ENG 231 3.R: Riffing a Paper

Posted on January 25, 2024 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • 2024 Riff
  • Some old stuff on writing a paper

2024: Riffing About Writing a Paper

I’m going to free-write a bit here. I’m going to free-write about how much I hate having to develop and present this material every year. I am going to explain why I struggle to assemble and deliver a standard lecture about writing a paper, which I usually title “Academic Writing Crash Course.”

Let me start off with one of my foundational principles:

  • Writing cannot be taught.

I accept no counter argument. Cicero once said that the greatest impediment to those who want to learn is those who want to teach. Those who want to teach are driven to reduce something complex into a seemingly simple set of rules. The contemporary education industry, built on pre-fabricated curriculums and standardized tests, is a capitalist manifestation of this pedagogical desire.

But writing is not a mechanical, transferable skill (in the sense that I can transfer my ability to write to you, but I do believe learning how to write in one context can transfer, partially, to other contexts). Sure, there are some rules I can teach you, but those rules are arbitrary and likely alien unless you already know them. Wait, did you just say you can only learn how to write *after* you know how to write? Yes. Yes I did. Because writing is a matter of praxis–a combination of authentic aim and embodied practice. Authentic, in that you have to really care and want to do it. Embodied in that you actually have to struggle through it. All writing is struggle. Well, it is a struggle if it matters. If it attempts to bring something new into your world. I only really learned how to explicate the rules of writing when working as a high school English teacher, where I was ordered to prepare students for high stakes writing exams.

I can write about postmodern ethical theory and make it look easy because I’ve read a lot of postmodern ethical theory. Writing about that theory has provided me with a lot of experience taking complex things and pinning them down into frustrating, exacting, slippery, words. My relationship with words is always complicated, but I think of them as trickster fairies who like to tease and play games and sometimes reward us with a gift that feels so perfect we wonder from where it came. It came from the fairies.

Revision: Should I delete this paragraph? I’m not sure what it is doing. I’ll leave it here for now, because I like the last two sentences.
Trust me, my feelings of command about writing about theory was not always this way. I spent two years agonizing over every word. I’m learning queer theory this semester and I can only write (think) about queer theory by putting it in conversation with postmodern ethical theory or rhetorical theory or actor-network theory or something else I have mastered. Chances are, you haven’t mastered anything yet and if you have you still probably feel like you haven’t. It is really common to feel anxious about writing and I even feel a bit anxious writing this and if you are one of those people that don’t feel anxious then good for you. I can only wonder at what that must feel like.

Switching gears. Writing cannot be taught. Learning to write is like learning to play the guitar. Watching someone else play the guitar really doesn’t help you play the guitar–at least at first. You have to learn how to place your fingers, develop calluses, coordinate your hands. You have to learn cord progressions and scales. Then, maybe, you can watch Mike Dawes and pick up a trick or two. I watch Mike Dawes and am filled with equal parts awe and envy. Such it often is with writing–to see someone else who makes it look so easy and thus to grow uneasy with our own talents. Struggle *and* anxiety then.

Some of you already know how to write. I’ve read your writing. It is insightful and beautiful. But your writing might not be disciplined (by academic expectations–you know notes and how to place your fingers but you haven’t learned the progressions and scales yet). You might feel that your writing isn’t what you, or someone else, wants it to be. Some of you are terrified to submit your writing, let alone share it with the class. Some of you might never have written something longer than 5 pages. The idea of writing a seven-page paper about a video game seems impossible. Trust me, by the time I am done with you seven-pages will feel like an impossibility–it is simply too few pages to say anything close to all the things you want to say. What I want from your writing is for it to want to say something, to see evidence of thought, of engagement, of wonder, of anger.

To return: it is impossible to teach someone how to write. But it isn’t impossible to learn how to write. Learning how to write requires time, suffering, accomplishment, self-reflection, and more time. Lots more time. I once wrote that we, those charged by the university to “teach” students how to write, should not think of ourselves as master chefs training apprentices. I’ve had that teacher, the one who thinks they are Gordon Ramsey and teaches with a religious fervor and gave me a “B” on a paper in graduate school because I dared to actually split an infinitive twice in a paper. Did I not know the rules? He called me into office hours to question my aptitude for graduate study because I dared to actually split an infinitive. Fuck that guy. I’m still not over it. Obviously.

