opposed to those. The camera work underscores the rhetorical quality of speech-acts by capturing the audience’s differing reactions.

I mentioned that the plan wasn’t perfectly conceived of or perfectly executed. There is definitely room to develop pedagogical uses for Mass Effect and other “rhetorical” games (the Fallout series comes to mind, or Heavy Rain for PS3). Next semester, I plan on bringing Mass Effect into the classroom earlier in the semester. (The scene I used today would have been particularly effective for teaching ethos in the second unit, or teaching “critical situation” right off the bat in the first unit). I might then bring the game back into the classroom for the third unit and have them play a different scene, to which I would append a writing assignment that would have students articulate on paper what the game does modularly and visually. I can imagine an assignment, for instance, where I ask students to translate their papers into the sorts of rhetorical prompts they saw in the game. Then students could mind map their papers to show how early decisions open up onto later decisions, while making certain decisions takes other options out of play. Such an assignment might help students think explicitly about why they’re organizing their persuasive essays the way they are, and how a different set of “moves” might have different effects.

You know…there’s a BioWare studio in Austin. It’d be interesting to see what some of the game’s creators think about its pedagogical uses. Just a thought.

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Cofounders of BioWare Ray Muzyka (left) and Greg Zeschuk

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Better than Rhetoric

Prentice — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:39:36 +0000

Author:

Chris Ortiz y Prentice

Image Credit:

Molleindustria

My thinking about rhetoric and realism has been greatly elucidated this year by my class, Rhetoric of Video Games.

Like most graduate student instructors, “intros,” “surveys” and “skills” courses have been my bread and butter: not a bad meal, after all, although rare has been the class that inspired my own thinking about a question. The discussions I’ve led with the students of Rhetoric of Video Games, by contrast, have very often gone beyond what many working in the field are talking about. These students are juniors and seniors, some business and economics majors, a handful of fine arts and communications people, a few computer science students, mostly boys, but a select group of conquer-the-world-with-pizzazz-type young women. What brings us all together is a love of videogames. One thing I haven’t done this semester is talk about illustrating your argument with example or supporting your claim with evidence; never had to. These students talk about videogames like Bob Costas talks about the Olympics. It is their delight to bring a game up in class discussion. Whenever a new game is mentioned, it receives cheers (or boos) from the entire class. I’m talking about hands-clapping, huzzahing celebration. The twenty-odd students in my class have been waiting to talk seriously about videogames for a long time now, and it has been my pleasure to give them a reason for doing so. In fact, I have already learned a great deal about videogames from these students, and I dedicate the thoughts below to them.

Pretty much everything we know about rhetoric and, in, and of videogames we take from Ian Bogost’s excellent Persuasive Games (2007). There, Bogost makes a distinction between “serious games”--which, for training purposes, put the player in the role of a functionary of some sort or another, say, a public high school teacher or a soldier--and “persuasive games.” For a game to be truly persuasive by Bogost’s criteria, it must put the user at a critical distance from the role it also asks him or her to adopt. This is a particular kind of make-believe; not immersive--as in, you are an IRS agent, and if you don’t want to lose your job, you’d better act like one--but contemplative and experimental--as in, think about the sorts of decisions the top suits at McDonalds are called on to make, the tactics they must implement, to maintain annual growth of x percent. A properly persuasive game does not train; it argues. Playing from a perspective at once “from within” and “from above” the game, Bogost suggests, is sufficient to realize an argument: “The McDonald’s Videogame [by Molleindustria] mounts a procedural rhetoric about the necessity of corruption in the global fast food business, and the overwhelming temptation of greed, which leads to more corruption” (31). Games become critical when they eschew immersion for abstraction (45-6).

Literary Realism, I would argue, has been at this very crux for a long time now -- but with a difference. Clearly, realism in novels or cinema or drama has a moral dimension; very often, characters will mount larger arguments about the way things work, and the internal workings of realist narratives are often pinned to a kind of moral machination. But a novel, a play, a movie: these forms put the reader into a different relation with the "players" than does a persuasive game. A good realist story gives each character as much due as possible--it develops "where they're coming from" to the utmost degree. The user in realism, furthermore, does not have access to the "game state" of the plot; as in life, there is no access in realism to the rules of the game--either for reader or for author. The result of realism's particular expressive technology is that the reader is not asked to experiment with the configuration of the roles but rather to come to understand why people are acting a particular way. Does this empathy lead to universal approval? Not at all: many times, a closer understanding begets a more intense contempt. But there is a fatality in realism; as an author, one must have the characters act on expectations that they are playing this game and not another. As a reader, it is futile to regret the decisions of a fictional character.

