Gaming

by TMD

22 comments

1 Erin Garcia { 10.28.09 at 4:22 pm }

Here’s a “preschool” level Halloween game found on CBC. http://www.cbc.ca/kids/games/shugersrush/
It fits the low entry threshold style that last week’s speaker mentioned, but I’m a little disturbed that the poor kid dies a rather gruesome death if he catches a rat. Would we really want pre-schoolers playing a game like this?

2 Erin Garcia { 10.28.09 at 5:36 pm }

P.S. Am I the only one who thinks of Ender’s Game when reading about how we need to sneak in educational content through gaming? oooh shivers.

3 Genevieve Brisson { 10.29.09 at 6:37 am }

Bonjour Erin,

I am learning so much in this course.
I do not txt, but I am thinking of trying txting with some of my kids, to see their use of languages when they txt or chat. They are learning/using French at school but for many of them it’s a second or a third language.

And I do not play video game, but I have tried the Halloween game on CBC’s Website. And I am SOOOO bad at it even if it’s “low entry threshold style” game. My partner tried it once and mad about 900 points… my best score was 310!

I had not thought of Ender’s Game, but now that you mention it, I am shivering…

bonne journée
Geneviève

4 Chelsey Hauge { 10.29.09 at 9:28 am }

Gee, in his article, and Sanford, in her talk, and also in her article, addressed the many lessons education could learn from video gaming. Video games are engaging, they are challenging, they are self-directed and they allow users to explore, attempt and re-attempt, and they use lessons and skills that build upon each other but get increasingly more difficult, through levels. Gee does not gender his article (that I recall) but Sanford is specifically addressing boys. She even goes so far to discuss video gaming as though it were a radical way of resisting the confines of the school system. In her talk, she and Liz Merkle presented research done with boys using video games. Through engaging with these games, they presented many many positive aspects of learning: learning collaborate, to help each other, to try again and again, to build upon prior knowledge, to research solutions, among others. I must admit, though, like after I read some of the articles, and especially like after I watched Brenda Laurel’s presentation on Purple Moon and girl video games I was a bit unsettled.

That feeling of unsettlement, that something was not quite right? I thought it was related to gender, so I proceeded to read a whole bunch of articles on gender and video gaming, specially on girls and video gaming. My skeptisism grew as I read more of Laurel’s work, where she discusses the extensive research she carried out on girls- asking them “what they wanted”- in video games, doing research on the issues in their lives, and creating games to reflect this. That seems like a great idea, an interesting way to create appropriate games, however there is no critical analysis about the discourse of language the girls already live in and have access to in order to express their desires. I’m not so sure we can separate the production of girlhood from desires expressed by girls and from gendered video games.In an article that addresses the explosion of video games, an explosion Laurel played a major role in, Bryson and de Castell (1998) wrote:
The question we urge is simply: Whose interests will be served in making use of these purportedly “essential” differences as a basis for creating “girl-friendly” computer-mediated environments? Most importantly, are we producing tools for girls, or are we producing girls themselves by, as Althusser (1984) would put it, “interpellating” the desire to become the girl? By playing with girlish toys, does the girl learn to become the kind of woman she was always already destined to become?”
So really, whose interests are being served by “girl games?” Does the production and ever-becoming performance of gender within video gaming spaces perpetuate patriarchy?

Likewise, if we are studying boys (as Sanford does) in video gaming, how come we are not addressing the ways in which boys are produced in those spaces? Do video gaming spaces, where, though not to overgeneralize, there are many games defined by violence/killing/guns—create spaces of male performance in which violence, power, and domination are learned alongside learning about collaboration, persistence, and research skills? Or, is the content less important than the medium in this case, and is it the medium that promotes such positive learning? Is the medium itself gendered?

