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

A New Way of Writing: Using Games and Game Design in the First

Year Writing Classroom

Jordan Pailthorpe | @Jpailthorpe | [email protected]


WLPFYWP

• Applied research lab • Games for civic engagement• Game design for development• Media literacy advocacy

• First Year Writing Program• Intro to College Writing • Research Writing

• Focus on multimodal writing

www.engagementgamelab.org www.emersoncollege.edu

Producer Adjunct Instructor

Learning Objectives


Analyze rhetorical situations and respond to rhetorical situations.

Identify the type of research called for in different writing projects

Invoke an appropriate audience depending on rhetorical situation and genre choice.

Identify differences and similarities of writing conventions across genres

Why Games?


• As Texts

• Reading multimodal • All games have a rhetorical situation • Creates new ways of thinking critically

• As Writing

• Creating in a multimodal context • New way of understanding form/genre• Group writing practice

…Also fun!

Why 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”

- Eric Zimmerman

Zimmerman, Eric. "Gaming Literacy Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the Twenty-First Century." The Video Game Theory Reader (n.d.): Http://ericzimmerman.com/files/texts/Chap_1_Zimmerman.pdf. Routledge. Web.

Why Games?


Bogost, Ian. “The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Edited by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 117–140. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.117

“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.”

– Ian Bogost

“So…you play Call of Duty?”


Games we play: • Dsy4ia • LIM• Papers, Please• Cart Life• Kentucky Route Zero• Gone Home• Werewolf

Games we talk about :• Dear, Esther• Depression Quest• That Dragon Cancer• Train• Dog Eat Dog • Portal • Earthbound

…nope!

The Genres


Rhetorical Analysis

Critical Essay

Memoir

Game Design


Rhetorical Analysis:Group play of Gone Home



Students will…

Write a 1-3 page rhetorical analysis of Gone Home, using the experience of playing in the classroom as well as the outside discourse.

• Two week session• Two in class play sessions (4 hours) using a hot-seat. • One in class peer review for essay • One in class essay/critic presentation • Final draft due beginning of fifth class



- Hot Seat play, letting class guide the controlling player

- Emphasis on materiality of holding controller, controlling a character in first person

- Thinking about the player versus the character

- Nonlinear storytelling

- Audience meaning making versus authorial meaning


Rhetorical Analysis:Understand Discourse

http://thiscageisworms.com

- Each student is assigned an essay from a critic, academic and non-acedemic, present how that writer wrote about Gone Home

- Focus on synthesizing information, doing a rhetorical analysis of those essays, and getting more context for how different audiences interpret the same work


Memoir:Games as Memory Triggers

Students will…

Model“Earthbound”memoir by Ken Baumann to create their own 4-6 page Creative Nonfiction essay engaging with the past/present reflection revolving around a piece of media.

• Three week session• Four sessions reading/playing Earthbound in class/homework

• Visual map of memorys• In class discussion on different I perspectives• In class discussion/lecture on shape of the essay

• First draft peer review / instructor conferences / final draft


What is Earthbound?

“I realize that the malls in Earthbound aren't like most American malls—they don't sprawl out, repping shopping corridors like malignant appendages. They're department stores.”

http://kotaku.com/what-the-f-k-kind-of-game-is-earthbound-580416562

The BookThe Game

A quirky Japanese role playing game Satirizing American culture through a Japanese lens


Memoir:Games as Memory Triggers

By (at least my) modern standards, what makes Crazy Taxi 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.


Critical Essay:Analyzing Digital Games

Students will…

Play all three games assigned and choose one to write an interdisciplinary researched essay that engages with the game criticism discourse.

• Three week session• In class student presentations on game criticism essays• Library research workshop and annotated bibliography• In class discussion/lecture on each game• Group peer review / instructor conferences / final draft



Cart Life Papers, Please

Kentucky Route Zero




Students will…

Work in groups to research, design, prototype, test, and deploy a tabletop game that addresses a specific rhetorical situation.

• Four week session• Continued student presentations in class. • Workshop>playtest cycle • Game design journals • Public beta playtest • Final play session/event

Game Design:Designing a Rhetorical Game



Constant workshoping is similar to peer review practices and helps cement this type of learning in other fields


Game Design:Presentation

Student Teams present their games to Emerson

at Public showcase



Most games make the players start at an unnaturally equal starting point, perhaps

because that might be the only way to convince people to play. Nonetheless, Top

Gov has the players start out from unequal positions so they can better

understand the inherently unequal nature of geopolitics. Furthermore, it regulates

the game because it helps those players that start out denuded of military to more

viscerally understand the vulnerability of militarily weaker nations.

- From the Top Gov rhetorical analysis



As the media, you are given the task of choosing the alien and the option

to throw the other players off the scent of the alien or allow the game to

be played fairly. This simulates the by partisan of various news outlets,

such as Fox News or MSNBC, that spins the news in order to hurt an

opposing view, or to push their ideals to the forefront.

- “They Came From Planet Terror” rhetorical analysis

Things students had to say about the course


Gained a new found respect for games and writing and the thought and effort that goes into both of them

I never would have chosen to take a video game class of my own accord. It forced me into learning something new and I am now walking away with a wealth of knowledge that I simply did not have before.

I hope the game I helped develop as the final project, which we left in the Game Development Lab, evolves into a commercial successful commodity, that I might benefit my intellectual property.

The “things that I did wrong” slide


- Freedom of choice led to incredible

difficulty

- Focusing so much on defining a game at the start of the course did not provide a good critical frame

- Letting students choose their groups led

to imbalanced expertise

- Do not be an expert in all the things

Thanks! Lets talk!

Jordan Pailthorpe

[email protected]

@jpailthorpe

www.jordanpailthorpe.com

Steam ID/PSN: Praisedasun

Engagementgamelab.org

@engagelab

http://www.jordanpailthorpe.com/

Education

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