Blogging Pedagogy - 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.

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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.

Serious Games

Cole Wehrle — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 12:58:26 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

Image Credit:

Ricardo Christe Homsi

Last year I wrote a blog entry on games in the classroom. The general guist of the piece went something like this: teaching practices, especially the implementation of classroom games, seems to have stalled since the fast and loose days of Hangman and other such earth shattering innovations. This is all especially odd because games, as a field of thought, are undergoing something of a renaissance right now—and I’m not just talking about narrative advances and new, more immersive interfaces. No, I’m referring instead to a new, deeper awareness of what it is to be a player and how players relate to each other in a game space. This development has been going on for nearly 30 years, but has only recently started to make its way into anything approaching the main stream. And, better yet, many of the most critical advances in thought don’t require fancy visualizations to challenge their players. Most of these game spaces (and their educational properties) could be easily created in a physical space with just a few props. And yet, in classrooms everywhere we might as well be playing the same classroom games that our grandparents played. This seems a little sad. So, as I set out to revise my 309 class over winter break, I decided to build a space for a game. My class covers (well, “touches on”) the Rhetoric of Independence. It starts with a look at some basic tenets of philosophy and economics and moves through case studies which consider the founding Documents of the United States, the Civil War, the early muckraking journalists and right on through the marketing of the “indie” concept and the success of the crowd funding platform, Kickstarter.

This semester I altered my syllabus to include an extended discussion of debt and financial and economic dependency, and I wanted to find a way for students to get a hands-on understanding of some of the issue’s complexity. Since many games have their origins in economic game theory, it seemed like an appropriate place to look. And after investigating a few options, I decided to adapt Stefan Dorra’s cruel and unusual game, Intrigue.

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Intrigue was originally published as a card game 1994. In it players take the roll of princely Italian families who attempt to farm out their family members to various lucrative positions and secure the most cash by the end of the game. It’s a curious game for many reasons, but perhaps chiefly because the players directly control the flow of money into the game—with the small caveat that they cannot give it to themselves. In other words, Intrigue is a game about gift giving. Its play generates a strange dance of obligations as negotiations that get more baroque with each passing turn.

However, the game itself wouldn't work in a classroom. For one, it would require me to find four or five copies of the game and would likely take too long to teach and moderate each group. So instead I decided to “blow up” the game. Rather than having players manage a little “family” of playing pieces, separated the players into families and had them act out the game as if it was a life-sized chess board. I made various labels for the different players and reshaped the class room to resemble the board. Now, a move like this might push the exercise a step too close to role-playing for my comfort. I wanted to maintain the game’s integrity so we spent a lot of time discussing strategy and I reminded the players that they needed to work as a team even if the game’s play would scatter the players around the classroom. After spending nearly half the class describing the rules and basic strategy we were ready to begin.

At first the class plunged into chaos. This was expected (as any classroom exercise where all 22 students are actively involved will generally produce a lot of noise and confusion), but soon the players became to organize themselves, almost without my intervention. Though the rules of the game are spartan, by the end an elaborate protocol had emerged, with the players inventing a whole system of rules organically. For instance, when negotiations would transpire between two parties, they would huddle and whisper so the other teams couldn’t interfere. One placed in their position, it was customary for the students to excuse themselves from any further discussions, and though I explicitly told them they were welcome to confer with their entire team. The students seemed to be developing an awareness of the impact of obligation and the limits of their own position’s independence.

Incentives, Focus, and Games

Cole Wehrle — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 18:47:47 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

Image Credit:

Hatdow

Most teachers who allow laptops in the classroom regret their choice shortly afterwards. Though students are always initially thankful and attentive, soon their eyes begin to wander to the screen. At first they play little games. Maybe they can have both MSWord and Wikipedia open at the same time, but maybe teacher will notice all that clicking and dragging so the reorganization goes unfinished and their browser sits blank, right next to whatever notes they are trying to compose. It’s not long before they start wondering if you will notice them. They begin a regular oscillation between empty looks towards the front of the class and quick glances back to their screens. After a few minutes of this their confidence builds. Slowly, with all the guile of a child stealing a cookie, they type in the f-a-c-e-b—that will launch them into a social-media stupor.

Such events are the grist for the mill of recreational teacher commiseration. The students are both brazen and listless—empty heads, somehow overstuffed with tripe. In talking to my peers, there seem to be only two solutions: either you implement an outright ban or vigilantly maintain surveillance state to shame them from their screens.

Of course, both solutions fail to really solve the problem. At their heart they are only treating the symptoms of a larger disengagement. In order to begin to solve problems of inattention, teachers must first address some uncomfortable questions. Why exactly do students want to fritter away their precious class time on Farmville, facebook, or ESPN.com? What do these resources provide that I, as the teacher, lack? The most common answer usually has something to do with the laziness of students and various cultures of disengagement and irresponsibility (i.e. “kids these days!”). However that line of thinking dismisses the considerable accomplishments of sites like ESPN.com, Facbook, and yes, Farmville.

After a summer of self-exile in the world of high school teaching, the answer to this question became immediately apparent. The vast majority of students in rhetoric and English classes arrive at the University of Texas fresh from their experience in high school. For many of these students, the rigor of a 30 hour high school course load all but precludes open disengagement. That’s not to say high school students don’t waste time, only that their engagement within class is heightened. There is simply more at stake. Thanks to college admissions and brow-beating parents, grades have serious consequences. Accordingly the students are placed into a tight information loop. Unlike the two or three meetings of a weekly college course, in high school their performance is constantly evaluated, and it’s not uncommon, especially in math and science classes, to receive grades daily.

