reclaiming agency beyond procedural rhetoric

In an essay often cited by rhetoric and composition scholars and students, Ian Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as the way a video game argues based on the coding system of the game. A videogame develops a world that a player learns to read, and successful reading of the game leads to success in the game. Learning how to play as lara croft, to explore the levels to find hidden weapons and treasures makes a player more successful at beating the game. Finding hidden coins and mushrooms helps Mario rescue the princess faster. In these types of video games, the agency of he game (and therefore the power) according to Bogost lies in the coding of the game. The player has no agency, no power, they simply learn to read the domain and then to defeat the game.

The same would hold true of a game like SimCity 4. The player learns to read the game, they learn what the symbols mean, they learn how to zone different sections, and how to grow their cities. They learn to read the coding of the game to work toward beating it. However, SimCity players don’t stop at that point, instead, some participate in online forums, creating mods, help guides and fanfiction surrounding the SimCity games (and their ability to play/manipulate the game). In these cases, the player is in possession of the agency of the game, the player learns to read the game on their PC playing by themselves, then moves their play to virtual community spaces where they can reclaim their agency by participating outside the game. In this case procedural rhetoric does not limit the players, it does not help explain game play. In these cases, players have not read the game as agency on their computer screen that they simply learn to read. They see the game as extending beyond the boundaries of the coding sequence developed by the game developers, and they have reclaimed their agency through fandom. Fandom is agency, and fandom is outside procedural rhetoric. It makes use of the game structure in things like fanfiction, but it reallocates the agency to the players who manipulate the coding to meet their own needs. In this way, in a game like SimCity, players demonstrate their agency through a site like simtropolis.com. they demonstrate their agency through their participation, their creation of mods, and their creation of fanfiction.

sight and mind

jamais vu - never seen
deja vu - already seen
linguistic cousins

we claim deja vu as our memory playing tricks on us, a past life trying to peak through our consciousness, our consciouness remembers. we claim jamais vu when we can't remember conversations, they never happened our consciousness doesn't remember them. both are tricks of the mind, tricks of the sense of sight, but attributed to the mind. linguistically they both refer to sight as the culprit, but mean the mind. we make so many connections between our consciousmind and the sense of sight, especially in the language we use to describe what we experience.

not much of a post

This isn't much of a post, but i thought this image was very fitting for this blog. so i'm adding it here.

knowledge as a noun because of assessment

Rereading Gee’s “What Video Games have to teach us about learning and literacy” for the third or fourth time for a class, I’m truly starting to understand the idea of viewing knowledge as a verb instead of a noun. So the discussion question in the board was related to assessment, how should assessment change if we look at videogame learning as a basis for understanding our education system. Gee spends most of this book showing how videogames reward players for learning, how they open space for players to apply learning principles in new contexts, the focus is on achieving goals during play, of beating the game. In the beginning of the game learning is easier, tasks are easier, other players are in place to overtly assist with learning (a parental type character will provide ‘helpful’ information that more expert gamers glean over due to their expert status, they assume they learned it before. Novice players will read all the help bubbles and try out the points as part of their learning process). So when we read all this, and we see how failing in a videogame is giving up, because the game will provide ample opportunity to try the task again (unless you’re playing a 25 cent arcade game, then opportunity is limited to funds) because the focus of the game is playing and learning, not on achieving something. When this book and the assessment question is introduced in discussion so many resorted back to the idea of knowledge as being assessed, so we approach knowledge differently. But we haven’t really understood Gee’s point that knowledge in videogames is learning, it’s doing, it’s a verb. As soon as the dreaded a word is mentioned we resort to traditional views of literacy and education as reading, writing and arithmetic accompanied by grades and tests. All of this focused on assessment of the content, did you read the right literature, and can you talk about it the right way, did you learn out to produce the right math answer. What we should be looking at in education is did the student learn how to arrive at the right answer. Did they understand the process? If it took student A 1 try to get the process and student B 50 tries, student B shouldn’t be punished with a lower grade. But we get so caught up in teacher time, and testable information that knowledge will never move into the realm of verbs, it will remain a noun because it’s something to be assessed.

cheating and redefining what it means to win at school

For my other class I’m playing SimCity 4. it’s a game about building cities, basically. It seems pretty boring, but I think it’s fun. There is no win state, there is no point where you’ve beat the game. It’s also a game that is inherently designed for cheat codes. So in my presentation on the game I asked does a game with no win state make the idea of ‘cheating’ different, since you’re not cheating to win. This brought up the discussion does winning always have to be an outcome, or is winning ‘not losing.’ In SimCity having your city not fail is winning. Having your city fail is losing. So if we applied this idea to education could we have a different idea of cheating and actually focus on learning instead of performance in skill and drill? Maybe. Maybe we should think about school as not winning at something but success is when a student doesn’t fail, that becomes the mark of winning. Then, if students needed a little help every now and then it wouldn’t seem so drastic like cheating. It would be an extra boost like a walk through to keep a student from failing (but also providing them with extra work to keep from failing, is that really a bad thing?).

We certainly go through a lot of effort to look up walk throughs, and then figure out what they mean, and what they mean in the game, and then how to use the information they’ve given. Walk throughs are not straight forward they say random stuff like “walk toward the dark spot, kill all the monsters.” Not really helpful, but if the key to that level is the walk pattern, and the person figures that out in game, they’ve decoded text (acquired learning). And they’ve used a research skill that required them to test a hypothesis in the game. So have they really just cheated? Or simply not failed?

demonstrating identity

James Paul Gee finds that “when people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy” (13). He then outlines ideas of acquiring knowledge in games and learning knowledge in games and how those tie to literacy. Literacy is not just reading and writing, but a way of learning specific content within a specific context and being able to demonstrate proficiency with that knowledge. Ideas about literacy begin to include identity, and demonstration of identity within domains. In Gee’s version of literacy, identity and recognized identity within a context become the best demonstrations of proficiency with a given literacy. Instead of teaching history content and then testing students, their ability to speak the right words about History, and demonstrate their understanding by acting as a history student are the best indicators that learning has occurred. This is more common in college education, especially freshmen composition courses (ENG 101). Inherently, the course is a skill driven course; students are expected to learn how to write. There is no native content that needs to be taught to students in ENG 101. Grammar is not mandatory, but is not necessarily content. So the purpose of the course becomes teaching students to demonstrate their understanding of their student status through the college essay. The college essay isn’t just a way for students to write, it isn’t just a way to present content, it’s a way for the literature student to show their identity as a literature student. The correct use of the correct terminology is the best demonstration of understanding of the content of literature, it’s also the best way for a student to demonstrate to a teacher that they ‘get’ the material. So, as Gee discusses how videogames cause good learning through 36 learning principles he lines out, we in education can use them to see if our students can demonstrate beyond a test score that they understand the material by presenting the content in a way that is accepted by the community they wish to belong to.

what is winning

In things we call games we typically consider someone as a winner, there is a point where someone wins. in single player video games, traditionally there is a win, Mario saves the princess, you defeat all the zombies and save civilization, you complete all your missions, etc. there are now new games (some considered simulations) where there is no such win condition. no civilization is saved in simcity, the point is to create cities. no princesses are saved in Farmville, but you continue to harvest crops and grow your farm. in games like these, commonly considered casual games because they don't require as much time an effort, winning can best be defined as not losing. losing is clearly the opposite of winning. however, some casual games have losing, and no winning. in simcity your city can die, it can become overcrowded, it can go bankrupt. in farmville your crops can die, you can spend all your money. you can lose, but you can't win. so, why do people play games you can't win? what do people do with the games if they can't move toward winning?