No, I am no master chef and you are not apprentices. I am an architect, and this classroom is a kitchen (that’s one of my favorite lines I’ve written and last night a colleague mentioned how she shares it with her class and it always feels great when someone tells you that you wrote something that matters). When I was a professor at South Florida they brought Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate, in to do a lecture for our MFA program. He spoke at length about the sound and rhythms of poetry. It was awesome. During the Q&A, a student asked him how he approaches reading poetry and his answer was one of my favorite lines ever: “a poet has to learn to read like a good chef eats.” What a metaphor. Let me unpack it a bit: you have to learn to eat so that you not only enjoy the product but so that you taste the process–so you are thinking about the flavors, ingredients, and, most importantly, techniques that bring the dish together. We have to speculate towards aims and desires.

So, today, I’ll try to “teach” you how to write the only way I really know how, by reading some past papers and thinking about what they do well. Identifying what I want them to do better. I will try to “teach” you about thesis statements, topic sentences, and contextual transitions as if they are scales or instructions for braising. Not all reading is the same: and, when practicing writing, you have to be aware of what you want to write. Learning to cook a cheeseburger is not the same thing as learning to barbecue or poach salmon or make chili. Let’s not even talk about baking which require precise timing and exact measurement. Baking might be closer to the idea of what many people want writing to be (just follow the rules!) until you actually try to bake something and learn that precision alone does not a great cake make. Point: you have to read the kind of writing that you want to produce. You have to have read about it and thought about how it is organized. It helps to have a sense of structure, a trace outline in your head. I can try and give you that today.

But before I try to do all those impossible things, or to teach a few fundamentals of academic writing, I want to lay out what is possible: to see writing in this class as an opportunity to say something to the class in a voice that is nothing more than the voice you want it to be. Be comfortable. To write in a way that feels natural. To not try to “invent the university” and write like a scholar or a student. But to write as someone trying to figure out what they might say about something: something interesting, important, significant, annoying. REVEAL something, if only to yourself.
/riff

Stock Lecture on the Foundational Elements of Academic Writing

For those that want a much longer and more detailed set of instructions for writing an academic paper, see this academic writing crash course. If you have not completed ENG 123 and/or want to write more about video games, then I teach that class every other fall–it will next be offered in fall of 2025.

Rather than just walk through the lecture this semester, I want to spend some time with the evaluation rubric in Canvas. We’ll look at a few papers and the lecture above.

First rubric criteria:

The paper must identify what it thinks the theme/argument/purpose of the game is (speculating on the designer’s intentions).

This is a content question–can you build a theory of what this game is trying to accomplish? Can you identify the rhetorical purpose for this game? Of course, this is more complicated with some games than others. When talking with y’all, I’ve framed this as: what change in idea, behavior, or perception does this game aim to enact in our real world?

You might Google to see if the designer has talked about this–but, of course, we cannot always trust artists to be honest about the purpose of their art. We can Google to see other writers and fan theories, cite those, and argue for which one we think is best. BUT, at the end of the day, you have to make this argument based on what happens in the game. (In most cases this is not a one sentence answer, but takes at least a paragraph to describe). A

Second rubric criteria:

The paper must provide an explication of Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric, citing Bogost, Custer, and this essay by Mark Love (also in the files section of Canvas). 2024 Edit: I’ll be looking at how you transform / improve upon the Chat GPT material we discusses on Tuesday.

First off, you only have to quote the Bogost essay. I will give you some bonus points if you cite the Custer and Love in a productive, non-drive-by shooting, kind of way (actual engagement rather than just shoving a quotation in there). Second, you don’t have to cite the ChatGPT material here, since I gave it to. If you are struggling with this element of the paper, then you might go to the Writing Center with a draft of your paper to discuss how to improve the ChatGPT material. They will help walk you through it and plan out how to improve it! If you need more time to complete the paper due to a Writing Center appointment, then I will automatically grant it (be sure to have the Writing Center email me after your appointment).

Third rubric criteria:

Does the paper provide enough context about the plot and characters in a game? Does this plot summary run too long?

Here’s where revision and compression might be hard. You have to describe this game–its plot, its world (if relevant), its central mechanics, its main characters in a very short amount of space. Maybe a paragraph or two. This can be a massive challenge. You will likely have to write a longer summary (2-3 pages) and then prune it down. You have to imagine what questions a reader must have, what questions are necessary to understanding your analysis, and introduce them here.

In a simple game, you might do this in the introduction. This might open the paper. More complicated games should probably have their argumentative-introduction first and then lay this out in a second section.