5 Melanie Wong { 10.29.09 at 10:44 am }

Hi Everyone,

Since discovering that our readings this week were on Video Games, I became curious about this phenomenon. I am not a “gamer.” Other then Nintendo etc.. I have never played video games such as Halo or World of Warcraft. However, I have friends who are avid gamers. Over the past week I have been asking them about what the attraction is. One of my friends discussed her online gaming experiences, telling me how she loved taking on different identities. She told me her role in the game was to be a healer. She enjoys this role and the complications it brings on. This is similar to the ideas Gee (2005) mentioned in his article. He discussed how good video games captures the players through identity. Yesterday, this same friend and I discussed about how addictive World of Warcraft was. We discussed how people play this game all the time. She mentioned how her husband enjoyed games such as this because of the social aspects of the game. She said it was not about playing the game but about being able to do this with friends. I found this extremely interesting because I never thought about it this way.

Last week at the talk we attended as a class, I had a lot of thoughts running in my mind. With the first speech/discussion by Eric Meyers on virtual worlds, some of the questions that popped in my head where: How do children figure out what is truth?
How is this space creating a safe place for children? What are the educational implications, other then the obvious ones? I actually thought it was sort of neat that some of these virtual worlds were modeled somewhat to the actual world. For example, how students could tattle on each other.

Liz Merkel and Kathy Sanford’s discussion was interesting to me on various levels. There was discussion on how there is student engagement crisis in schools. It made me think about how this is very true. Are the traditional ways of teaching just not as stimulating with all the new technology out there? How are teachers addressing these issues? When they discussed the disconnect between what is happening in the traditional classroom and at home, it really got me thinking about how teachers need to be considering this. Even if you are not actively using technology in your classroom, teachers should still be aware of the implications it is having on students. I also thought a lot about the idea of “productive play.” What type of implications does this have for me as an educator?

In the article written by de Castell, Jenson and Taylor (2007), they made some very interesting comments. However, the comment that stuck with me the most was in their conclusion. They said, “As the school’s human subjects, students, teachers and others, work increasingly within technologically remediated worlds, the school’s fidelity to traditional ways and means of educating becomes correspondingly unsustainable” (p. 597). Again, this notion that we need to rethink the way we teach or at least consider the changing world around us. They also mentioned in their article the significance of “play.” Play is something that obviously has a potentially significant impact in the classroom when it is utilized.

Chelsey, I enjoyed your discussion posting. Gender roles etc. is obviously a very significant factor when it comes to video gaming. Your Althusser (1984) quote got me thinking about how I am actually quite concerned about video games and girls in general. I am thinking about this game I own on my Nintendo DS. I brought it awhile back because I thought it was cute. I can’t remember the title of it since it is sitting in Calgary somewhere but basically it features,” Princess Peach” (from the Mario series). When I reflect on the game I am wondering about what type of gender roles we are portraying in these games. Yes, Princess Peach was the heroine in the game. However, the dress, the way she moved, how she hit her enemies with an umbrella (!) etc. really indicated to me the gender stereotypes. Also, if you play other games in the Mario series, Princess Peach is always portrayed as being helpless. Why is she not rescuing herself? Is this what we want our girls to be exposed to?

Erin: Thank you for sharing the link. I checked it out and I agree.

More from me later.

Melanie

6 Eva Ziltener { 10.29.09 at 2:09 pm }

Chelsey, you hit the nail on the head… whose interests are being served by “girl games”? I know you and I have already discussed our reaction to Brenda Laurel’s TED talk (and some of her writing) but I wanted to share my thoughts with the class: I too felt slightly annoyed by Laurel’s patronizing (yes, I use the term on purpose) attitude towards girls, as she keeps telling us “we love little girls” and “we ask them what they want” (I’m paraphrasing). It also took me a while to realize what was making me feel uncomfortable, until I realized that Laurel, along with Purple Moon and other companies are telling girls how to be… and how to interact with digital technology. By creating their version of “girl space”, they are constructing a certain mode of being – one that not all girls will necessarily subscribe to, or might not revert to, were they given the freedom to create their own spaces in the digital/virtual world. There is of course a financial benefit for companies such as Purple Moon if girls play their games. The “girl game” market is still small, with lots of room to grow… a potential money mine, if girls could be motivated to buy games. According to Kearny (2006), focus in academia has so far been mainly on media produced for girls by adults, with little energy invested in “all girl-made” media. It would be interesting to focus on empowering girls and women to change their perception of the computer as a “boy’s toy” (Walkerdine 2007) and to appropriate the computer as a tool for their own use. This is already happening, but it’s not very mainstream –yet (Kearny 2006).

