21. GAMING COURSE DESIGN
1. Emergence as a Tool
Do I have a specific group or groups of readers in mind—
3. Emergence as a my family, parents of teenagers, churchgoers, legislators,
or scientists?
Practice What opinions and values do they probably share that are
relevant to my topic? Are they likely to agree with one
another? With me?
Do they know more, or less, than I do about the subject?
What do I need to learn in order to address this audience?
How simple or technical should my language be? What
terms or concepts will I need to define, explain, or
illustrate?
What do I want to accomplish in writing this? To teach my
readers something? Convince them of my point of view?
Move them to action—or to tears? Entertain them?
22. GAMING COURSE DESIGN
1. Emergence as a Tool
3. Emergence as a
Practice
5. Emergence of Multiple
Audiences
23. GAMING COURSE DESIGN
1. Emergence as a Tool
3. Emergence as a
Practice
5. Emergence of Multiple
Audiences
7. Emergence into Multiple
forms of Production
25. GOALS
Three sites for interrogation:
• Meaning within the Game
(Audience ↔ Text)
• Meaning around the Game
(Text ↔ Writer)
• Meaning outside the Game
(Writer ↔ Audience)
Good afternoon, everyone, my name is Scott Reed, and I do a lot of thinking about games and rhetoric. But where my paper begins today has a lot more to do with my particular situation. I'm a professor at Georgia Gwinnett College, a very new institution with (until very recently) an open access policy. Like many who work with non-traditional students, I found myself preferring an approach that emphasized audience awareness and critical reading over the development of technical skill. One of the biggest challenges for me in getting students to transition from the formula-driven nature of high school writing is to get them to transition into richer and more developed notions of audience: to think of their writing less as pro-forma exercises and more as opportunities for meaningful engagement and invention. It's from that situation that I'm approach my comments today.
So, like a lot of younger and fairly inexperienced teachers, I found myself falling back on a lot of handbook models, a lot of rehashed Aristotle. Rhetorical topoi, simple audience analysis. In other words, I was working with a set of pretty traditional and tightly defined heuristics for thinking about audience. [click]
Around the same time, I opted to preserve my sanity by teaching around a topic familiar to me: video games.
As much as I'd like to spin some enlightened BS about how I did this as a bold pedagogical move based on reams of New Media and comp theory, the core truth is that managing a 4/4 load means needing to figure out some way to have fun with what I teach, so I don't burn out and die. My interest in actual game scholarship did of course play a part, and it's through that scholarship that I converged on the topic of my discussion today.
Games are by their nature really good at getting us to think about rhetorical complexity. And if there's a reason that people joke why Computers & Writing might be lurching towards “Games & Writing,” think there are good enough reasons why.
Games are grammatologically layered, multimedial, multimodal objects. They are multiple, and are situated at a juncture where two new important media – code and image – meet with more traditional ways of writing (consider the massive textual corpus at play in a game like Warcraft, Skyrim, or Mass Effect). [develop more]
Games operate as cybernetic feedback loops. They require active (usually playful) participation. They structure that participation, and they always already reply somehow to the game’s input.
Play, I have found, facilitates knowledge transfer, particularly between private and official discourses. The “agility and flexibility” that is endemic to play is the same agility and flexibility that Darren Cambridge argues is essential to facilitating knowledge transfer in electronic portfolios.
And all this is really handy, because it dovetails with the drive, which I can't help but see as being co-sponsored by thinkers native to both rhetoric and technology, to develop “methodologies of complexity.” Such methods, according to Byron Hawk, would attempt to articulate constellations of effect between our institutions, our subject formations, our technologies, and our discourses.
Whereas a traditional Berlinian classroom looks at one specific type of connection – between subjects and ideology – Hawk's critique is that even that liberatory sort of program neglects many other of the complex factors that we know govern our experience. Reading, not creativity, is the primary articulation of Berlin's program. Students in classes, though almost certainly profiting from the dissoi logoi treatment of working in dialectical pairs, speaking up for the marginal and unspoken, are also by that very treatment hailed into very specific positions which the teachers have chosen. Hawk's suggestion, ultimately, is to “create contexts, not subjects,” by considering more complex webs of relations which participate in the ecology of writing.
