A New Way of Writing: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Using Games and Game Design in the First Year Writing Classroom

Editor's Notes

• #3: The Engagement Lab is an applied research lab at Emerson College focusing on the development and study of games, technology, and new media to enhance civic life. The Lab works directly with its partner communities to design and facilitate civic engagement processes, augment stakeholder deliberation, and broaden the diversity of participants in local decision-making. I primarily work as the creative producer for client based projects and specifically focus on finding the connections between While I am also an Adjunct Instructor in the FYWP program where I primarily teach wr121 research writing. Our program director is John Trimbur and he has allowed us complete freedom in course design, only needing to abide by a four part project structure regardless of what those projects are
• #5: Two fundamental elements I was thinking about when creating this course: For those students who don’t care at all about games, how do I make this appealing and useful to them? How do I help others in my program understand why studying games in a research writing class (as opposed to a digital media class) makes sense?
• #6: Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and academic who theorizes the relationship between literacy and games. In his essay Gaming Literacy Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the 21st Century he writes Gaming literacy turns the tables on the usual way we regard games. Rather than focusing on what happens inside the artificial world of a game, gaming literacy asks how playing, understanding, and designing games all embody crucial ways of looking at and being in the world. This way of being embraces the rigor of systems, the creativity of play, and the game design instinct to continually redesign and reinvent meaning.
• #7: Ian Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form “procedural rhetoric,” a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change those positions, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. . In his essay “the rhetoric of videogames, bogost writes In a video game, the possibility space refers to the myriad configurations the player might construct to see the ways the processes inscribed in the system work. This is really what we do when we play video games: we explore the possibility space its rules afford by manipulating the symbolic systems the game provides. The rules do not merely create the experience of play—they also construct the meaning of the game. Procedural rhetoric affords a new and promising way to make claims about how things work. As I argued earlier, video games do not simply distract or entertain with empty, meaningless content. Rather, video games can make claims about the world. But when they do so, they do it not with oral speech, nor in writing, nor even with images. Rather, video games make argument with processes. Procedural rhetoric is the practice of effective persuasion and expression using processes. Since assembling rules together to describe the function of systems produces procedural representation, assembling particular rules that suggest a particular function of a particular system characterizes procedural rhetoric.
• #8: The biggest misconception around my course and I would say games in general is the thought that what is seen in mainstream media is all that the medium offers. While I absolutely think there is merit and value to playing and thinking about Call of Duty critically, no we don’t play Call of Duty. My course is dedicated to utilizing the games that are built for critical engagement from the outset, games that don’t put their emphasis on “fun” but on their rhetorical positions. There is an entire subculture of games engaging with incredibly nuanced cultural and political ideas such as identity politics (Ds4yia, LIM), Power relations(Paper’s Please), and economic inequality (Cart Life). In addition, my class also engages with games that are less mechanic oriented and instead attempt to rival literary novels, plays, and poetry. (Kentucky Route Zero, Gone Home). I encourage my students to think past the preconceptions of all media, and the framing of the class begins by breaking down the idea of what a game is and can be, what’s expected when we say “videogame” or “Board game” eventually by the end showing enough examples for them to see games as viable creative medium that has just as much potential to tell stories, advocate for ideas, present new ways of thinking, and invoke empathy.
• #9: So though we play a lot of games, my research writing course is broken into four genres of writing: Rhetorical analysis Memoir Critical Essay Game Design
• #10: Gone Home Creates an immersive 3d environment in which players don’t commit any kind of violence, but instead utilize the perspective to learn through exploring a space, unraveling a narrative as the player makes their way through the house. Genre: First person 3D exploration Mechanics: Players investigate what happened to the house and the inhabitants by exploring objects and diaries left in the space. The mechanics are super minimal in that players don’t have many difficulties completing the game or getting stuck due to puzzle solving. Much of the game is linear, though the drive is the writing and the mystery of what happened to your family since you left. In this way, the narrative is the prime element, with the player’s ability to explore a space operating as the progressive element. Learning Goal: Understanding storytelling through game based interaction. More specifically, it also teaches how to empathize with the complex elements of a family. Why is it fun?: Gone Home taps into our human drive for inquiry, both physically and mentally. The game sets up the player in front of an empty house and only tells them that this is your new family home. Everything else is told through audio diaries and objects the players find in the house. The player never interacts with a human character. The game is completed in under 2 hours.