This is to say that realism does not mount arguments. Let’s take a couple of high-realist test cases. There are no better candidates to ascertain whether realim makes an argument than two among the most argumentative instances of high realism: Jude the Obscure (1895) and Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893). So what could be the argument of Jude? Society is very bad because it doesn't let people get along? That's not an argument at all. An argument requires an exhortation, and, as the critics have long noted, Hardy relentlessly shuts down aveues for change in Jude. Structurally, the novel is an anti-Bildungsroman in the method of tragicomedy; thematically, Jude adopts Sue’s opposing worldview precisely when--and for the same reason--Sue adopts Jude's, leaving each as they were before: hopelessly unable to see eye-to-eye. Mrs. Warren's Profession is no different; in the end, Vivie admits to understanding the "Crofts philosophy of life" but chooses to go another way, not out of a sentiment of good and bad but out of an unremitting self-honesty. What could then be the argument of Mrs. Warren's Profession? Be like Vivie, not like Crofts or Mrs. Warren; but Vivie herself would denounce that as the very sort of infantile moral and “sentiment”--what her mother calls “pretence”-- she wishes to be done with, once for all. Anyone familiar with these works will immediately see how pointless it is to try and reduce them into argumentative proposition.

What we've learned is that realism deals in argument without itself being an argument. Indeed, the great problem of nineteenth century realist aesthetics--and the generative problematic which initiates every new realist project, up to the present day--is how to go beyond argument.

One more stopping point before we arrive at the moral of this, my teacher's tale.

If realism isn’t argument, then (going back to the Bogost) surely it’s because it takes an immersive rather than abstracting approach to representation. I thought this too for a while, but let’s go back to the McDonald's game now that we have an understanding of realism under our belts. Suppose that the argument one gets from playing the game is that McDonald's is necessarily bad for the world because its purpose is not to feed human beings but to amass surplus value. To make this argument, the McDonald's game forces your hand; you seem to be playing “from above”--above even the CEO or the shareholders--but you find yourself powerless to change the game's outcomes: bribing officials, clearing forests, dislocating poor people, pumping cows full of hormones, etc. It turns out that the McDonald’s game is every bit as tragic as realism. Given this main difference between immersion and abstraction with which we’ve been dealing, how could that be?

Recall that realism also takes a view “from above" and that the telescoping of perspectives between “from within” and “from above” allows realism to achieve tragedy. Realism is tragic, in other words, because it immerses, then abstracts, and allows us to see how inevitable all this pain is. But of course, whether one comes out with a tragic issue all depends on the videogame notion par excellence, that of “interactivity.” What can you do to change a tragic course? In the McDonald’s game, you are even more limited to a rational program in your abstracted role. Why is that? Because you are nothing other than the interest which keeps all of the players playing the same game. Not only are you powerless to change the game: you are the game.

Such a role places us at the very edge of argument. As the game, we have a tragic view "from above." What interests me, however, is videogames' technological capacity to go beyond argument. To say that this game we’re playing at the moment is necessarily bad for its players is argument, but like realism, it finds itself stuck in the tragedy that follows on the heels of critique. But whenever we ask someone to act on different expectations and then give them a reason and a way to do so; whenever we say, wouldn't we all be better off to play another game and then offer another game, we may be moving past the problematic of realism. The question is, How to play a game in such a way that it changes the game? The challenge, for the aesthetics that takes this as its problem, is how to create a place for the user neither “from above” nor “from within” but “from outside.” This semester, I’ll be asking my wonderful students to go further than the realists could in addressing that challenge; they will try to use the capacities of the videogame medium to go beyond argument into experiment. That’s the real promise of videogames, and perhaps what makes them better than rhetoric.

Video Games, Queer Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:34:15 +0000

Author:

Kevin Bourque

Image Credit:

Fallout: New Vegas

Since early 2006 – when Blizzard Entertainment met with criticism and controversy for threatening to oust a player advertising a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)-friendly World of Warcraft guild – queer visibility in the world of gaming has exploded. Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony gave the world of gaming its first eponymous queer character, “Gay” Tony Prince, just last year; and, as though mirroring America’s slow shift in public opinion from “separate-but-equal” solutions to full-fledged marriage equality, mere same-sex cohabitation in the Sims 2 graduated nine years later to gay marriages in the Sims 3 (2009). Dragon Age: Origins, from that same year, includes a memorable elf-on-elf scene which, in the words of the conservative World Net Daily, “depicts two men in various sex positions in a secret scene of homosexual seduction.” And finally, ongoing controversy over the possibility of same-sex coupling in Mass Effect 2 has prompted Bioware to lock down any forum discussion on the subject – perhaps in a misguided attempt, similar to Blizzard’s five years ago, to protect sexual minorities from abuse by mandating their invisibility.

