You will compose a paper (likely in the 1500-2000 word range, so 5 to 8 pages double-spaced) that analyzes your game and gameplay in terms of Sicart’s theory of ethical gaming, highlighting how the developers aimed to build (or failed to build) player complicity, avoid or encourage instrumental play, whether/how their choices reflect Sicart’s theory of wicked problems, and whether/how the game forces you to reflect on your decisions and thereby prompt an ethical experience.
This paper is meant to expose you to how humanities scholars analyze texts and arrange papers (our next project will show you how you do this in the hard and social sciences). Generally, this involves:
Developing a critical lens (identifying, before you approach a text, what you will be looking for. Hence, the Sicart summary paper). So, you know going into this paper that you are looking for designer choices that amplify or diminish ethical decisions (or experiences). You know you are attempting to identify how designers try to engender player complicity. Etc. etc. I will go over this list more next week when I review your papers
Applying the lens to specific moments in your “text.” I use text pretty liberally here–literally anything you examine is considered a text. Depending on the game you analyze, its mechanics and narrative structure, this can look REALLY different paper to paper. For instance, is your game one linear narrative? Or is it a choose-your-own-adventure, with branching paths? Thus, do decisions have narrative consequences? Or is the impact of decisions more centered on the feelings/reactions of the player? And–as we’ve discussed–do designers do something bad (from Sicart’s perspective) and tie in game powers/abilities/gear to making (what the game decides in advance is) the “right” decision?
Revise one of your journal entries using the heursitic as a frame. At this inventive stage of the project, you should be working to identify what is interesting about your game.
Homework
I’d like you to clean up your journal. So far, I’ve given you two opportunities to play your game–for an hour last weekend and then for another 1 1/2 hours coming into today. That means you should have two journal entries. We need to play more, so here’s the schedule:
Journal Entry #1: 1 hour of play (Tuesday 13th)
Journal Entry #2: 1 1/2 hours of play (Thursday 15th)
Journal Entry #3: 2 1/2 hours of play (Tuesday 20th)
Journal Entry #4: 1 1/2 hours of play (Thursday 22nd)
That gets us to 6 1/2 hours of play–which I think will be the maximum I’m able to provide you. The homework next weekend (due Tuesday the 27th) will be to draft the Sicart analysis paper (pulling the critical lens description/material from the Sicart summary paper and your journals).
I’m hoping this doesn’t take more than 5 minutes. I would simply like you to add a citation and a link to another research article to your team’s workspace. My theory is that, as you read and annotate scholarship, you are finding references to other studies. If you have one from a previous worknet (central or singificant) or annotation that isn’t in your team workspace, then please add it now.
Presentation Expectations
Let’s me think about presentations across three vectors: content, design, and performance.
Content
Today I’m going to ask you to meet with your team and begin mapping out commonplaces that come up in the research articles you read. That is, we want to identify some of the key questions, terms, ideas, problems, differences, etc that are circulating through your topic. For instance, I’m writing a paper about job advertisements for English majors and Writing minors. I’ve read about a dozen articles for my lit review. So I sat down today and started mapping articles, starting with key ideas and then listing which (other) articles share those ideas. I now have something that looks like this:
I’d like you to meet with your groups today and review the articles that you’ve read. Map out the various sub-topics that they cover. Look for overlaps and conflicts.
Presentation Logistics
When we have about 15 minutes remaining in class, I’ll ask you to change gears and start thinking about presentation logistics. I’ve asked for a 4-5 minute presentation; which is about 700 words (so about 3 and 1/2 pages double-spaced). I’d like you to generate a script for the presentation. And I’d like you to designate speakers for the different parts of the script. Create a PowerPoint or Google Slide to accompany your talk. Keep text on slides to a minimum (don’t just read slides).
Ideally, each team member would be responsible for writing about one or two commonplaces–liking them to articles, writing a few sentences that help us understand the term/idea/(dis)agreement, etc. You will submit presentation materials to Canvas and will give these presentations in class on Friday.
Note that the homework for Monday will be to annotate a third research article in your personal workspace.