I would like to subscribe to Henry Jenkins’ philosophy of creating a “gender-neutral” game space… where children/youth and adults can explore virtual worlds and digital spaces (relatively) free of the burden of gender. Jenkins (1998) notes “We are not sure yet what such a gender-neutral space will look like. Creating such a space would mean redesigning not only the nature of computer games but also the nature of society. The danger may be that in such a space, gender differences are going to be more acutely felt, as boys and girls will be repelled from each other rather than drawn together.” He is referring here to obvious differences repeatedly documented by researchers, such as: boys’ marked preference for violent games and girls’ lack of interest in such games.

I enjoyed Gee’s articles, in which he didn’t focus on gender, but only on the positive benefits of playing “good” video games. (Please note the use of the word “good”… although I suppose Gee should have defined the term…). I was inspired by the positive aspects of gaming Gee presented in both of his articles, and I have seen the learning he describes in action first hand, when watching kids play games. (I have no chance of playing at their level… even 5 year olds seem to be blessed with better gaming skills than I). My boyfriend, too, insists there are many positive benefits to playing games: He learned English thanks by playing computer games. (The kind of game where players interact with characters and move around the virtual world by typing in commands).

I felt a bit of resistance while reading the Sanford article, as I felt she didn’t make a distinction between playing “good” games (a al Gee) and games that were mindless violent or otherwise devoid of “good” content. However, I enjoyed the de Castell article and especially enjoyed it when she had her epfiany: The goal of (educational) games is to stay in the game! It’s true that being an active and engaged participant, who can put together pieces of a puzzle in order to stay in the game is worthwhile goal in itself. I also enjoyed her notion of play being a voluntary action and one which allows children (students) to be intelligent agents in their own lives.

I leave you here for now, with David Perry’s quote (from his TED talk): “Games on the surface, seem simple entertainment, but to those that look a little deeper, the new paradigm of videogames could open entirely new frontiers to creative minds that like to think big.”

7 Janet Pletz { 10.30.09 at 3:00 pm }

Great postings this week.

Erin, I also tried the Hallowe’en game on CBC for kids. On three tries I went from 160, 300, 460. I guess my ‘mouse’ skills improved. Death-by-rat to signify the end of the game reminded me of the Southpark characters (round heads, back views, cloaked)…the way the character in this game turns around to face you, the participant, at the moment of ‘death’/ending served to make me feel player guilt; when the character turns to face you, it might be saying… “Look what you did to us? You’re responsible for this mess!”….alas. I’m not a gamer. I do ‘own’ one avatar mind you. It is the avatar that plays Wii Tennis ‘for me’.

Chelsea, your extensive background on issues of gender brings much to the conversations this week. I also watched the Laurel video. In its day (1998), her voice was very indicative of ‘the digital and gaming times’. Today, if she held the same line, I would be very worried. I also picked up the patronizing tone, as you mentioned Eva. This video clip is now 11 years old. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I thought this clip should have an affect on our ‘2009’ sensibilities…time and evolution tends to do that. Having said that, it provides a historical vignette that has no doubt served to shape the nature of gender related research in the last decade.

I had wonderful conversations with my three sons this week on this topic, who are now adult men in their mid twenties, and have/do all participate in gaming mediums. They speak eloquently about the challenge and lure of strategizing, tactical maneuvering, and critical thinking. This course has opened a new sense of understanding and awareness for me. Gee’s articles on content and learning principles (I remind myself of his connection to the New London Group) stated some noble competencies—of GOOD video games. In his closing remark he asks: “How can we make learning in and out of school, with or without using games, more game-like in the sense of using the sorts of learning principles that young people see in good games?” My response to this is that good teaching practice in classrooms can and should employ the same learning principles and achieve the same outcomes. It would be errant to think that only good games could achieve attentive engagement and situational learning outcomes. Which brings Sanford and Merkel’s comments to mind. I would be hesitant to accept their remarks as generalizations of a crisis in schools and engaged learning. I did, however, appreciate how they related connections to complexity theory.