The newfound visibility of queers in games serves as a kind of compelling synecdoche for our increasing, if troubled, presence in popular culture. It offers, too, a unique case study in sexual identity, complementing ongoing debates in queer activism, theory and culture as to how LGBT identity is created to begin with, and offering a compelling resource to teaching and scholarship on theories of sexual identity – in courses such as my own Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture, or other courses grappling with the rhetorics of gender, sexuality, and identity formation.

In her foundational Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick traced a governing tension between minoritizing and universalizing approaches to sexual identity, the former seeing homosexuality as the purview of a minority of actual homosexuals and the latter as a possibility for all persons, across a wide range of sexualities. This tension – along with the complementary binary of essentialist (one is intrinsically gay or lesbian) versus constructionist (all sexualities are socially constructed, shaped and formed by context) models – governs our notions of sexual identity. The making of sexual identity in contemporary video games demonstrates these ongoing debates, making thorny if foundational concepts in queer studies far more apparent and intuitive to the student.

The Sims (2000), for example, takes a generously universalizing approach. In lieu of making a particular sexual identity part of the character-formation process, developers chose to populate the game entirely with equal-opportunity Kinsey-3’s, each character intrinsically bisexual. Left to his or her own devices, a Sim is equally able to form romantic attachment with either sex, and one’s sexual identity is predicated more on interpersonal connection than on any intrinsic or personal difference.

Contrariwise, the recent Fallout: New Vegas has taken a minoritizing perspective, even building sexual minority status into the process of character formation. Character “perks,” such as the aptly-named Confirmed Bachelor trait, define one’s character as gay (Cherchez la Femme, incidentally, is the lesbian version) as they offers bonuses in conversations with sexual minority non-player characters.

1. Confirmed Batchelor used in dialogue; a gay NPC's response

Finally, other video games are destabilizing sex, gender and sexuality outright. In MolleIndustria’s Queer Power, styled after fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur, two players race to beat each other to sexual orgasm while seamlessly transforming in gender, sexual position and erotic activity. Queer Power is, in the words of creator Paolo Pedercini, “loosely inspired by queer theory and particularly the work of gender theorist Judith Butler,” and as in Butler’s groundbreaking work – which thinks through how the performance of gender in fact constructs the categories of sexuality, gender, and even biological sex – how you act defines what you are, not vice-versa. The concept, as well as the theorist’s notoriously convoluted writerly style, is likewise reflected in a recent release from the UCLA conceptual-design outfit Queer Technologies: TransCoder, a “Queer Programming Anti-Language” which offers “libraries rooted in theories of queerness as an attempt to sever ontological and epistemological ties to dominant technologies and interrupt the flow of circulation between heternormative culture, coding, and visual interface.”

2. MolleIndustria's Queer Power; Queer Technology's Transcoder

Communication in the Classroom

Prentice — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:31:10 +0000

Author:

Chris Ortiz y Prentice

Image Credit:

David Sky

This semester I wanted to develop the Mass Effect lesson I devised in the fall. That lesson used the video game as a rhetorical modeling technology, which (I hoped) would have student thinking about how rhetorical decisions afford and foreclose others “down the line.” In my discussions of this lesson with many of you, I was encouraged to develop a writing lesson that would give students a chance to make their own Mass Effect-style modular arguments. The lesson I’ve learned from devising this exercise is the advantage of letting students in on the lesson-making process.

I’ll admit that, when I made the copious materials my lesson required, I wasn’t too sure myself how to turn persuasive articles into the sort of rhetorical prompts given to the player of Mass Effect. The relation between these prompts and what Shepard says is by no means obvious but an interesting rhetorical question in its own right.