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So far this semester, my focus has been on introducing you to a topic. You’ve had an opportunity to explore some scholarly research on a particular problem. By this point you should have at least read:
One Scientific American article that either delivers an overview of a topic or a pointed opinion on one
A first scholarly research article (Worknet #1)
A second scholarly research article (Worknet #2, Annotation #1)
A third scholarly research article (Annotation #2, due today)
I doubt you consider yourself an expert on whatever you’ve been reading about, but my guess is that you know more about it now then you did a month ago.
Beyond the content you’ve been reading, I’ve been trying to introduce you to a few of the common moves you’ll be asked to perform as academic writers. Of course, writing looks different in every field. But the ability to read difficult material and condense it, to turn a couple dozen pages into a few short paragraphs (and, at higher levels, a few short sentences) will likely be useful whatever your major. We’ll continue to work on direct quotation and paraphrase in the coming weeks.
I’ve also tried to introduce you to the structure of academic articles. Again, articles differ greatly by discipline–most humanities papers don’t have a “methods” section, for instance–but understanding the general layout of an academic paper should also be useful. That is:
Introduction (lays out a problem, states findings of paper, road maps the sections of a paper)
Literature review (survey previous literature on a subject, tries to identify a “gap” in the literature, a hole that the current study can fill)
Methods section (details how subjects/texts were gathered, the method of experiment or analysis, and the measures taken to ensure findings are valid and reliable)
Findings / Discussion of Findings (sometimes one section, sometimes two–the discussion generally reflects back on the lit review. Does your findings line up with previous work? More importantly, what is different? Why do you think you found something different? What does that tell us?)
Conclusion
The research work you are doing now will (hopefully / eventualy) populate your literature review. It might also help you develop a methodology section. Say you later poll people on their views on climate change–the readings you are doing might help you craft more grounded and detailed questions.
So that’s what we’ve been doing so far. What will we do next? Here’s my plan:
This Wednesday, in the computer lab, I’m going to ask you and your teammates to draft up a quick 4-5 minute presentation on the research you’ve done so far. Those presentations won’t be on specific research articles–rather they will circle around a few commonalities you’ve found across your articles. I’ll explain this more on Wednesday, and then give you 30-40 minutes to work in groups on the presentation.
In Friday’s class, groups will give their presentations. We’ve got five groups–so I am guessing that we’ll only have about 15 minutes of class time left after the presentations. I’ll use that to introduce a reading by Wayne Booth on developing a research question. There will be an assignment in Canvas, due next Monday, on the Booth reading.
Next week we will return to reading research articles. After you’ve finished the Booth article, I’ll ask you to locate and read 2 more research articles that somehow line up with your developing research question (I doubt the Booth activity will yield a complete research question, but it should push you closer–this will make more sense after we discuss the Booth next Monday).
After you have given your presentation, done the Booth assignment, and conducted a bit more (hopefully pointed) research, you’ll draft a project proposal for the rest of the semester. This will involve doing more research annotations and developing a primary research study.
Second Annotation Feedback
I’ve seen some general improvement in the quality of your annotations, but I also see a need for people to invest a bit more time and provide more concrete details.
I realized I didn’t indicate where to put these annotations. Most of you haven’t done them [stern look]. Those who did them put them in their own personal workspaces (that’s where I figured you’d put them). A few put them in your collaborative team workspaces (fine with me, that’s where they will eventually go).
If I submitted a score to Canvas, and you do or redo something, please just resubmit the link to your workspace to Canvas. Canvas will alert me that you’ve submitted something new.
There’s no homework due on Wednesday (but I will be closing all previous reading / annotation assignments, so if you are missing something, then this is your last chance to get it in–many of you owe me a second research annotation)
4-5 minute class presentation on Friday
Booth reading and post due next Monday
Two more article annotations (#3 and #4) due next Friday
No class on Monday September 26th
Proposal assignment due Wednesday September 28th
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First, the Sicart Summary paper is due Friday at midnight. I said in class that you can take until Sunday at midnight if you need it. I will start grading these papers Monday morning, so make sure yours is there by then.
Second, as a class we voted on whether to continue playing Walking Dead or move onto to playing a game from the recommended list I shared last class. The class voted to move on. So I’d like you to play your game for 1-2 hours over the weekend and then write for 15-30 minutes, using the Sicart Heuristic to guide your reflection [see below].