Castell, Jenson, and Taylor (2007) brought forward the dichotomized slope between commercial games and educational games. “If commercial game designers are victimized by the marketplace, educational game designers are victimized by conceptions of learning and practices of instruction no less crudely instrumentalist” (596). At the authors report, at core of this statement is the significance of the larger role that money, re-conceptualization of knowledge, and changed modes of media for education are just a few of the grand narratives overarching this field. My favourite line, taken from this article is this:
“Play has been a critically underappreciated resource for learning.”

8 Jeff Miller { 10.30.09 at 3:16 pm }

Hi everyone,

Great comments so far on the readings! I was quite interested in de Castell, Jenson and Taylor’s (2007) description of the role of games in constructing particular gender stereotypes in their players. The various avatars they used to illustrate their point were great examples! I’ve been curious about this whole issue, too, from a parental viewpoint, as my six year old son is still as happy to play Princess Peach in Mario Cart as he is to be a big bruiser like Bowser! Princess Peach’s pink motorcycle does some of the more interesting tricks on the track, of course, so that might be part of the attraction! I’m keeping all of the shooter and other violent games away from him at this point, though there is already slippage on that as “comic violence” and “cartoon mischief” (real warnings on video games) come up in even the most innocuous game. Just think of all of the poor Gumbas that Mario stomps on (cute but deadly)!

Ryan’s discussion of the geography of gamers’ interests was quite productive and the fact that I did waste a small portion of my youth on various video games helped me to identify with a few of the poles she described. I played at least a couple of the Myst games, and I recall quite well just how much time was spent on trying to crack the hard puzzles. I kept notes on the various clues, built out code tables to crack ancient writing, and learned to piece together the story from the multimodal clues offered by the environment. I had to be quite literate with a host of different texts by the time I was done in order to make progress. I can’t remember if I ever finished the game, though. The narrative was interesting, but it was also quite exhausting. And while cheating was an option, I wouldn’t have the satisfaction of figuring things out for myself: it would be kind of like reading the Colesnotes for Ulysses!

In watching my son learn how to play a game like Super Mario Galaxy (his all time favourite game), I can certainly recognize many of the characteristics that Gee describes. The game is an amazing learning engine, with all manner of strategies in place to motivate players to patiently build skills, piece together context, build courage and competence to explore, all in a scaffolding environment that is a lot of fun! And do such games have any impact on notions of identity? Well, this picture might give you some indication of that (warning shameless cute kid picture ahead):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bazzy/3908953358/

Now the moment that I wrote down that I let my 6 year old son play video games, I felt self-conscious. But we only let him play for 1 hour a day on weekends. But we also constantly read to him. But we only let him play a very narrow range of “age-appropriate” games! Schooled in contemporary notions of literacy, I can’t help but feel a bit guilty giving him access to what some might consider edutainment or worse. My son is absolutely bursting with the creativity of early literacy, so I have no worries that he will soon be able to see dick run as I did before (and I know that he knows more words than he is letting on to me). But I am in awe of the power that the gaming environment seems to have to motivate him to learn. As Gee says, that is something that anyone interested in education should pay close attention to!

Happy Halloween!
Jeff

9 Genevieve Brisson { 10.31.09 at 7:25 am }

I was fascinated by the different versions of the avatar in the article by de Castell, Jenson and Taylor’s (2007). I like the fact that so much time and reflection were put into creating the avatars. One of the reasons I am not a gamer is that I am often upset/shocked/disturbed/annoyed by the way women are portrayed in games, at least in the video games I have been exposed to. Women are often dressed in a very sexy manner; sometimes they wear so few clothes, they do not even seem to qualify as “sexy” anymore. A (male) friend of mine once told me it did not matter, because it was simply a game, but it seemed to me to be a major element of many games. I really like the final version of Dox in her hip, metropolitan look. As for her somewhat “androgynous look”, it seems to be a look commonly adopted by many young women these days. My first thought when I look at the drawing is not that she looks androgynous; I think she looks sure of herself.