Between these two topics – games and complexity – I want to introduce you to a strange loop of my own: an example of my pedagogy in which theory and application co-evolved. There is no narrative here of discovering complexity theory by way of games or vice versa: the ideas are entirely inherent in each other, and what I'll be trying to suggest in this talk are handful of the pedagogical tactics I used to get students to momentarily interrupt that strange loop: to interrogate the complexity of their circumstances in a way that supports both fundamental audience awareness (of the invoked/addressed sort) and fosters a sense of meaningful connectivity between self and audience, self and text, text and institution.
And thinking about heuristics is the lever that connects both. A heuristic is, ultimately, just a rule or a principle, a relay for turning x into y. An algorithm, if you will. Hawk's analysis of the role of vitalism in the rhetorical tradition locates the ways that various heuristics get deployed and discusses how, like any logos , a heuristic necessarily includes and excludes. Any rhetoric or pedagogy, however motivated by a grand metanarrative, develops some heuristic for presenting material to an audience. In the case of Berlin's dissoi logoi approach to dialectics, where students interrogate ideologial dynamics by supplying the opposing term to an argument, a specific type of student and a specific type of interaction are included, while others are excluded.
Rather than simply abide by one heuristic or another, the goal of rhet/comp scholarship and teaching should be to investigate particular constellations created by multiple kinds of heuristics, ones that help us think about the multiple relations among “architectures, technologies, texts, bodies, histories, heuristics, enactments, and desires.”
Similarly, in the evolution of game's scholarship – or really, in the creation of game scholarship – we can attend to a similar sort of move. While the dominant cultural narratives tend to paint games as engines that strip meaning from experience (that make us lazier or more disconnected), a wealth of critical scholarship came up to show that games have ways of including meaning as well – to make arguments through processes, as Ian Bogost argues, and to create social connectivity (TL Taylor, Celia Pearce, Henry Jenkins). Of particular interest to me, is a term shared between Hawk and game theorist Jesper Juul: “emergence.”
In Half-Real, Jesper Juul discusses the distinction between games of progression and games of emergence. Both games are based on speicfic rules of behavior, but a game of progression tends to advance the player in a particular direction, toward a specific goal, using fairly constrained methods. Think of Candy Land or Life or Trouble with the Popamatic Bubble. A game of emergence, on the other hand, uses rules to create a situation: a set-up out of which mutliple possibilities can emerge.
Juul’s go-to example is this, the “dust” map from the game Counter-Strike. The rules of the game are simple: point, shoot, don’t get shot, and so are the rules of the physics, like how the walls are solid. But from that basic set of rules, a wide variety of complex tactical and strategic behaviors are possible.
Between games and complexity, ultimately, I found myself with a basket of potential ideas for working with complex tasks using complex methods based on simple heuristics. The more I thought about it, the more I recognize that rhetorical complexity, on the order that Hawk describes, isn’t too far removed from the way games work all the time, anyway, and I wanted to find a way to convey that to my students.
As part of my own constellation of influences, though, I recognize also that I have to work within a particular rhetorical ecology, where there are specific needs I need to address with my population of students. I work at a 4-year teaching college that was until this year open access, and whose population exploded from about a thousand in 2007 to almost ten thousand in the coming year. For me to work in these complex terms means to also engage the writing-level needs of students who exhibit vastly different levels of preparation (and to make it clear to administrators that the new kid on the block isn't chasing down theoretical windmills at the expense of students). What I want to show in the rest of my presentation is the way that I engineered a recent course to do this, to work with the conceptual braid between complexity and gaming, and to do so with a solid rhetorical focus – and that focus became audience.
