Stewart Whittemore
Ph.D. student
Rhetoric and Writing
Michigan State University
[email protected]
Report of a Video Game Analysis Assignment for First-Year Writing
Background
Video games represent a significant portion of the
literate activity (reading, writing, and thinking) that
students have engaged in prior to entering college
(Gee, 2003; Gros, 2003). Yet, until recently first-year
writing pedagogy has made few attempts to use video
game literacies as bridges to academic literacies, as
we have done with other genres of popular culture
including film, music, and various Web media such as
Blogs and Wikis. As with these other popular culture
literacies, building such bridges has the potential both
to motivate students and to lead them to engage with
culture and technology in critical and analytical ways.
The assignment described here represents one
instantiation of a first-year writing assignment centered
on the analytical study of video games commensurate
with the goals of Michigan State's Tier I writing
curriculum to challenge students "to seek new
information and to reflect upon its relevance to their
own observations and experiences"
(http://www.msu.edu/~wrac/t1/t1_index.html). This
assignment also validates students' cultural expertise
and represents an enactment of situated practice,
overt instruction, and critical framing as the pathway to
transformed practice (New London Group, 1996).
Stewart Whittemore and Douglas Eyman
Discussion
The Assignment
Student work was read according to a qualitative teacher research paradigm which emphasizes a rich and
deeply-contextualized analysis of student data with the purpose of discovering useful information for teachers
and students working in similar situations (Ray, 1993).
Preliminary analysis of student work suggests several directions for pedagogical approaches and future
research:
• The analytic framework offered by Gee's learning principles can help to situate the pedagogical possibilities
of engaged gaming in composition courses as working within spheres of learner motivation, community,
metalanguage, and transformed practice.
• Student narratives of on- and off-screen interactions with game technologies exhibit a mix of narrative
perspectives, revealing an incipient awareness of the interplay of real, virtual, and projective identities as
each was brought into play in the research and reflective tasks for the assignment (Gee, 2003). This points
to the benefit of using video game assignments as a means of fully involving learners in research tasks in
composition pedagogy (Gros, 2003).
• Student work also points to the usefulness of video game research as a means of fostering an embodied
understanding and critical awareness of the ways in which they live, play, and work in material structures
designed by others (Haas and Witte, 2001).
Contexts
Classroom Context
• Course: WRA 110, “Writing: Science and
Technology”
• Theme: Usability issues in human technology
interfaces
• 27 students – 24 freshmen, 3 sophomores
Theoretical Context
• Usability was operatively defined in the class as the
extent to which a technology meets the needs of its
users. Emphasis was placed on the “softer elements”
of technology and technology as “acts of
communication” between designers and users
(Vicente, 2004; Norman, 2002).
• Students read James Paul Gee’s What Video Games
Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and
were encouraged to use Gee’s 36 learning principles
as an analytical framework with which both to interpret
video games as examples of especially effective
learning technology and to reflect on themselves as
learners.
Madden NFL 2006. (2005). Electronic Arts.
Guild Wars. (2005). NC Interactive.
“The programmers of Guild Wars unlocked
the greatest resource for learning in the
game, social interaction. All throughout the
game, you are required to seek help from
others […] This is the beginning of an affinity
group, as Gee calls it, that you will bond
together with through shared endeavors,
goals, and practices […] In Guild Wars, Gee’s
Affinity Group Principle equals successful
teamwork.”
Douglas Eyman
Ph.D. student
Rhetoric and Writing
Michigan State University
[email protected]
“Gee’s Regime of Competence Principle
states that the learner gets ample opportunity
to operate within, but at the outer edge of his
resources, so that at those points things are
felt as challenging but not ‘undoable.’ This
principle is great to [explain] frustration. The
game frustrates you, but frustrates in a way
that […] makes you want to complete the
tasks in the game. When you apply this
principle to a game, it's like the game isn’t too
easy, but it's not hard to the point that you
think it's impossible. It's all doable.”
“When I am playing games, being
comfortable using the right buttons at the
right time without having the manual on my
lap, is amazing. The designers of Madden
even hit on Gee’s Discovery Principle. […]
When I accidentally hit the sticks during the
game and discovered the Truck Mode and
Big Hit capabilities, I felt even more in love
with the game.”
References
Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Gros, Begoña. “The Impact of Digital Games in Education.” First Monday 8.7 (2003).
<http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_7/xyzgros/#author>
Haas, Christina, and Stephen P. Witte. “Writing as an Embodied Practice: The Case of Engineering Standards.” Written Communication
15.4 (2001). 413-457.
New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social
Futures. Ed. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. New York: Routledge, 2000. 9-37.
Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. 2002 Edition. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Ray, Ruth. The Practice of Theory: Teacher Research in Composition. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993.
Vicente, Kim. The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live With Technology. New York: Routledge, 2004.
The back of the box
Good video and computer games represent some of the bestdesigned, most user-friendly technologies available. In this
assignment you will analyze how the learning environment of a
favorite video or computer game teaches its users to play while also
challenging and motivating them.
Walkthrough
In this assignment you will evaluate the learning environment of a
video or computer game of your choice in order to reach some
conclusions about the overall quality of that environment. By "learning
environment" I mean the methods by which the game teaches its new
players (users) to play, including but not limited to wizards, tutorials,
manuals, quick reference cards, in-game hints, special beginner
levels, or any combination thereof.
I am asking you to do this in the context of a class focusing on
usability because, as James Paul Gee notes, video games are
complex pieces of technology that demand a diverse set of skills from
their players, ranging from critical thinking and problem solving to
careful reading and attention to detail — skills we try to teach in writing
classes like WRA 110. Yet, unlike most classes you have probably
encountered in school and also unlike most of the technologies we'll
talk about this semester, successful games do a very good job
teaching learners how to make sense of this complexity while also
motivating them to want to learn more and keep playing.
So, your job is to:
1. Report how the game you have chosen goes about teaching
players to play
2. Assess the strengths and/or weaknesses of this learning
environment
3. EITHER offer specific suggestions for ways in which the learning
environment of the game could be improved to create a more
satisfying playing experience OR, if the learning environment of the
game you chose is nearly perfect, speculate on ways in which the
learning environment of that game might be transferable to another
technology
Mods (i.e. stuff you make)
Your deliverables for this assignment are:
• Report - 4 pages (+/- 1000 words).
• Reflective memo responding to the following prompts:
- What did this assignment teach you about yourself as a learner?
- In what ways are Gee's principles useful for interpreting how video
games affect you as a player (i.e. how they motivate you, how
they frustrate you, how they intrigue you, how they manipulate
your emotions, or how they shape your identity)?
Hints
Although I hope you have fun completing this assignment, doing it well
will require careful planning and attention to detail. Even if you are
already an expert at the game, you should play it again from the start,
putting yourself in the role of a new player and paying close attention
to how the game teaches you about itself.
To create a substantive analysis of a video game, you will need two
things:
1) A game sufficiently complex to analyze (Pac-Man, for example,
would probably be a bad choice); and 2) Some sort of specific criteria
by which to analyze the game. Part of this criteria can come from your
own past experience playing similar games, but to be credible, some
of it will need to be based on criteria offered from our readings, class
discussions, and your own research.