Video Game Pedagogy - Week 1

Week 1 of ENC1145 - Writing About Game Culture came to a close yesterday for me. I requested two sections of the same class on Monday and Wednesday instead of what I usually have (MWF) for entirely lazy reasons. Whether those lazy reasons will work out for me over the semester is an open question right now: assigning homework requires more attention to certain details, but I like the 75 minute class because it allows me more time to do all the things in-class that need doing.

And just what needs doing to teach students simultaneously about video game culture and composition? There are a range of considerations but, having taught this class before, I was able to lay my groundwork a little better this semester. My goals for my students this semester are that they:

1) Learn to write a basic research paper (this is what the university chiefly wants from my class)
2) Learn the critical tools for interrogating cultural products (in our case, video games)
3) Learn to begin interacting with the everyday in a critical way: to see things like games as having a context and a power the same way we see "Literature" having those things.
4) Learn something about Cultural Convergence and the power of audiences.

(The last bit is my own dissertation speaking, which means that while I'd like to talk nothing but Warhammer as Convergence for the next 15 weeks, it really is the last (though still relevant) concern.)

To meet these goals, I have a few projects going in-class. The first is to prepare them to write a research paper by giving them secondary sources and critical terminology to work with as we go along. Before the beginning of the semester I made a list of the terms I wanted them to know: general critical theory ideas along with more specific technoculture things that will probably be useful to discussing games. My plan is to teach them a new idea each week and then do cumulative quizzes each week on the terms I've discussed. At the same time, the terms are ordered in such a way that they build on the previous ideas while overlapping with what we're doing for homework.

For example, next week's term is "Postcolonialism" and I'll be telling them about Orientalism, Self/Other, and West/East (which builds on this week's discussion of "Binaries", "Reading Resistance", "Ideology", and "Value"). Next week is also the time in which we begin discussing Act II of Diablo II which is set in a fantasy facsimile of the Middle East. It will allow us to go over the relationship between West and East in Diablo II (Characters start in the West and must travel East through increasingly primitive societies to find the Devil) and speculate about the kind of messaging happening on the game creator's end.

Now, keep in mind, these are freshmen. I'm not making them read Edward Said or Spivak or something like that (though I will give a list of authors they can check out if they want to know more). My goal is just to familiarize them enough with the term so that they can be able to deploy it in the simple way that a 1st year college student needs to, and be able to ask the right questions when doing their own research on the topic. I don't have time to give them all the answers, but I have just enough to teach them to ask the right questions.

The second project going in class is interrogating our games as though they were pieces of Literature, and in class I usually use The Scarlet Letter or Withering Heights as examples of books they may have had to analyze in high school that they can imagine as games. To that end, we're doing character maps for the important characters as they arise in the game: who they are, what they say, what their dialogue or actions reveal about them, how they relate to one another, and how they interact with the story structurally. This allows us an opportunity to discuss literary structural ideas that aren't necessarily covered by critical terms (for instance, we were able to discuss framed tales and unreliable narrators yesterday, but such things don't really come up in cultural-criticism discussions).

Doing both of these in relation to video games leads us quite organically to my third project in the class: illustrating how the games function as points of cultural convergence. That is to say, the games are part of a larger assemblage of media from books to websites to news articles to conventions and role playing events that all interact to create a canon more official for consumers than that provided by creators. This worked out well yesterday when the students asked, "Is Marius really the main character? He's the narrator, but aren't we the main character since we're playing the game?" And so we talked briefly about "You" as a character in Diablo II and how "You" creates and re-creates the story by moving through it, thereby affecting (however minimally in a single instantiation) the canon.

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More to come soonish as I start writing for my own classes, revising my paper for the South Atlantic Modern Language Association convention in Atlanta, and push further into my own teaching.