In their seminal essay, “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked,” Lunsford and Ede, in essence, debate two conflicting set of heuristics. In one, the “audience addressed” model, writers go through prescribed processes of writing, response, and feedback to attempt to imagine a real and practical audience. Such heuristic processes, though, Lunsford and Ede argue, elide the importance of invention and the importance of writers reading their own writing. Conversely, the “audience invoked” model requires that the writer “internalizes academic convention,” with the unfortunate effect of overemphasizing the writer's role in shaping discourse. As with any heuristic, relationships are forged which necessarily include and exclude certain skills, processes, and ways of being in the rhetorical situation. So Lunsford and Ede, to me, throw down a gauntlet. If not any one heuristic is going to get the job done (in terms of creating emergence), then use more than one. And in so doing, to create some emergence of my own.
One: define emergence, and treat it like an interpretive tool to be applied. So their first paper was a project in identifying the emergent experience that comes from a game. The heuristics here are the interpretive kind, the textual kind, and the technological kind, as we developed a vocabulary for understanding how digital images and gameplay contribute toward “emergence.”
Two: a more traditional research paper, directed at an academic audience. They had a wide choice of topics; they had to investigate an issue or phenomenon related to gaming, and investigagte it by drawing on some academic source. Here is where I unloaded the barrel in terms of traditional audience heuristics: following the handbook steps and getting them to learn and apply some basic notions of audience. Based on these heuristics, the project becomes one of emergent knowledge through research and writing.
Three: Things get interesting. Sort them into groups who are all assigned the same game. Students are assigned a project to describe their experiences in gameplay, compare and contrast those experiences with those of their peers, and to account for the factors (such as prior experience, values, and individual purpose) that led to that “emergence.” As a more reflexive project, the rhetorical equation gets dimensionally more complicated, because now, through gameplay, students are being effectively asked to interrogate themselves as an audience, an audience who brings all sorts of complicating factors to bear.
Four: Working from these same groups, students compose a concept for a video game design. This shift of move does a few things. One, it changes the compositional materials being used. Now they have to write in algorithms, inventing rules and mechanics for their game, while they also must write in images by creating an aesthetic “feel.” Two, it shifts the focus of the class from reading (induction) to producing the text (production). Three, it adds a third audience – an imagined audience for the game. The audiences are networked together in the form of a high-stakes pitch presentation in which teams pitch to an audience of academics (literally, as I got colleagues to volunteer to be my panel) a game that would appeal to an outside third audience – not strictly themselves, but not academics either. I wanted the course sequence to be a process of gradually introducing and complicating the notion of audience. By the end of the class, students would, the hope would be, display greater rhetorical savvy by effectively “mixing” different kinds of heuristics: interpretive, audience-based, and technological. This isn't a sequence that is by any stretch of the imagination complete, but I do want to present it as an attempt to “invent” complex pedagogy using the materials at hand, with the goal of promoting a sense of”situatedness,” accompanied by a bevy of “ethical connections [and by ethical, I don't take Hawk to mean as much in the sense of behavior as in the sense of connections among my ethos, your ethos] that will lead to productive acts and texts” (Hawk 258).
Here are some loops: a few principles I brought into the process, followed a few lessons that “emerged” from ”doing” this pedagogy and which serve largely to reinforce those principles of both game theory and complexity.
First, I want to start with a sense of the stated goals of the class: the simple rules which form the basis of later complexity. In one sense, the course came out with three fundamental learning goals: --- to have students interrogate the heuristics that games deploy to create meaning (meaning within the game; audience ↔ text). Heuristics for textual analysis, just like learning close reading or any other method for interpretation. --- to have students interrogate the heuristics that they themselves use to interpret the gameplay experience. They were prompted to reflect on which aspects of the game affected them in particular, without necessarily being asked to analyze them, and to define holistically an “experience” that the game provided. (meaning around the game; text ↔ writer) --- to have students interrogate the heuristics that structure the way they develop their writing for various audiences (meaning outside the game – all networked together; writer ↔ audience)
Now, in one sense, this plays out like a traditional Aristotelian triangle of writer-text-audience, hardly anything complex enough to write home about. And that’s exactly what excites me – that starting from these simple heuristics something else came out. So, I’m going to try to discuss three qualities I attempted to design into the class, or rather that the class seemed to present to me, which bring some much needed dimensionality to these goals.
