Freshman Pedagogy and Video Games

I'm beginning to construct my course for the Fall and I've luckily got two really convenient sections of ENC1145, which I've made "Writing About Video Games" again. As usual my classes are almost full already and so summer kids are kinda screwed, which is a pity since summer students tend to be pretty studious. There's also a high percentage of nerds in my current class who I think would enjoy and profit from a video game humanities. Hopefully (especially with the inevitable over-enrolling of my class) those who want it will get a spot.

Yet even as I say that, I am reminded of pedagogical problems that present themselves in a class about games. The class naturally attracts a lot of gamers (there were 4 females out of 50-60 students in my Spring lineup, funny enough) mixed in with just general enrolled students and some students who, for whatever reason, followed me from earlier classes. When I first taught this class, my instinct was to imagine that gamers would be ideally suited to the topic of the course. I'm teaching about games, after all, which for a gamer is typically a huge section of their time (even by general standards of interests: golf enthusiasts don't watch as much golf as WoW players play WoW).

In actual reality, though, the experience of having so many similarly nerdy students in one place was... mixed. First, the downsides:

* It sometimes became hard to steer the conversation appropriately towards the focus of the class: composition. Anyone engaged in fan culture can relate to this phenomenon, but if you get five fans in one place talking about fandom then turning the wheel on that ship gets harder and harder.
* This is probably not specific to my games class, but it bears repeating. Enthusiasm for the subject does not necessarily overlap with writing ability or idea articulation. It was amazing to me how deeply embedded in the culture some of the students were - a few were hardcore WoW players, naturally, and even some LARPers - yet they could struggle with examining their experience or articulating that experience.
* Nerd culture is, as one might expect, not mainstream culture. In a lot of ways it can be shockingly crude. The social cues one responds to in nerd culture are different and can be alarming if one isn't prepared for them. Discussion of internet or nerd culture was common in the classroom, but sometimes it could veer off into strange places that an anonymous internet forum would be perfect for, but not really a classroom. Herding cats in a game classroom requires not only an understanding of the nerd culture I think, but also enough resolve to dominate the discourse and derail a train heading into, you know, Goatse shock site territory.
* Not having the games on hand in class is sort of a drag. Teaching in a computer classroom isn't really an option either since there's no way the university is going to load Warcraft III onto the network for me. It might have been for the best (having a game at their fingertips could have been uber distracting), but there were several times in which it would have been nice for that hands-on discussion of the game.

On the bright side, though:
* In the places were enthusiasm and articulation overlapped, the discussion was really rewarding for both them and for me. Many students were really able to engage with the topics discussed and their knowledge of the games themselves allowed them to more easily integrate the cultural theory I was teaching them into the media.
* Once I struck a balance between discussion of cultural theory and video games themselves, I found that the majority of students were really able to understand and reprocess the ideas. Finding this balance, though, for me, required that I have a plan at the beginning of the semester about what I wanted my students to know at the end. Mine came in the form of a Cultural Studies vocabulary list (Popular Culture, Binary, Marxism, Erasure, Feminism, etc.).
* If, like me, you write about games, it's a good opportunity to interact with the gamer environment directly in both a non-professional and scholarly way. You get to hear what freshman are playing and what they think about it in their own words, but you also get to explore the cultural crit angle in ways you might not have anticipated. For a lot of disciplines you can do this almost entirely with your peers, but Games As Text people won't really have direct peers for this discourse.

Some neutral observations to wrap up. First, students really responded well to Warcraft III and Diablo II, and part of that, I think, is the setup of those games. They're both explicitly literary, dividing into chapters and acts like plays, and their storylines are not so fluid that you can't talk about traditionally literary arguments when discussing them. Second, the most shocking thing I learned though? No matter what the subject is, some students will still slack off. I rarely assigned from the reading list and almost always focused on the students "reading" through Warcraft III and Diablo II, and yet a significant portion still did not find time to play the games without me making quizzes about it. It's not Shakespeare, not Hemingway, not Beowulf: it's watching cutscenes from Diablo II. Yet still I inevitably ran into non-readers.

I vaguely suspect I could assign an hour of internet porn and would get similar results.