We created Google Docs in class on Thursday and submitted an editable link to Canvas. You will put your gaming journal entries in that Google Doc. Simply label them with a date and time played. Open the entry with a very brief description of the content you played (some plot summary).
Over the next week and a half, you will play a video game for about 8 hours. After every hour of gameplay, you will free write for 15 minutes, using the heuristic as a guide. I do not expect a journal entry to be polished prose, but I am expecting about 250 words per entry. And I am expecting the entries to move beyond plot [details about what happened] and use the heuristic (so some rough analysis, thinking about what the developers are trying to accomplish, how they are trying to make you feel, act, or think). Move between concrete details in the story and/or game design/mechanics/systems, Sicart’s theory, and your phenomenological response (are you invested? frustrated? bored? did you care about making decisions? why or why not? Can you identify what the developer is attempting to make you think/feel/struggle with? Was their attempt successful?).
These journals are rough draft for our second paper–the Sicart Analysis paper–which will condense and revise the summary paper and the journal material together.
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Reminder: we are not reading/annotating Scientific American articles. If you want full credit on the annotation assignments, you have to read peer-reviewed scholarly articles.
I have created individual workspaces for the research teams:
Our goal for the next week and a half is to develop an annotated bibliography. You’ve each written one annotation for today (and, in some cases, I imagine y’all annotated the same article. That’s okay). Over the next week you will be signing up for articles in your team workspace, reading them, and crafting annotations (using the three paragraph model I introduced last class). Later, you will read articles that have already been annotated to review and expand the existing annotation. I’ll talk about this more at the end of class today.
Your job *today* is to, as a team, add research articles you have found to the annotated bibliography section. We want a giant list of things team members could read. Include the ones already listed in your Intro Material section. But I know many of you have identified a lot more articles via the worknet process–so take those central and significant articles and add them to the Google Doc (in APA format). A lot of today might feel like busy work as you track down citation information for the articles linked in workspace. But, trust me, organizing a research project as you work–particularly a team project–makes everyone’s lives easier in the end.
After you have inputted them, list them alphabetically.
Homework
Marc–is there time for a drop-indent? Is there time for a format?
Note: I am cancelling Friday’s class.
Before we leave class today, everyone will go and claim an article in the workspace to read and annotate for Monday’s class. To claim an article, simply select the author’s name and add your name as a comment [Insert > Comment]. Note that I will not be requiring a worknet, but I will ask you to identify and central studies and add them as an apa entry to the annotated bibliography. Change the color of any added entries to green so it is easier for teammates to see new possibilities.
What is positivism? Why is it a problem for technical writing? What does Miller identify as the most problematic dimension of a non-rhetorical approach to scientific communication?
Miller identifies 4 problems for technical writing pedagogy that stem from the positivist tradition. How do we avoid them?
How does Miller–writing in 1979–describe the epistemology that is replacing positivism? [Note: scare-quoting “new”]
What does it mean to teach technical writing from a communalist perspective? Why might some students reject a communalist approach to teaching writing?
One response to the last question that I want to explore a bit.
Teaching technical writing from a communalist perspective means teaching an understanding of how to belong to a community. The main idea from the passage about this is that writing can become something shared and collaborated on. Miller states, “To write, to engage in any communication, is to participate in a community; to write well is to understand the conditions of one’s own participation – the concepts, values, traditions, and style which permit identification with that community and determine the success or failure of communication” (617). The main idea is that teaching this way would allow better understanding of the power of words, by understanding the impact of individual ideas.
Some students may reject this approach because they are more concerned about their individual grades and learning. This is common, because we are taught to be concerned with individual progress, rather than working and collaborating. This is not true of every case, but is true in competitive fields where the work is more individual focused. Writing is often thought of as an individual practice, something that we work on personally and don’t share with others easily. Students may find it hard to make their ideas work with others.
This is shown through my experience at UNC. Most, if not all writing assignments have been individual. Writing is something that is mostly just shared between the professor and the student, except for in more creative writing focused classes. Until this class specifically, there hasn’t been the prospect of working on something to do with writing in a group setting. I think that this still shows the positivist approach because writing is judged on rubrics and a set of rules, where there isn’t a lot of flexibility (unless, once again, the class is more creatively focused).