My first interesting loop is provided by what I call enactment. I think that central to any pedagogy based on complexity is the need to enact the content. In this, I’m mirroring Greg Ulmer’s “heuretic” approach, in which materials are not simply used as texts to be analyzed by our standard issue heuristics. Instead, those texts are the interfaces we use to construct new heuristics. In this case, to talk about games means DOING games. Using the same materials. Doing games gamically. (Character sheets, rules, deadlines) Playful – show examples of battle turtles and artemis and all that good stuff need to pull an Ulmer quote to make this work
One way I pulled this off was to structure the class, as much as possible, like a game. Students, for example, kept a “character sheet” on themselves. (Where my old school D&D players at?) Each item is a small-scale heuristic used by the writer for generating knowledge about the writer.
More profoundly, by having students move from the critical position to the creative position, they were able to ENACT their developing understanding in various forms. What you see here are various artifacts constructed by students during this process – artistic concepts, design flowcharts, justifications and explanations for the impact on audience. Though the scale of the evidence Is limited, they do represent steps towards moving students, as Greg Ulmer proposes, “from consumers to producers of image discourse.” So here you have not only visual texts constructed by the students, but also visualizations and imagetextual combinations.
The second emergent feature of this pedagogy is the way that it produced a space where students had to network their own knowledge. This is a neat little term, because I think it strikes at two valences of the class. One is sort of simple. By “enacting” the content of the class, an understanding emerges where students themselves are a variable in the game, and an attention to their own private and lived experience with these games (with PLAY, which is an affective, pathos-laden, felt experience).
Then the push is on to connect personal, private, felt experience to larger discourses. A game-based research paper does this in a gentle sort of way, where the challenge is to connect the writer, various sources, and games. A kind of contiguity is established between tools, practices, and audience. Multiple writing practices can react the same audience. The same tools can be used productively to speak to multiple audiences. Even if the class does (and this is a nod to my ecology) bend towards “centering” on academic discourse, the larger effect was that student anxiety between writing assignments was dramatically reduced. A sort of rhetorical network was in effect, where students could move around more comfortably.
My word choice here is sort of intentionally fraught. After all, the “networked” understanding I just referred to seems to presage a “reflexive” from students towards their writing. I'd like to argue, and this more than anything else is based on my own highly limited observations, that the key side effect is an emergent “reflexive” understanding of the university environment itself. By “enacting” gamework in the classroom – by playing the class itself as a sort of game – students came to regard not just the writing process, but the class itself, as a site of play.
In other words, to paraphrase Mckenzie Wark, they belonged to the space of the classroom the way that one belongs to a game. They learned that they could approach the ecology of the classroom the same way they approach the game. This is no longer about enacting game content in the class, it's about game content becoming the relay by which students can rethink the class itself. Working at a rapidly-growing college of students who are more non-traditionally prepared, this last understanding has a lot of interesting potential. As those of us who teach FYC can often attest, sometimes it feels that half the work is acclimating students to the culture of university. But if they belong to the university the way that they already, in a sense, “belong to games” (and I should point out that this to Wark has nothing to do with being a gamer or not, but everything to do with the complex and emergent features of digital culutre itself), we might see some of that angst dispelled.
I recognize that I've described, developed, and justified this pedagogy using some pretty damn broad theoretical strokes. I'm not one to argue that “enacted, networked, and reflexive” are better qualities for a pedagogy to have than “grounded, local, or critical.” But I do join with Hawk in wanting to advance the larger argument that pedagogies based on this kind of complexity have the benefit of helping students negotiate between themselves and the discourses of the university, negotiate with themselves and their own learning, forge links across domains of knowledge. There are a lot of possibilities in there that aren't reducible to one kind of student “body” or disciplinary program. Working with unfamiliar subject matter secures me a necessary tactical advantage: I can assume that, whatever their preexisting attitudes toward games (and trust me, they vary wildly), the students are already asked to assume an unfamiliar position. The class becomes then, I'd hope, less about a particular student “body” and more about a rich context that produces possibilities. And they have the additional benefit of keeping our pedagogy more playful for us, more fun for us, more engaging for us as teachers. And I know I'm not a worse teacher for knowing that i'll probably be having fun while I work.