Fourth and Fifth rubric criteria:

The paper must identify at least two ways the mechanics work with or against that theme/argument/purpose. Remember that “mechanics” refers to rules, procedures, abilities, scoring systems, etc. Anything related to how we play the game. [Note: multiple path narratives are tricky here]

Does the paper analyze the procedural dimensions of 2-4 specific scenes, mechanics, elements of the game? Is there enough rich description for me to follow/appreciate/evaluate the analysis?

Warning: I realize those criteria don’t exactly make sense and that I need to revise them. Let me try to do some of that work here.

I’m looking for the paper to “close read” at least two different scenes or design elements. Each of these readings should have an argument or claim (e.eg., “The scoring system in this game encourages us to want to eat more ice cream”) and then point at evidence of how the game element does the thing it claims to do. Typically, in academic writing, you want a paragraph to open with the claim, and then present the evidence. (“The scoring system in this game encourages us to want to eat more ice cream. At the end of chapter 1, for instance, Gretchen reminds us that eating ice cream makes the cows happy. If you complete the chapter without eating any ice cream, then the cows will smash through a wall and attack you. Most players, however, are likely to have eaten some ice cream. If you haven’t collected enough ice cream, the cows grow sad. Beyond this emotional response, the game also rewards you with a power-up if you are able to eat all the ice cream available in the chapter. I believe this is a procedural argument because the ice cream here represents paying taxes in the real world.”) Remember as you move through your analysis to explicitly tie game play back to real-world rhetorical purpose.

Sixth criteria:

Does the paper handle sources with care?

This relates to citation practices and contextualizing quotes. For this, I will turn to the stock lecture.

Seventh criteria:

Does the title not suck?

I believe we have already discussed this.

Eight criteria:

Does the introduction lay out the argument? Do I see signs that it was actually written last?

I am a jedi knight when it comes to this. Do not question my power to know if the thesis paragraph (usually not a single statement) was actually written before you wrote the paper. I will not give you a B because you split an infinitive, but I will rain hellfire upon you if you try to slip by some lame-ass, watered-down, generic thesis that you wrote before you actually wrote the paper.

To the stock lecture.

Sample Papers

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ENG 319 3.T: Demagoguery Feedback, Categorical Identity, Building a Heuristic

Posted on January 23, 2024 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Demagoguery Feedback
  • Categorical Identity
  • Building a Heuristic
  • Thursday’s Class: Ross 1240 Computer Lab

Demagoguery Feedback

Here’s a document.

Categorical Identity

I wanted to share a few passages from Annamarie Jagose’s 1997 book Queer Theory / An Introduction. See: 62-63, 68-69, 77-78 & 82.

Kenneth Burke, (1969), Identification isn’t as Idealist as Persuasion. We need not be Heroic Heroes?

“We need never deny the presence of strife, enmity, factions, as a characteristic motive of rhetorical expression. We need not close our eyes to their almost tyranneous ubiquity in human relations; we can be on the alert always to see how such temptations to strife are implicit in the institutions that condition human relationships; yet we can at the same time always look beyond this order, to the principle of identification in general, a terministic choice justified by the facts that the identifications in the order of love are also characteristic of rhetorical expression.” (20)
—
“Insofar as the individual is involved in conflict with other individuals or groups, the study of this same individual would fall under the head of Rhetoric. . . . The Rhetoric must lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the War of Nerves, the War.” (23)

Burke-identity *by* division. What Vitanza would refer to as negative dialectic (something *is* by way of what it *is* not). Heterosexual only enters the lexicon after the clinical establishment of homosexual, which itself represses a wide range of sexual questions and phenomena, reducing it simply to “object choice).

Vitanza (indebted to Burke but also skeptical):

“While the negative enables, it disenables. As I’ve said, it’s mostly a disenabler because it excludes. Something is by virtue of Nothing, or what is not. The negative–or negative dialectic–is a kind of pharmakon, and in overdoes, it is extremely dangerous (e.g., a little girl is a little man without a penis! Or an Aryan is not a Jew! And hence, they do not or should not–because in error–exist.) The warning on the label–beware of overdoses–is not enough; for we, as KB says, are rotten with perfection. We would No [kNOw]. That is, say No to females, Jews, gypsies, queers, hermaphrodites, all others. By saying No, we would purchase our identity. Know ourselves. By purifying the world, we would exclude that which, in our different opinions, threatens our identity. (We have, Burke says, “the motives of combat in [our] very essence” (1969, 305). Hence, we build gulags and ovens so as to have a great, good place. It [the standard, Aristotelian, school-book History of Rhetoric] is a momument built by ways of exclusion. I am against monuments, edifying pretensions.