So I brought the lesson to class without having mastered (or even fully understood) the skills I was asking the students to practice and develop. This made me nervous. The students perceived that I could not communicate to them precisely what I was looking for them to do. I referenced what we’d learned the previous class playing the game; I told them that I wanted them to take the provided material and make “modular” arguments; I gave them a sense of my thought process, the difficulties I’d encountered, and my ambitions for the lesson. And then I stopped talking, half-expecting insubordination. “You’ve no idea what you’re talking about! How can you ask us to do this when you can’t even do it yourself? What gives you the right to grade us when you can’t model what an A would look like?”

What I got instead was collaboration. “Wouldn’t it also be possible to write the prompts like this?” “Isn’t there another decision going on behind these words?” “Couldn’t we connect these two lines, like this, since they go to the same place from here on out?”

As luck would have it, I recently came upon a young Raymond Williams arguing for the pedagogical superiority of communication over transmission. In some educational contexts, his words (at the end of Culture and Society) might strike one as hopelessly optimistic. But in the rhe306 classroom, and last week, his argument held true:

Communication is not only transmission; it is also reception and response. . . . The very failure of so many of the items of transmission which I have listed is not an accident, but the result of a failure to understand communication. The failure is due to an arrogant preoccupation with transmission, which rests on the assumption that the common answers have been found and need only to be applied. (309, 314)

This may seem like teaching 101 to all of you, but I guess I didn’t fully trust it. I was surprised when my students turned collaborators, but I don’t know why I should’ve been, since working towards an answer is a much more satisfying experience than being told one. (Bo’s April 4^thpost is worth reading for insights into how to devise lessons that purposefully make the learning process communicative and collaborative).

Why ARIS Works for Literature Classes

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:23:57 +0000

Author:

Cleve Wiese

Image Credit:

Cleve Wiese

So my Banned Books E314 class is wrapping up the ARIS project described in my recent lesson plan post, and as I reflect on the experience I find myself fending off the complaints of a reasonable (if imaginary) skeptic: Sure, games are rhetorical, so it makes sense to analyze them in a rhetoric class. And sure, procedural rhetoric is an important mode of argumentation, so game design makes sense – in a rhetoric class. And yes, given the proliferation of location based media, the creation of location based, augmented reality games is probably a valuable experience for students – again, in a rhetoric class. But why, this skeptic asks, would any of this be relevant to a literature class – a banned books class, no less – in which your texts are predetermined novels and poems? Aren’t you just driving a square peg into a round hole for the sake of a personal (read, selfish) interest?

I have a few responses for this critic. To begin with, I see the E314 course as a general introduction to a variety of ways of reading and analyzing literature. For me, that means spending part of the semester focusing on writers and their historical contexts, part of the semester focused on new-crit-inspired modes of close-reading and formal analysis, and part of the semester focused on reader response (things don’t break down quite that cleanly, of course, but that’s the guiding, tripartite framework). This assignment emphasizes the third approach: Beginning with the Aristotelian idea that people can only experience things (fiction included) through the lenses of concrete real-world experiences, memories, and images anyway, the purpose here is not to analyze what a text means, in itself or in some particular historical context, but what can be done with it, right now, at UT Austin in April 2011. The novel or poem is merely the raw material for a new creation that is literally embedded by students on the real-world space of the UT Campus via the ARIS platform.

But, my critic counters, if you so completely de-emphasize the text itself, how can this assignment possibly teach literary analysis? And what about your responsibility to focus on the bannedness of these banned books?

This assignment teaches analysis because every ARIS game the students design has to make an argument. And although that argument isn’t limited by the text, it is an interpretation of the text, inspired by the text, in response to the text. From this point of view, it’s really not all that far from the kind of literary analysis we already ask students to do all the time. The difference here is that the games students create self-consciously filter source material through their own real world concerns and lived experiences. For example, one game based on Catcher in the Rye includes an exchange with NPCs inspired by peripheral characters from Holden’s West Village drinking binge – but in the game, these characters are virtually embedded on the South Mall, and the focus of their exchange with the PC (in the role of Holden) is refocused on a particular concern of a particular group of UT readers/English students/game designers: underage drinking. These connections – between personal experiences and Holden’s fictional night out – occurred to these students in their roles as readers. And in their roles as students in my course earlier in the semester, they were expected to filter this seemingly irrelevant association out of writing assignments. But in this assignment, in the new roles of game designers, they are encouraged to put that subjective “noise” at the center of a new product focused not on the text alone, but on the intersection of the text and their everyday lives.

