Canned Goods

First, let me say that I will not be commenting on Connors’ initial chapter on gender and changes in the rhetoric classroom beyond saying I totally disagree with Crowley’s reading of it, although I never knew Connors personally, and I’ve only read a couple other things by him. There may be more to the book (this particular chapter) that I’m aware; all I had to go on was the text itself.

With that said, what interests me regarding the story Connors tells concerns the literacy crises. We are apparently in one, and you can blame videogames for taking the atention of young boys away from reading and writing. Video games may very well be part of the problem; I know I read and write less when playing, but that depends on the game. Morrowwind, for example, had hundreds of books in its world, and I read a bunch of them. It was like reading all the fantasy and sci-fi books I had read as a kid except I was a part of the world. Anyway, video games are the bad guy, just as t.v. was in the past: “How many hours a week do your children watch t.v. when they could be doing homework?” Could the problem be that the standards regarding literacy have changed, not the kids’ abilities?

For Connors it seems that changes in who was allowed to attend or was attending college tended to shock college administrators and professors into believing “Johnny can’t write.” At times, as during the 1960s, according to Connors, entrance into college was much more competitive and so only the most school-competent students got in, but as admission numbers waned, policies changed, students under prepared for college had difficulty. (I think back to my experiences teaching fyc for the first time at a right-to-try university–challenging and rewarding in ways unlike teaching at UW.) Yet, even Harvard had trouble in 1874 when it introduced the entrance examination essay; the students of the best prep schools did poorly (lower order concerns, really). This was the illiteracy dilemma of the 1870s (128-90). Another problem, then, is figuring out what we consider to be “good” writing. Is there a list somewhere?

Part of the current literacy crisis these days seems to be the outcry from corporate America for good writers. Has there been an increasing reliance on written communication in business? Needs of the Man in flux?

The topic for Constance’s class that I will be investigating is types of players in WoW. So far I have it broken down under two headings: motivations and time spent playing. I often read WoW’s general forums, especially after I closed my account for the fall, and one great debate has been ongoing between the “hardcore” and “casual” gamers (if only this was a debate I had to moderate in first-year comp). Understanding motivations for playing games seems incredibly important. Not that I’m a game designer (I just got Salen and Zimmerman’s The Game Design Reader), but it makes sense that with a game such as WoW understanding the possible audiences for your game would allow for greater sales.

For example, there have been times in WoW when I have been at a crossroads and decided I’d like to see what was down one road. I once spent two hours, at lvl 38 to run from Ashenvale to Moonglade and Winterspring (for those not playing–highly dangerous). In general I’d say I always play a game to escapethe “real” world, but this trip also included wanderlust.

When I joined a guild, mostly made up of couples who gamed together, I learned that socializing was a reason people play. Not having played an MMOG before, I hadn’t expected the amount of talk that takes place. Some may see WoW as a role playing game, and one could say it is, though not in the way we often think of roleplay. Jack and Jill, as I’ll refer to them, appeared to play as themselves–only they took on vitrual bodies. The talked about where they lived and worked and life in general, and I admit I played in the same manner. I never pretended to be a female night elf hunter. I was always me. My point here is that many enjoy the socializing that goes on in WoW. The make friends and sometimes make plans to meet in the “real” world. I remember writing pen pal letters in grade school, thinking it would be cool to meet this person from another place. How is it different than in WoW?

So we have a desire to socialize (could I squeeze desire to collaborate in here?), escape, and wander. Another motivation would be achieving–in the form of gaining the next level, getting a mount or that coveted weapon or piece of armor. I resorted to soloing the graveyard in the Scarlet Monastery to grind for my mount. And then there’s immersion, a bit more slippery for me. This could be those that play as their characters, actually taking on another persona–a particular way with words, set of moral principles.

Am I missing any?

Anyway, I’m sure any particular player would be motivated in many ways. So I’m thinking about making up a Likert scale survey to explore these motivations, and if anyone knows of a relevant study, offhand, let me know.

Also, here I am in graduate school studying composition and rhetoric looking at what motivates players of videogames. What’s the connection? Right now the connections, however tenuous, I’m drawing with, say, writing is that I want to understand what motivates my students to write–besides a grade. And I have a feeling that I could give the a survey to writers in first-year comp with similar questions as for the gamers and see indications that these motivations play out in writing also. And what would a curriculum that incorporates these motivations look like?

Actually I do. Since I began thinking about games from the standpoint of a researcher, I’ve heard countless times about the controversy between gameplay (the rule systems that govern gameplay) and narrative. Constance writes in “Why Game (Culture) Studies Now? that “core scholars on both sides acknowledge that the debate is an unfortunate red herring (Aarseth and Jenkins).” So, as just a noob in this field, I did find the idea that narrative wasn’t important to a game playing experience a bit, well, silly. Sure, there are games out there that don’t need a narrative for the gameplay. We can use Tetris as an example, although a game sold during the Cold War as the “Soviet Mind Game,” with an onion-topped palace on the cover might just begin some sort of narrative in the user’s mind. And as much lore as there exists in WoW, I really don’t find myself thinking about it often, and not everyone playing WoW played the previous War Craft games.