Geneviève

10 Richard Harris { 10.31.09 at 1:40 pm }

Happy Halloween Everybody,

Janet, I also appreciated de Castell, Jenson, and Taylor’s view on play as an “underappreciated resource for learning.” This connects to ideas around retooling educational spaces and mediums that all the work on multimodality and hypermedia express.

I particularly appreciated that fact that de Castell, and others, focused on the design of educational games by actually writing one. The discussion on character identity, as others have mentioned, was particularly important to gender issues in games (and society in general).

I also enjoyed their discussion of the problem of incorporating educational content into a game while still producing something the students would want to play. They embedded narratives and characters that dealt with real problems around health and class issues in society while maintaining the core belief that the game must be entertaining. Too often “educational games” are terribly boring and overtly instructional in their approach to content. Through their trials and tribulations of game creation, de Castell, Jenson, and Taylor correctly identified that “the problem is the very idea of ‘content’ ” (596). Content delivery, in my view, must be embedded in play in order to make it more engaging for students.

I would be interested to see where de Castell and others go with these ideas. Is there an empirical study in the works? Could one quantitatively assess students’ understanding of the health issues raised in the game before and after they play? Then compare?

I am reminded of my own Social Studies 8 class. As many of you will know, SS8 covers about a thousand years of world history in one academic year. No easy task with a room full of thirteen-year-olds. Occasionally, I would notice a few boys who would have extensive prior knowledge of a particular ancient civilization. When I enquired a little I found they gained the knowledge from a strategy RPG-type game which draws its content from real history. This raises a couple questions in my mind. 1) Can games like these be made to align more closely with the traditional curriculum? And if so, how would we incorporate them into a school environment? 2) What is the impact on education if games such as these actually offer misleading/selective information or reinforce negative historical prejudices?

I’m personally optimistic that games can be more readily incorporated into the curriculum. Though, they do need to be fun to play.

Enjoy trick-or-treating tonight,

Richard.

11 Eva Ziltener { 10.31.09 at 7:12 pm }

Salut tout le monde!

Toutes vos idees fantastiques m’ont fait penser: comment pourrait-on utiliser les jeux videos pour améliorer l’apprentissage des langues?

Je vous avais raconter que mon copain, qui vient de la Turquie, a appris l’anglais en jouant des jeux d’aventures- il a du resoudre des problemes en anglais, ce qui lui a permit d’améliorer son vocabulaire!

Also dann, wie koennen wir so etwas im Sprachunterricht einbauen?

Liebe Gruesse et joyeux Hallowe’en!

Eva

12 Heidi { 10.31.09 at 9:40 pm }

“Play obviously represents an order in which the to-and-fro motion of play follows of itself…The structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus takes from him the burden of the initiative, which constitutes the actual strain of existence. This is seen also in the spontaneous tendency to repetition that emerges in the player and in the constant self-renewal of play, which influences its form” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 94, 1960).

I’ve never been a gamer myself, video or otherwise, and I’ve never been able to figure out why…however, I am in favour of the process that goes into it…the act of play. The concept of play has been brought up a few times in this thread and was mentioned in each of the articles. This year I have become interested in the concept of play as influenced by the writings of Hans Georg Gadamer. [Yes, that’s right, here I am bringing up hermeneutics again!] Gadamer advocated for a way of thinking that would overcome Kant’s “radical subjectivisation” and he used the concept of play in his argument for an “aesthetic consciousness.” Gadamer speaks of play as “the clue to ontological explanation” (Truth and Method, p. 91, 1960).

Learning can benefit from play because, drawing on Gadamer’s words, the learner becomes absorbed in what is being learned as opposed to perceiving it as an objective task. In writing about Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, Richard Bernstein states, ”[m]eaning and understanding are not psychological processes, discrete events, or states of mind; they are essentially and intrinsically linguistic. It is the work of art or text itself that possesses meaning. And furthermore, this meaning is not self-contained – simply “there” to be discovered; meaning comes to realization only in and through the “happening” of understanding” (Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, p. 126, 1983).

