Today’s Plan:
- Revising Your Sicart Analysis Papers
- Formatting Your Sicart Analysis Papers
- Papers Due Next Tuesday / Thursday Before Class
Revising Your Sicart Analysis Papers
Now that you have drafted the paper, you should be ready to revise the paper. Today I want to pay particular attention to revising the introduction. Along the way, I’ll frame two different ways for organizing the whole paper.
Let me pull up the rubric and focus on the introduction. I’m evaluating the intro on two things (one more important than the other):
- Does the intro provide a strong, detailed, claim, or does it read like a draft (left open as a question)? [5 points]
- Is there a roadmap that lays out the order of material in the paper? The steps in the argument? [3 points]
The first of these criteria is more important–and more difficult–than the second. The first one tells me everything important the paper is going to argue. The claim is the argument is the thesis (different teachers will call this different things). It isn’t necessarily a single sentence–especially for a longer paper like this one.
Laying out the claim this way helps you do the second paper, which I call a roadmap. This generally comes after the claim and just lays out the order of material in the paper. It often uses a structure like:
I begin by exploring three of Sicart’s concepts–player complicity, wicked problems, and forced reflection. I then demonstrate how Capcom’s game Chicken Factory 4 amplifies a player’s ethical experience by looking at three scenes. First, I look at the barn scene, noting how designers make us complicit by introducing us to Susan. Second, I look at the factory scene, noting that in addition to complicity, the designers successfully integrate a wicked problem. Third, I critique the infamous windmill scene, noting that while the designers sought to create a wicked problem, they failed because something something something.
I want to give my reader as specific, concrete a sense as possible of what is coming, and how it supports my claim. You can’t be this specific and concrete until you’ve actually written the paper.
Okay, let’s look at some introductions.
APA Formatting Workshop
For today’s exercise, I’ve got Hacker and Sommers’ A Writer’s Reference. You might also use the Purdue OWL APA guide.
Below is a workspace in which we’ll practice APA formatting.
- Fake Kant Paper. If you are working with a laptop or tablet today, make a copy of that document
Final Papers
Your final papers are due before our next class meeting. Submit them as a Google Doc link (preferred) or as a Word Doc.