So, let me conclude (wherever we are) by swinging this back to why we have to care about this as writers–and, perhaps, as “technical writers.” We have to talk about Arendt and Arendt. America’s divisions. Katz.
Homework
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Discuss: Is Duck and Shawn a Trolley Problem (and the rest of episode #1)
Potential Games List
Homework
Reminder: Sicart Summary Papers
A reminder that these papers are due Friday at midnight. I do my best to comment on them and return them by next Friday.
A (Maybe) Brief Lecture on Ethics
I opened this class with a rather long lecture on ethics, arguing for a sense of ethics as when moral laws come into conflict and/or as our ability to handle the stranger and the strange.
Today I’m going to open with a more simple and traditional definition of ethics: it is the study of how we make difficult choices. To study ethics is to become more self-reflective and self-aware. As the skit from The Good Life implied, this can lead to a kind of paralysis by analysis (philosophers and theorists often are excellent at discovering and mapping complexity, less great at deciding on one definitive course of action). Rhetoricians (some of us) recognize the need for deep analysis, but often insist on a moment of decision, where analysis has to turn into action. That is a lecture for another course.
Given the complexity of human decision making, there’s a lot of different theories and approaches to ethics. Let me lay out 4 of them:
Deontology or Moral Law
Teleology or Consequentialism
Virtue Ethics
Hospitality Ethics
Deontological ethics are based on identifying moral laws and obligations. To know if we are making the right decision, we ask ourselves what the rules are. For instance, if you didn’t lie to Herschel because lying is wrong, then you were invoking a deontological frame. You made a deontological decision. You worked back from the specific concrete moment to a (prior) conviction. Deontological ethics get critiqued because sometimes moral laws come into conflict and because it requires absolute adherence to the law without thought of context.
Consequential ethics look ahead, from the action and decision, to its consequences. You use prior knowledge to make hypotheses about what will happen. Your focus here isn’t on what other people or institutions would declare right or wrong, but on producing “the greater good.” This is called utilitarianism, which strives to imagine what will make the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. Another form of consequentialism is hedonism, which strives to make the most pleasure and minimize pain. If you didn’t lie to Herschel because you thought lying might lead him to question you further or kick you out of the farm, then you probably made a hedonistic decision. If you didn’t lie to Herschel because you thought lying might lead him to question you and kick you and Clementine out of the farm, then you made a consequential decision. Consequential ethics get critiqued because they can lead us into hurting minority populations (one can absolutely argue, for instance, that slavery contributed to the “greater good”–I’d say they are wrong–but one can rationalize pain in relation to happiness, which can lead us down dark paths).
Virtue ethics are a bit different–though, like consequential ethics they rely on our imagination. Virtue ethics asks us to imagine, in that situation how a good person would act. This, in a sense, mixes deontology (who is the good here? what rules do they follow? what institutions would they represent?) with the situational flexibility of consequentialism. If deontology operates around rules that govern behavior, virtue ethics begins by establishing the characteristics common to good people (bravery, compassion, justice, etc). If you didn’t lie to Herschel because you believe a good person should tell the truth and be brave, and trust others (etc.), then you are exercising virtue ethics. Note: this is different than deontology, because here you don’t *have* to follow the rules, and there might be times that lying (say, to protect someone from Nazi pursuit), is justified.
Ethics of hospitality also involve an effort of imagination; this time it is our task to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and imagine a decision from their perspective. Is this a decision we would want someone to make if they were in our position? We can think of this as a more radical version of the Christian ethic of the Golden Rule (from Lev. “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), accept here we are self-skeptical enough to realize that the other might not want the same things as us. So rather than assume the other is just like us, we train ourselves to recognize and honor their difference, their alterity. Hence hospitality, since we train ourselves to welcome the strange, the unfamiliar. Ethics, here, trains people to negotiate the unknown and the contingent. Ethics as the impossibility of ever walking in another’s shoes, but trying like hell all the same.