In de Castell et al. (2007), the authors state that games require a different kind of epistemology than that experienced within instrumentalist educational practices: “Games are well-suited to, and in fact call upon, an epistemology very different from that defining curricular knowledge (lesson, test and textbook), changing in turn what knowledge as meaningful “content” in play can mean” (p. 596). The authors are calling for an epistemology that embraces Gadamer’s concept of play, writing “[t]he learning goal in such a game is simply to play it, to be in that setting, as an active and engaged participant, stringing together the parts, none of which is self-contained, but all of which can be fitted together to make up a richly educative whole” (p. 597). When reading this section of the article I was immediately reminded of a new form of epistemology that a few curriculum theorists have extended from complexity theory, which they have defined as “temporal epistemology,” a quest for knowledge that is not based on developing accurate understandings of a finished reality but rather, “discovering more and more complex and creative ways of interacting with our reality” (Osberg, Biesta, and Cilliers, 2008). The genre of video games allows for experience with multiple realities, where actions can be performed repeatedly each leading to different outcomes. The experience itself consists of learning and the comparative analysis of the individual experiences provides opportunity for critical thinking.

I personally would like for the ideas explored above to be considered when developing digital narratives. Perhaps the concept of narrative, and what we can do with it, is not open enough. As an art educator, I encourage students to challenge the traditional boundaries and understandings of narrative and story. Ryan (2005) compelled me to see the benefits to linearity and traditional structure when incorporating narrative into education, but I still think that the term narrative can be challenged through digital technology without it becoming a meaningless term. In fact, the concept of narrative has been challenged way before digital technology was born. Not all narratives should become avant-garde but neither should they all need to have a beginning, middle and end in order for engagement and understanding. I like the idea of providing as much opportunities as possible to the player and instigating the creation of environments/roles. When reading about the Façade game, I wondered how it was any different than a choose your own adventure book. What is the digital environment contributing to the game/text that other media could not? (besides allowing the player/user to input word/phrase answers).

One example of what digital technology can provide to interactive narratives is interface mapping – the visual representation of events that unfold over time. Stephen Mamber wrote an interesting chapter entitled “Narrative Mapping” in “New Media: Theories and practices of digitextuality” (2003) by Anne Everett and John Caldwell. Mamber calls this “narrative mapping” and another term he uses is “critical visualization.” He discusses different types of narrative mapping including geographic, temporal, thematic/structural, conjectural and conceptual. Mamber discusses various digital projects that reveal narrative mapping, not including video games. It would be interesting to see someone apply this concept of narrative mapping to video games…(I will post the narrative mapping chapter to the wiki in case anyone is interested).

13 Emma Kivisild { 10.31.09 at 11:25 pm }

jeff — that little serious mario is, well, you know, very very very cute.

Play has always been a place to learn, and so it is no surprise that video games are too. I am glad there is so much attention to them in this regard.
i, too, loved reading about ‘contagion,’ and narrative, too, especially in light of my other class, in narrative inquiry.

Me myself, still with the bad eyes and fumbling fingers, have spent a lot of time watching video games. Often that’s a great place to spend time with kids. In the Myst days, I helped solve puzzles, and I enjoyed that, 1080 snowboarding is beautiful and the snowboarder will go down the hill even if you do nothing.. Star Wars Lego is cute, and encourages team work.
I am wondering about focused thinking, though, and the repeated trying of things, which is great,, but is it the only way to think? Is it the best way? In addition to all the things about learning that Gee, Meyers, Sanford, and Merkle talked about, unfortunately I observe the following (sometimes)– ‘my game is really important and I will not stop,’ ‘if I lie to you and say I can’t save at this point in the game, you will believe me and I can keep playing,’ ‘it is much more important for me to play this game than it ever could be for me to help with any kind of chores, or eat dinner or exercise,‘ ‘I’m better at this, so let me take over now.’ ‘we’ll take turns, and if your turn lasts one minute till you die, and mine lasts for hours, it’s still fair.’
More than schooling in violence, I find this extreme self-focussed behaviouir alarming.
I observe young fathers with children leaving the housework and the children to the mothers, because they are busy playing World of Warcraft. Doesn’t anything ever change? They love their kids, their kids love them, I know that, but why is this?
Ah sexism is everywhere, and I for some reason am being cantankerous. Sorry.
emma

14 Erin Garcia { 11.01.09 at 6:32 pm }

Please excuse the jarring change in conversation, I wrote this a couple days ago, but wasn’t able to post until just now:
Well said Chelsey! Great quote. It makes me wonder how the things I want in life may just be because society tells me I should want them… hmmmm.