Borges’ short fable. Baudrillard, opening of Simulation and Simulacra.

Let’s Build a Heuristic

Using our reading as a guide, let’s develop some guiding questions for the upcoming demagogic rhetorical analysis paper.

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ENG 231 2.R: Procedural Analysis Paper

Posted on January 18, 2024 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • What Game Are You Playing?
  • Procedural Paper Heuristic
  • Papers Please

What Game Are You Playing?

Let me get a sense of how you spent your week?
Is there something mechanically interesting about your game?

What Do I Mean By Procedures and Mechanics?

There’s three dominant senses here. The first speaks to the action of the game–what, as a player, you have to do. Is there something unique, specific, interesting, about the way you move through the game? For instance, the Last of Us creates immersion by making you shake the controller as if it is a flashlight dying. Conversely, Detroit: Become Human The second relates to the scoring system for that action. How does the game reward you for what you are doing?

Let’s watch something.

Let me stress that I do not expect your papers will have such a sharp critical lens. I use this as an example because a major crux of EC’s critique falls on the scoring system embedded in the game. It also is an example of how a real world system (sex slave trade) can be (mis)represented in a game.

Here is a list of heuristic questions that might help you develop your paper. Not every paper will address each of these questions (please, god, don’t try I don’t want to read 25 page papers). Whatever questions you address should be supported by examples (plural in most cases) from the game. Every paper should address the first question.

  • What does this game represent/do? [What is the theme? Rhetorical Purpose? Argument? Message? What does it want to say about being human or living in the world?]
  • Does the game model a real world system? If so, does research suggest it is a fair representation?
  • Is the game making an argument about how we should behave in the real world?
  • Is the game addressing a human problem we might face in the world? How does it suggest/teach us to deal with that problem?
  • Mechanically, what stands out to you? Is there anything interesting here?
  • What mechanics does the game use to support that representation?
  • What are some potential arguments made by the game’s scoring systems? What kind of behaviors does it reward?
  • In what ways do the mechanics match the argument?
  • In what ways do the mechanics clash with/ignore the argument?
  • How might we modify the mechanics to create more procedural harmony/aesthetic impact?
  • Phenomenological: how does this game make me feel? Are my feelings what the developer intended them to be?

Other paper requirements:

  • The paper should be written to someone who has never played your game. You probably want to take a paragraph or two to explain the game–what is the goal? What is the setting? Who/what is your character? What are the basic mechanics? Is the game an established genre or a play on an established genre?
  • The paper has to offer a definition of procedural rhetoric. It should draw on the Bogost reading to do this, using at least one if not several direct quotations. This part of the paper is “building a lens” through which to see the game. This part of the paper shouldn’t exceed one page.
  • The paper needs to have a thesis paragraph. This is usually the first or second paragraph in the paper. YOU WRITE THIS PARAGRAPH LAST AFTER YOU HAVE WRITTEN THE PAPER. I will talk about this more next week.
  • The paper needs to have a title that does not suck.
  • The paper will be as long as it needs to be. Last year’s page length by paper grade:
  • A+: 9, 7, 7, 7, 5
  • A: 7, 7
  • A-: 15, 7
  • B+: 9, 5
  • B: 9, 8, 6, 4, 4, 4
  • B-: 5, 5
  • C+: 6
  • C: 5
  • D: 6

Papers, Please

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ENG 319 2.R: Burke, Miller, Mercieca; Rhetorical Analysis Paper

Posted on January 18, 2024 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Write-Ups and discussion: 40 minutes
  • My Write-Up: 10 minutes
  • Rhetorical Analysis Paper: 20 minutes

My Write-Up

I didn’t have time to write a short one, so I wrote a long one instead.

Rhetorical Analysis Paper

Your first longer assignment of the year asks you to conduct a rhetorical analysis of a politician. I want you to select a politician for whom you actually want to vote. Following Miller, we are not going to critique others as much as practice some self-skepticism. Your analysis should examine that person’s campaign materials to determine how demagogic or democratic they are. So, let’s use Burke, Miller, and Mercieca to figure out what we could/should be looking for.

In terms of what you should look at, your paper should analyze:

  • Website
  • Television Interview
  • Campaign speech
  • Twitter Feed

Note: I am particularly interested in how the candidate discusses policy and the place that policy discussions hold in his/her campaigns.