This may seem a counter-intuitive, or even self-indulgent, approach to teaching literature. But I find it strikingly appropriate for a Banned Books class: Most of the controversies we discuss have less to do with what disputed literary works mean in any objective sense than with what they are used for by different stakeholders in different cultural contexts. In some cases (such as The Satanic Verses, which we’re studying right now), the books themselves seem deliberately designed for this kind of fragmentation and re-mediation by a wide range of people in many places with a wide range of political, religious, or cultural agendas. In fact, this is the way books often work and have a measurable effect in the world. So I think it makes much more sense to give students the chance to engage in the same kind of openly rhetorical, subjective, irreverent appropriation of literature than to flatly condemn it as ignorant or wrong.

Finally, I think that playing with ARIS is an amazingly interesting way to get students thinking about persona and audience. In What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning, James Gee discusses three levels of identity operative in a role playing video games: Real-world identity (student, teacher, etc.), virtual identity, and the intersection of real and virtual identities in a “projective identity” (what the real world ‘me’ aspires to for the virtual ‘me’). Similarly, in this assignment students first have to think of themselves in the real-world identity of game designers with the confidence and authority to play with (that is, freely appropriate) previously sacrosanct literary texts. Second, they have to design a persona for players to adopt and they have to figure out to effectively convey this role through dialogue and gameplay (as you can see below, in dialogue situations the ARIS player is visually represented by only a silhouette and the word “YOU,” a limitation that forces designers to find other compelling ways to convey 1^st person characterization). Finally, the students have to think about projective identity not so much in the aspirational sense that Gee talks about as in a closely related rhetorical sense: ‘What,’ they have to ask, ‘will players be encouraged to believe in their real world identities as a result of experiencing this game through the particular virtual identity I design.’ In other words, the projective identity becomes the interpretive thesis or argument.

Ok, my critic says, even if I buy all of what you’ve argued for here, I still think you’re trying to turn a literature assignment into a rhetoric assignment. To this I plead guilty, at least in part. But since every paper I ask my students to write requires them to make an argument for a particular audience, I’m not sure this is such a bad – or unusual – thing.

Prototyping Procedural Rhetoric

Scott Nelson — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:13:20 +0000

Author:

Scott Nelson

Image Credit:

Scott Nelson's RHE 309K Students

For the final project in my RHE 309K: The Rhetoric of Video Games class, I had students work in groups to develop a game concept that uses procedural rhetoric to argue a thesis. The lesson plan can be found here, but the gist is they write a classical argument on a topic of their choice, and then present both why their thesis is the preferred position and how a video game arguing this position would work. I encouraged them to use use various multimedia authoring tools for their presentations, but was still surprised by the innovation and quality of the multimedia they created. Since there were only four groups total, I'll run through their basic ideas for the games.

Mix

Mix is a game about broken copyright laws and the stifling of art. The group decided on a puzzle metaphor for the game, on where the individual pieces represent other artists' work. What I found particularly innovative abut their game design was that each boss battle corresponded to a different part of the four-part test for fair use. The player actually fights fair use concepts, but later these concepts come back on the side of the player to defeat record companies.

Children of the Future and the Laptops of Doom

CFLD argues to students about the overuse of laptops in college classrooms. What I found particularly innovaive with their approach was to have a set of minigames dealing with attention and respect for the instructor. All of the minigames' win states point to the overarching thesis that using laptops in the classroom is detrimental to students' learning.The above screenshot is from the first minigame, and highlights the difficulty in processing information from simultaneous, varied sources.

Overparenting Mama

As the title suggests, this game is about overparenting, often called "helicopter parenting." Aside from the obvious visual rhetoric of a hovering mother, this game uses a unique point system to argue that letting kids fail is ultimately good for them.

War on the Homefront

War on the Homefront argues against the military's Individual Ready Reserve policies of extending contracts beyond the three years mandatory service. The group argued that similar to the "backdoor draft" of stop-loss policies, the IRR disturbs veterans' civilian life and unethically asks more of men and women who have already served their country. The innovation in this group stemed from their decision to use Little Big Planet as a presentation platform. The above screenshot shows Sackboy literally drowning in statistics about PTSD and tours of duty.

These screenshots don't really do justice to the robust nature of the students' presentations, as each group created a multitude of digital media to supplement their arguments. Some of the presentations contained the usual PowerPoint, but some used static images, video, and even working prototypes of the game using Game Salad or the Unreal Engine. In creating procedural rhetoric, the students pushed themselves outside normal conception of argument creation and used new media in novel ways. I'll be submitting all of their projects to TheJUMP, where hopefully they can be published at a later date.