These may be obvious observations, but they create a considerably underappreciated environment. Secondary school courses establish a culture of almost constant evaluation and considerable incentives. In some ways it’s not unlike the world they view on a Facebook news feed. The information is oriented around their position in their social sphere and contains constant feedback for every input. Of course, few would argue that the average status update carries the same importance as an algebra test, and it even seems a little silly to compare the two. Nevertheless, the unity in focus that might be directed towards alegrbra and Facebook reveal and important truth: the size of an incentive doesn’t matter; it’s the presence that commands focus, and it in this respect that the design principals of games demand our attention.

On Fridays, after a week of rigorous test preparation I would often reward my high school students with a day of classroom games. At first, in order to get them in the mood for something childish, I offered a range of incentives: homework passes, quiz boasts, participation points. At first I was elated by the response. A majority of the students seemed to genuinely become interested in the classroom activities. I even watched a student reprimand a fellow student for lollygagging on their cell phone during the competition. However, involvement was not uniform. By-and-large, the most active participants were the students who desired the “prize.” This led me to a new tactic. Instead of designing complicated and seductive prizes, I thought I would dream up more interesting games and keep the “prizes” either within the game or disregard them entirely. For instance, on one occasion I happened to draw each team a mascot on the board. As each team won points I would offer their team’s mascot various props (a top hat, a motorcycle, et cetera) to indicate who had won the round. Though first offered as a joke, the students became highly competitive over the virtual bling and kids who had little interest in the material immediately became engaged. By keeping the prizes within the space of the game, the students could allow themselves to become unplugged and focus just at the task at hand.

Procedural Engagement and Inform7

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:57:18 +0000

Author:

Matt King

Image Credit:

Inform

In my “Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing” course last semester, I included an assignment that drew on Ian Bogost’s understanding of procedural rhetoric while also aiming to complicate it. After studying communities of their choice throughout the semester, my students had to create procedural arguments about their communities using the interactive fiction software Inform7. This assignment drew on a similar one designed by Jim Brown. Through it, I hoped to encourage a form of what I have begun to call procedural engagement.

As Bogost notes in Persuasive Games, “Procedurality refers to a way of creating, explaining, or understanding processes. And processes define the way things work: the methods, techniques, and logics that drive the operation of systems, from mechanical systems like engines to organization systems like high schools to conceptual systems like religious faith… Procedural rhetoric, then, is a practice of using processes persuasively” (2-3). More specifically, it is “a technique for making arguments with computational systems and for unpacking computational arguments others have created” (3). For Bogost, video games serve as an exemplary embodiment of procedural rhetoric: the processes and rules that structure games make arguments about how the world works.

While procedural rhetoric focuses primarily on how computational systems – and video games in particular – can represent and make arguments about the processes at work in various systems, Bogost also uses the notion of procedurality to advance an ontological understanding of the world and the objects that comprise it. As Bogost elaborates in "Process vs. Procedure," objects are distinguished by the unique “logic[s] of behavior” and “way[s] of operating” that characterize their being (6). These logics can be understood as capacities for expression and engagement, and these capacities differ from object to object. Procedurality thus offers a way of accounting for how objects encounter and relate to one another: “Within the withdrawn core of an object, swirls of murky logics churn, regulating the ways an object might enter and exit relations with other objects in order to constitute still different objects” (7). Procedures, those “swirls of murky logics,” thus make available and constrain an object’s capacities for engagement and expression.

This in turn encourages us to think about the ways that we engage with objects. Bogost further argues that the “molten core of an object remains inaccessible and unknowable” (7). In other words, we cannot fully understand or represent the logics at play in a given object or system. Thus, as rhetoricians, our attendance to procedures and the relations they make available would not privilege symbolic representation, understanding, or critical engagement. The notion of procedural engagement offers a site for articulating a different mode of engagement. The main goal of procedural engagement would be to keep the lines of communication and relation open – that is, to maintain an engagement with the logics at play in a situation without translating them into imperfect representations and objects of understanding. From this perspective, rhetorical relations have less to do with bridging differences and establishing symbolic identifications than with finding ways to encounter and engage the withdrawn and unknowable, to bring it to the surface, to give it a space for expression.

Here’s where the assignment comes in. Working in Inform7 challenges students to expose the unique logic of their community to the logic of the digital writing environment. Take this example of a student working with the environmental activism community:

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In "Environmental Paths," the reader/player must navigate a series of decisions as an EPA investigator that dramatize the complexities of balancing environmental and economic concerns. In part, the procedural and interactive text is argumentative; it embodies Bogost's understanding of procedural rhetoric. But the challenge of authoring such a text goes beyond argumentation. This mode of writing is not simply a matter of advancing a claim. Rather, it requires the student author to approach the situation in such a way that their understanding of the community can respond to the unique constraints of the writing platform. This asks of students a sensitivity to the various ways that their communities express themselves in terms of place and social practices. It makes their perspectives and positions subject to the logic of the platform. It calls for a different mode of engagement, one grounded in responsiveness to the various logics at play.

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.