Thinking About the Walking Dead
Okay, so we have four different senses of ethics. Chances are all four reverberate through every decision you make. As a phenomenologist, Sicart is interested in what percolated to the surface as you made a decision. This is why rigorous reflection is so important to his method of ethical analysis: what were you thinking about at the time you made a decision? And how did the game designers reward/frustrate/respond to that decision-making? Did they pull a bait and switch (they anticipated I would make X decision, but surprised me). Did decisions become too predictable? To anticipate what I expect to find in the Sicart Summary papers, did they institute a scoring system that told you when they did good, and, if they did, then what notion of ethics are they reinforcing?
There is no right or wrong reflection here. You have space to articulate something smart about a game in light of Sicart’s theories. You might play a game that *doesn’t* involve ethical decision making, but does (you think) engender high ethical impact (my personal favorite for this is The Last of Us).
First, it is time to select a game for our upcoming Sicart Analysis paper. This grows out of the Sicart Summary paper. You will use the concepts you summarize in the first paper (complicity, choices, reflection) to analyze your experience with a choice-based game. I have a list of recommended games. If you would like to play a game that isn’t on the list, then email me and/or come to office hours on Friday to discuss it.
From this coming Thursday until next Thursday I’ll ask you to play about 6 hours of your game. You will keep a gaming journal–after every play session (which really shouldn’t be more than 90 minutes at a time), you should write for 15 minutes. Trace important decisions the game asked you to make, their level of complexity, their consequences. Identify where/how the designers made decisions that either amplify or diminish the ethical potential / impact of your game. On Thursday I will provide a clean heuristic document with questions to help guide your reflection writing.
Google Scholar (you can find articles here, but then have to search to see if our library has them)
Anonymous User Survey
Before we leave today I want you to take five minutes and read and think about these two prompts:
Are these worknets helping you understand the research articles you are reading. Give me a Likert Scale answer: 4 (very helpful) 3 (somewhat helpful) 2 (somewhat a waste of time) 1 (really big waste of time).
Do you have a question/comment/concern about how class is going so far? Or just a general question about University life/work?
Homework
Reminder: there’s no class on Monday. Enjoy the long weekend. Touch grass.
Marc: Remember to construct a keywords list in the collaborative doc on Wednesday (in addition to adding articles–it might be time to develop topic specific workspaces).
Next Wednesday we’ll meet in Ross 1240. Between now and then I’d like you to do two things. A research annotation (put this in your google doc as worknet annotation #1) and a second worknet (article #2 bibliographic pass, article #2 semantic pass, article #2 affinity pass).
First, I want you to craft a research annotation for the first academic article you worknetted (that’s a real wonky looking verb). Mueller’s gambit is that the process of analyzing an article from different angles helps us understand the material better. It widens our frames of interpretation and the depth of our reading. My gambit is that reading research *before* you try and articulate a paper topic, research question, or argument also helps you engage the article better–since you are engaging it on *its* terms instead of yours.
So let’s test that. I’m going to ask you to write a research annotation for the first article you analyzed. A research annotation should have at least three paragraphs. It can have more. I expect annotations to reflect 30-45 minutes of writing time.
Paragraph One: the first paragraph covers the purpose, findings, and recommendations of the article. This is a really condensed summary. For instance:
Miguel Sicart’s 2013 book Beyond Choices offers a framework for evaluating whether video games offer rich and complicated “ethical” choices or shallow and simplistic “instrumental” ones. Sicart draws on a wide range of game and design theory–especially theory on wicked problems and interviews with game developers to construct a lens for analyzing games. This lens focuses primarily on the nature of player complicity, the ambiguity and rewards for decisions, and how a game does or doesn’t prompt a player to reflect on the grounds and consequences of their decisions.
I can’t give details about the whole book in a paragraph–(for instance, I don’t go into the wide range of games he discusses–from Walking Dead to Fallout to Elder Scrolls to Papers Please). But you walk away knowing his three most important findings–that games need to build player complicity, that games need to include wicked problems, and that games have to force you to reflect on why you chose what you chose to be considered an “ethical” game.