I checked out Contagion http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/ the educational game discussed in de Castell’s article. I commend the work that went into “building Contagion from the ground up using Macromedia Flash.” I believe that it would have afforded them a better learning experience than if they just studied someone else’s game. hey wait a minute! doesn’t that suggest that instead of designing games for kids to play, we should have them designing the games themselves?

Anyway, back to the educational Contagion. The intro is pretty interesting and got me curious to play. Enjoyed creating my own avatar (but it didn’t allow my chosen name to be used during actual play, so a little less personal connection there). I did notice that the one female avatar was very androgynous as mentioned in the article. In the article, de Castell speaks of not wanting to create stereotypical masculine and feminine avatars and that they felt trapped by the dichotomy, I think this could have been easily solved by creating additional avatars of various shades of masculinity and feminity. The narrative dilemma is intriguing, especially today with H1N1.

I got bored pretty fast with the game, due to its chunky movement (in)capabilities, and lack of scaffolding, for example, it kept annoyingly telling me to don my mask before going out, but it didn’t tell me that in order to do that, I had to click the small person icon in the corner, which isn’t really part of the educational content or desired skill set, but perhaps training me to click on everything randomly and see what happens is a necessary skill set in the days of New Literacies.

Here’s the main problem with this educational game, and too many others, as far as I could see, it didn’t actually let you make mistakes and suffer the consequences (like the poor kid in the CBC Halloween game I mentioned earlier). Instead, it just annoyingly won’t let you move on until you’ve done it. For example, putting on your gloves and mask before seeing a patient, the screen just kept telling you to do it, and wouldn’t let you continue until you did.

I was really interested in Ryan’s article as many of the ideas tie into next week’s topic on E-literature, and I completely agree that a key ingredient lacking in current Games is a narrative architecture that is so intriguing that “the game will be played for the sake of experiencing its narrative design.” I argue that one game has done this, and I’m not talking about Myst, the game I’m thinking of is King’s Quest, and I think that the reason it did not “[command] a wide respect” is simply because it was created before everyone had a personal computer, so only those odd ones on the so called North Pole of technology got to experience it. I played this game when I was a kid and loved it. The series followed traditional story structure and archetypes and contained elements both of playing to experience the story and playing to win. But I have to admit, I haven’t seen a game like it since, and even Myst wasn’t quite up to snuff, in that it’s puzzles were not actual story elements to unravel, but rather a bunch of switches and buttons to play around with until you got the right sequence. blech.

15 Heidi { 11.01.09 at 8:32 pm }

Great points Erin. Sounds like you feel the games are too linear and formulaic? Ryan talked about the danger of non-linear narrative structures becoming confusing. The same might be said about playful pedagogies. The challenge seems to be in balancing choice with content….yes?

16 Chelsey Hauge { 11.01.09 at 9:48 pm }

Like the discussion, Erin and Heidi. Its especially interesting in light of the comment Teresa made about her own research, in which participants complained of non-linear digital narratives being confusing when reading them, but were excited about making non-linear digital narratives…. Perhaps the construction of these non-linear digital narratives is a playful pedagogy of exploration/learning

17 Cory Theodor { 11.02.09 at 10:43 am }

Hi everyone! Here are some initial thoughts I had on the Ryan essay “Narrative and the Split Conditional of Digital Textuality.”