For me, I’m often drawn to games that have a narrative–KOTOR, HALO, Homeworld (anyone remember Battlezone-not the arcade version?). But my question is for those who play games that don’t include a narrative. Do you construct a narrative as you play–one of your own creation. For example, my wife is not a gamer, in the stereotypical sense, but she really loves computer Solitaire. We got to talking about why I like certain games over others and my fondness for narrative, how I’ll progress through a game motivated by the desire to see more of the narrative. I like plot. I was suprised when she told me that when she plays Solitaire she oftens has a narrative running through her head: She’s stuck in Las Vegas without enough money to fix her car or get home by some other means, so she takes what she has to the casino and gambles in hopes of raising enough cash. Amazing! I thought. I don’t think I would play the game like that. I’d simply want to achieve a better and better score and get pleasure from solving the puzzle.

So my question is how many people play plotless games in this manner? Is narrative more important than is thought? (if this is actually a controversy)

The reason this interests me is how it seems that finding meaning in activities such as school learning, in the case of my discipline, Composition, helps students see purpose in what they do in school. Why write research paper for first-year comp? Isn’t that just an exercise in me finding sources and reporting what I’ve learned to the teacher? What my students are lacking in FYC is a context which initiates the assignment and motivates the process of writing. I thought, in the past, that using service-learning would give my students a real-world context in which to act. They worked with “live” people, face-to-face. They were doing auto/ethnography rather than library research. And I’ve begun using blogging as an assignment with the same thinking–writing in the real-world. I don’t have the capacity in the writing classroom to simulate for my students writing in the community of psychologists, sociologists, chemists, or computer scientists, and this is what I feel is missing from a research paper assignment. My students don’t seem to see writing as conversation within a given field. They don’t have a context to put knowledge in action.

When I play thru Homeworld I become immersed in that universe and feel a connection to my people, the Higarans. It’s up to me to learn the rules of the game in order to put that knowledge in action to protect my clan. I’m roleplaying in the game, just as I do when I write my graduate seminar papers. I pretend I’m in conversation with these scholars. So each semester I ask myself what can do to give my students a compelling context within which to write academic research papers. I guess it could be as easy as asking them to roleplay, but that doesn’t sound as interesting as being in a field or in a game.

Welcome to Canned Goods at Blogsome. This is my third blog; the other two lasted a semester each. The second was a msn spaces blog that was part of a blogging assignment for the first-year comp course I taught in the fall: http://spaces.msn.com/members/burnteggs/. Nothing special, but I had lost verve for my first blog on blogger and wanted to be actively blogging with my students, so this blog was about “cool” stuff from my childhood. Being relatively new to the blogosphere, I’ve come to see that what makes blogs exciting for me as a reader of blogs is to see the conversations that take place, and I guess that is the reason why I wanted to start another blog–to have a place where I discuss things (school stuff: readings, papers, courses, research) that interest me, and, hopefully, it becomes a place where people interact.

For my students blogging this semester, I find it difficult to blog, maybe because I haven’t done it for very long. But I think it’s like any writing in that it requires you to make time for it. Professional writers often work on a set schedule. For instance, a couple years back I read the biography of Frank Herbert, and he got up early in the morning, hit the rowing machine, had a bit of toast, and got to work until lunch time. He was dedicated. It works the same for school and nonschool writing. Part of my lack of motivation often come from knowing that no one will see the writing; for instance, I started many a journal–private writing–but after a while I lost the verve. Like I said, perhaps this is because it wasn’t enough for me to be writing merely to myself, and I connect this to school writing. Often we are only writing for the teacher, for a grade. Sounds like fun! (insert sarcasm)

In order to make school writing interesting, I always pretend that I’m in conversation with the sources of my paper, but this semester, you’ll actually be in conversation with each other, the people behind your sources, and me. Further, having a blog means that you are potentially in conversation with people from all over. Last semster, one of my students blogged about an advert for a tanning salon, where the pic used was only the torso of the model–no head. The creator of the advert found her blog post and responded.

Part of writing (or composing/creating in any medium) seems to be this desire to communicate with others, to share with others, to build communities with others–much different from that paper I wrote in 7th grade about Vietnam: pick topic, find encyclopedia, change a few words of the text (it’s got to be my own words!), report info back to teacher for grade. Wash, rinse, repeat.

If you have looked at writing through the lens of the latter, I hope you’ll come to see writing (school and nonschool) throught the lens of the former. Blog away!

I’m Rick Hunter, a second year Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Department of English’s Composition and Rhetoric program, minoring in Games, Learning, and Society. I write about my teaching, research, and other interests. I’m currently teaching first-year comp (Cool, Culture, Technology, and Identity), and my research interests include (composition pedagogy, of course; digital literacies; new media studies; online community culture; service learning; writing program administration; autoethnography; and narrative.