Paragraph Two: the second paragraph details the methods, including how many subjects were in the study, how subjects were found, the location of the study (if relevant), the length of the study, how data was analyzed/synthesized, and any other significant details. Notice how I dropped a single sentence about methods in the first paragraph–here I would have to expand it (e.g., Sicart identifies his method as “postphenomenological,” meaning blah blah blah. He draws extensively on Person W. Name’s theory of Wicked Problems, which are blah blah blah. His penultimate chapter offers a list of 10 criteria blah blah blah. In terms of games, he focuses much attention on choice-based games, but also discusses a few games without choices such as Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and 4.
Paragraph Three: the third paragraph does some thinking by connecting the article to other research (this thinking can compare or contrast). This is the hardest part, since unlike the other paragraphs you are called upon to invent material rather than simply summarize it. This is also the part that helps you begin to write the research paper. At this stage of the process, this is kind of a free write paragraph. Test out ideas. Think about how this connects to other things you’ve read. Perhaps pose a question. Think. React. Respond.
Second, I want you to read another academic article and put it through the three steps of the worknet process: bibliographic pass, semantic pass, and affinity pass. We will write the annotation for this second article in next Wednesday’s class.
I think we realized that the bibliographic pass really just needs to focus attention on the centralized and significant articles. Don’t bother documenting all of the passing references. That should help save some time.
Our first major paper this semester is the Job Ad Report. Generally this report is 6-8 pages, single-spaced (including title page, table of contents, and potential appendix). It does not need a formal reference list.
Rhetorical situation: we have been hired by the UNCo Department of English to write a report that can be delivered to high school seniors, and their parents, discussing the current job market for English majors. The report will also be distributed to University Administrators and used to leverage funding for the Department. The report will be shared with faculty in the Department ahead of a round of curricular revisions.
So we have multiple audiences for this report:
Client: English Department
Primary Audience: High School Seniors
Secondary Audiences: Parents (who may or may not be skeptical that English is a viable career field), Administrators (who may or may not be skeptical of investing more resources in English, particularly money on technology-driven classes/computer labs), Faculty (who may or may not still see the mission of English tied to the traditional Liberal Arts education)
Although the paper won’t be due for several weeks, I want to gloss over the report specs now. My hope is that this lends relevance to the work we are doing. For instance, the coding work we do today would contribute to the methodology section. Our reading of Brumberger and Lauer also contributes to the methodology section (in a longer grant application or research paper, B&L would be part of the Literature Review–but lit reviews are more of an academic genre convention and aren’t often included in public facing reports.
Length: Generally this report is 6-8 pages singled-spaced (this includes a title page, a table of content, and properly sized charts/graphs)
Front Loaded Introduction: Does the intro summarize all significant findings and include specific, actionable recommendations?
Methodology: The methodology section needs to do a few things. First, how did I collect the job ads (I described this process in a blog post, condense my Brumberger and Lauer discussion)? Second, how did you select your 20 jobs from the job corpus? Third, from where did we draw our coding scheme? Fourth, what did we do to ensure that our data was reliable? Could I recreate this work based on this section?
Presentation of Data: Does the section contain a table or graph of data?
Can you understand the table or graph, or is there some mystery meat?
Does the writer make clear what the table or graph says?
Discussion of Data: Does the writer highlight significant or unexpected elements of the data? Does the writer put the data in conversation with previous research (Brumberger and Lauer)? Does the writer make specific recommendations based on the data?
Style and Grammar [commas, run-ons, fragments, tense shifts, agreement errors, etc]
Does the paper reflect our work on style (Williams and Bizup, Characters and Actions)?
Does this paper reflect expectations for business formatting?
Title Page
Page Numbers (should not include the title page)
Also, this is a professional report, not an academic paper. We are not using APA or MLA format for citing sources. Instead, we will rely on AP style–which uses in-line citation.
Finally, you should draft and revise this paper in the same Google Doc. I will check the document history to see if it indicates that the paper was given a careful edit? (And/or, is the document relatively error free? Are there sentences in which grammatical errors lead to misunderstanding?)
Finally, you can go throw a few of the ten jobs on your list and input the codes already in those documents into the spreadsheet.
Homework
For Tuesday, read the Miller and complete the Canvas discussion post. For Thursday, read the Lauer and Brumberger and complete the Canvas discussion post.
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