Ryan begins this essay with a jarring split between the narrative models of high culture, medium culture, and low culture, claiming that her goal is to bridge the gaps between the groups (by demonstrating the complex narrative structures present in forms of mass cultural phenomena like video games), writing, “One end is the avant-garde, those regarded as the cool intellectual elite. The other end is the masses of computer game players.” She sets up this strong division between narrative forms and the classes of people associated with these narrative forms, and as a result, creates the cultural splits almost as much as she crosses them. Pop culture plays a strong role in avant-guarde narrative arts, and avant-guarde art influences mass forms of narrative reciprocally. Ryan recognizes this when she explains that there are traces of Surrealist automatic writing that later appear in magic realism, demonstrating the fluidity between narrative forms. In terms of popular culture’s influence on the avant-guarde, let us look at the example of first-shooter video games; one avant-guarde artist and computer programmer hacks into the game and overwrites musical notes to the gunfire and other actions, creating a musical composition that compliments the game play. I find her treatment of class in relation to complex narrative problematic. It’s not that there aren’t divisions in class and accessibility, it’s that the abstract narrative model need not be “split” so cleanly in this way. What do you think of alternative narrative structures (alternative to the Aristotelian call for linearity) in relation to class?

18 Cory Theodor { 11.02.09 at 10:46 am }

Oh! and how ridiculous was her use of metaphor! you’d like to think those would never get past an editor. (Sorry Ryan!)

19 Heidi { 11.02.09 at 12:16 pm }

“She sets up this strong division between narrative forms and the classes of people associated with these narrative forms, and as a result, creates the cultural splits almost as much as she crosses them.”
I’m with you Cory…I felt that there were really good intentions beneath the words in the text…but the argument was weak because of what you have pointed out.

20 Chelsey Hauge { 11.02.09 at 3:31 pm }

Saludos todos!
Espero que se encuentren bien en sus nuditos del mundo…
Al tanto de los juegos, querria abrir el tema de lenguas, y de como aprendemos atraves de juegos. Tanto en video0juegos y en juegos de video colectivo, navegamos temas de lenguaje y interpretaje.

Alguien entiende? Que tal de los que no entiendan? De (mis)representacion?

Chelsey

21 Cory Theodor { 11.02.09 at 8:07 pm }

Here’s an event that you might be interested in, REMIXING THE WEB FOR SOCIAL CHANGE:

Net Tuesday: November 3
What is success? What’s worth measuring? And how can we do it?
Host:
Vancouver Net Tuesdays – Remixing the Web for Social Change!
Type:
Education – Workshop
Network:
Global
Date:
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Time:
5:00pm – 7:45pm
Location:
CBC Broadcast Centre “Artist’s Lounge”
Street:
700 Hamilton Street (between between Robson and Georgia)
City/Town:
Vancouver, BC
View Map
Email:
elijahv@gmail.com
Description
What are we trying to accomplish?
Are we succeeding?

Without consistent and conscientious measurement we don’t know. Which means we aren’t able to get better at what we do.

November’s Net Tuesday is all about measurement.

I’m thrilled to announce that Steve Williams (Net Tuesday sponsor and measurement expert) will be delivering his talk “Answering Question Zero: What is success and how do we measure it?”

Herman Leonard’s Question Zero asks “What exactly are we trying to accomplish?” For social ventures and non-profits this can be a difficult question to answer simply and communicate succinctly. Especially challenging is the need to manage, measure and balance financial success, mission or community impact and ongoing organizational sustainability.

Join us for a discussion and learn how to determine what is important to your organization, how to measure your success in achieving those goals, and how to tell that story to your board, your employees, your investors and your customers.

22 Cory Theodor { 11.02.09 at 8:10 pm }

And these:

Remixing Pop Culture: Media Democracy Day Kick-Off Screening and Panel!

November 6th 7:00pm at the Vancouver Public Library
For more information and to register for MDD Visit: http://mediademocracyday.org/vanouver

Media Democracy Day 2009: Beyond the Frame

Saturday, November 7th – 11am-6pm at the Vancouver Public Library, 350 West Georgia Street

More about MDD: http://www.facebook.com/inbox/readmessage.php?t=1245376064711&f=1&e=-12#/inbox/?folder=%5Bfb%5Dmessages&page=1&tid=1053229826298

You must log in to post a comment.