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Articles Conference Reviews |
2008B10EssidChanging Writing, Alternate Realities: Games and Game Theory in the Writing Classroom And his three Second Life avatars:
For this session review, I thought I would be a bit waggish by not only giving an academic review but a response in the voice of three “false” personalities, my Second Life Avatars (yes, I know that it’s a world not a game). My avatars are all tricksters at some level (one of them a woman) so it’s natural, in a place like New Orleans, that they’d be along for the show as well as the conference. Queering Video Games: The Multiplicity of Identity and Writing Through Games Blackmon began with a reaction to Donkey Kong (1981), an early video game about the mustachioed Mario who goes after the big ape: “Girls don’t save the princess.” Thus even early games had a masculine bias, Ms. Pac Man aside, given the predominance of male coders at Nintendo and other game companies. Blackmon strove to extend this inquiry to games and who plays them today. She noted, and this is a key point, that to Plato, play was defined as that which has “neither utility nor truth nor likeness” yet is judged “by the criterion of the charm that is in it, and by the pleasure it affords.” This is a most useful definition and helps explain something the reviewer has noticed about academic responses to gaming: play, in the Platonic definition, is devalued by academia. Blackmon noted that women desire “Equity Characters” in role-playing games. Yet the content of gaming works against equity of appearance, if not roles. For example, male characters get better armor and equipment in gaming, whereas women notice in World of Warcraft that female characters often begin scantily clad and end up more so as they “level up.” Blackmon also cited Fear Effect Two, a later game, that has a lesbian subtext aimed to titillate the male gamer. This subtext is apparently common in games. She closed with a call for us, in classroom practice, to be aware of the representations of gender and race in the very media students love to use. I would like to see further work about Lara Kroft as a fetish for men and model for women gamers, or the notion of gender construction in virtual worlds where the resident/player, not the software company, controls the appearance of the character/avatar. Ignatius responds: Lesbianism-fetishes by geekboys? Guilty as charged. Why men so enjoy virtual lesbian fantasies is beyond this avatar. My female friends in Second Life have occasionally given me grief about this aspect of male geekdom. Jezz responds: Scanty-clad wimmin? Well, it am true as far as Second Life goes, I reckon. Most gals run ‘round in next to nuffin’ here. I wears cut-off pants an’ a short shirt (but I ain’t shaped like no Lara Kroft!). But I wears a guy’s black cowboy hat an’ some butt-kickin’ boots (handy on my worf’less brother, Pappy). Pappy responds: This am awl troo as far as my fake wirld goes. I been told I am fun tu play wif, on the basis that I never du nuffin’ useful o’ resemblin’ work o’ not stretchin’ facts. So I reckons this espistermerloggy o’ play by ol’ Play-doh am kerreckt. An’ now I knows why they named my fav’rite playin’ toy aftur that-thar Greek feller. Don’t Bite the Noobs!: Collective Networks and Collaborative Composition in WoWWiki. Collaborations of participants of WoWWiki show a large network of writers at work, yet there are difficulties, Hunter notes, of moving this sort of content into our classrooms. Hunter described how the WowWiki moved quickly beyond simply offering game tips to something more writerly. “Lore” is a major part of World of Warcraft, and this writing about the history and mythology of the invented world expanded beyond the multi-player game into other media (novels, graphic novels, fan sites) associated with the game. Using these enthusiasts’ sites gives students a decent model of collaboration among passionately engaged individuals. It has been hard, historically, to find good models of collaborative writing beyond our campuses. Wikis, however, do not necessarily result in good collaboration. The failure of Geek Squad’s company Wiki for employees led Robert Stephens, the company founder, to go back to try to understand his employee’s/writer’s agenda rather than set up one for them; he could then tailor the collaborative tools accordingly. Igantius responds: My creator sees this every day in how assessment measures and classroom configurations (both cited by Hunter) work against a richer use of collaborative tools or Web 2.0 applications in the writing curriculum. Jezz responds: I liked Misophur Rik’s slide show with photos of ol’ Chuck Norris kickin’ butt, like I are a-gonna do to Pappy if’n he don’t stop shamin’ our fam’bly. Passively Multiplayer Games: How New Media Reconfigure Composition and Cognition PMOG is a the type of game that lives passively on a computer desktop, and when, say, a computer user surfs the Web, each click will slowly level up a character. It is a form of “self-designed identity play,” a term that applies to much gaming, but in this case a social networking feature expands the story-line and activity beyond the game. A player may leave various missions, traps, gifts, and messages on others’ Web sites. Robison’s focus is how social this type of surfing-driven game actually is. Interestingly for me, nothing analogous exists in the virtual world I research, though I and many others leave avatars “camping” to slowly earn Linden Dollars by dancing or hanging out at social spaces. But when camping, one does not interact. With PMOG, however, one gets a form of collaborative writing (the communicative aspect of the game) that both leaves a history and receives instant feedback. In a way, this is Wiki-as-game. Robinson closed with a great challenge to us, asking why we must “suck the fun out of learning” when we take this type of engagement and adapt it to education. Time and focus did not permit Robison to focus on alternate-reality gaming in her paper, an area that I hope she will pursue in a future project. Ignatius responds: PMOG is very different from any interactive gaming or virtual worlds, but we all think that lots of busy computer users will “play” PMOG during their workdays without bosses or professors knowing about it. The client lives in the bottom edge of the Firefox browser. All avatars respond: Next time we do the entire review while you dance, geekboy! Our feet hurt! |