• #13: One piece that bled through to another class was actually one that I didn’t have to read. The Gone Home blog post “Went Home” by chaoticblue was actually assigned to Matt when we were each assigned different posts to read about the game. Still, the piece came to mind when I had to write an essay for my “Queer Dreams” class, a class about Queer Theory. While I can’t use an informal blog post as a major academic source for that paper, it got me thinking about possible paper topics. I enjoyed thinking about this blog post and some of the other Gone Home blog posts as worthy pieces of criticism. I especially liked thinking about an informal post that was highly emotional. The writer even says “Maybe I’m just whiny?” towards the end of the post. These emotions aren’t out of place for a discussion about such a topic, however, since the writer is essentially criticizing how the game affects and effects people’s emotions and how true it is to emotional experiences. I also like how we’re giving “informal” or “non-academic” media the attention it sometimes deserves because only paying attention to peer-reviewed works written by doctoral candidates sitting in their ivory academic towers seems a bit classist and out-of-touch for my taste. Blog posts, even highly emotional ones such as this, can still include important criticism and bring up legitimate arguments, and it was interesting to look at them in a “research writing” and academic context. These pieces, after all, are writings that require some degree of research.
• #14: This is the most traditional assignment in my class, and provides a welcome break for those a little flustered with games or the inability to choose their own subjects/topics to write about. That said, the text specifically functions as both a great memoir to model how the past/present works, but also shows how someone can write about a videogame without JUST writing about a videogame. The goal for me is to show my students how to use videogames, and other media, as a lense into deeper ideas found in literary works. I allow them to choose their own subject, though require that it is a specific album, movie, TV show, or game that was prominent in their childhood.
• #15: Mention lets play Mention structure of the book
• #16: By (at least my) modern standards, Crazy Taxi is an okay game; everything that makes it work so well as an arcade game undercuts it as a home-console title. It’s only meant to be played in a small number of just-a-few-minutes sessions, to milk more quarters from the gamer, not binged on for hours and hours like my family did back then. I can see now that this experience-rationing is designed into the game: spend too long in Crazy Taxi’s city in one sitting, and you start to realize how small it is, how the places just don’t fit together.
• #18: Cart life In Cart Life, players control one of three characters, each of whom has a different street vending job; Vinny sells bagels, Andrus runs a newspaper stand, and Melanie sells coffee from a cart.[2] While at their stalls players interact with customers by selling them items and can manage their stall by selecting stock, setting prices, and buying new equipment. Players must also look after the character's day-to-day lives, including having adequate food, drink, and sleep. Each character has unique situations to address; Melanie, for example, has a daughter who she walks to and from school Papers Please Make decisions based on information presented to the player. As a border guard, your job is to judge whether or not people are let into the country. You must determine if their papers are correct based on the rules of who can be let in on that day. The core mechanic is information parsing and comparing in order to make “correct” judgments. The game consistently barrages you with consequences for your actions. You are always consistently asked to reflect on your ethical approach, and the game does not provide you with a “right” answer or a “correct” way to win the game. The game instead teaches through putting the player in tough situations and getting the player to see how large institutional forces affects the individual, on both sides of the fence. Kentucky Route Zero
• #19: I don’t remember what she looked like, where she was from, or even how old she was, but I do clearly remember what I was feeling after I met her. Once I had looked through her documents, I made a firm decision that she was indeed qualified to cross the border. I inked her passport with a large green ‘APPROVED’ stamp and handed it back to her. Expecting her to immediately turn around and exit into the country, I was surprised when she slipped a note onto my desk. Before I could open it up, she was gone… I thought back on my virtual family and how every one of them was sick and counting on me to make money to help them. I thought about the girl and what might happen to her. Would I ever even find out? So, I did what I knew would help my family and I progress in the game and stamped his passport with a big fat ‘APPROVED’. As he was walking out, I caught myself whisper something out loud. “...sorry”.
• #20: Here they are forwarding their reflections on what games can be from a perspective of engagement and combining that with the rhetorical analysis work in the other two assignments. This project seems extremely daunting to students at first, but after getting in groups and beginning the brainstorming process things fall into place quite quickly.
• #22: Note game maker tool Twine