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ENG 328 2.R: ReMakes Crit and Mini-Project #2: Faculty Offices

Posted on January 17, 2024 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan

  • ReMakes Crit
  • Work List #2: Faculty Offices
  • Introduction to Photoshop

ReMakes Crit

Here is a link to this semester’s slides.

Work List #2: Faculty Offices

Some of you took a swing at our terrible English Office signs for the first project. Good! Those are bad! We can make them better. Here’s what I want:

  • A poster design in Photoshop. I am going to print the Posters via Staples. The size will by 18 x 24. You have freedom to do a portrait or landscape orientation. The resolution must be 300 pixels. This will be a full color design. This means the design has to have a bleed. I have created an (almost blank) template file: link here.
  • I want something cool. This can be bright and graphic. It can be really English-ee, if that’s what you want (photos of books? A collage?). I do not want to spend money on something boring.
  • The primary goal here is to help students find faculty. Faculty names should be bold and noticeable. AND, faculty offices are clustered. It would be really cool if this design could include a map. But even if it doesn’t, names should be organized in a way that resembles the layout of offices. Here is a powerpoint the department uses to keep track of faculty offices.
  • Graphic photos are cool. If you have a recent iPhone or Android phone, then you can increase the camera resolution. I have an old crappy iPhone, so I am not sure when they started to include this functionality.

Because this is a pretty large project, I am going to push back the due date until Sunday the 28th at midnight.

Intro to Photoshop

I’m going to ask everyone to make the second Work List in Photoshop. The first day survey results were pretty much a 50/50 split regarding comfort with Photoshop, so we are going to start with a few basic tutorials today. On Tuesday, we are going to work with a few more in-depth tutorials on type. First, let me give a brief overview of the workspace and list off some basic tips.

  • If at any time you cannot find a panel in a tutorial, then go Windows > Workspaces > Reset Essentials. Sometimes as I am working I accidentally close a panel or click on a different workspace. This will take you back to home base. You will find this works in every adobe program.
  • Adobe programs are built around layers. In Photoshop, the layers tab is in the bottom-right of the screen. By default, images you import into Photoshop will be “locked” as a background layer. You can double-click on this layer to unlock it and make it editable.
  • On the left-side of the screen is the tool panel. Any tool with an arrow in the bottom-right corner has extra options. Left-click and hold to see those options.
  • There is an additional tool-bar at the top of the screen.
  • If you get into trouble with marching ants, then go Select > Deselect on the top tool-bar. Hold shift to add more, hold alt to take away.
  • Canvas vs. Image Size

In Photoshop, we are going to complete the Get to Know Layers and Get to Know Selections tools.

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ENG 231 1.R: Bogost, Procedural Rhetoric, Project #1

Posted on January 11, 2024 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Reviewing Bogost Reading
  • Custer on Procedural Rhetoric
  • Project One Expectations and Game List

Reviewing Bogost Reading

Question #1: What is Procedural Rhetoric?

  • Procedural rhetoric is the practice of conveying different avenues of thought based off of rules imposed inside of the game itself.
  • I would define procedural rhetoric as arguing a point by showing or allowing people to go through a series of events that illustrates the arguer’s viewpoint.
  • I understand this to mean that it is a way of proposing an idea or argument through the limitations or structure of the interactions of a system based on how that system is established, or how it allows the player to interact with it. Procedural Rhetoric portrays this argument, in short, as what a system allows its user to do within the confines of its rules.
  • Procedural Rhetoric is allowing consumers to explore and discover ideas through their own actions within a given ruleset.
  • Procedural rhetoric is like telling a story or making a point, but instead of using words or images, you do it by creating a set of rules or actions. When you’re playing a video game, the game doesn’t tell you a story just by dialogue or pictures. It also tells a story through the rules of the game, how you interact with the game world, and what happens as a result. Procedural rhetoric is all about using design and processes to share ideas or convince someone about something.
  • My understanding of procedural rhetoric is that video game makers can provide social commentary within their games through gameplay mechanics and objectives.
  • Procedural rhetoric is similar to other types of rhetoric, in the way that rhetoric is found and analyzed, but different in what in particular is being found or analyzed. As opposed to expressing rhetoric through words or imagery, procedural rhetoric expresses ideas through the creation of rules
  • Google Doc Work Space

Question #4: Procedural Experiences

  • There are times when game designers will purposely leave programming bugs for players to use, such as using a small amount of liquid to gain vacuum space to store food in the game Oxygen Not Included, which should have been a bug but Klei never fixed it. Perhaps these bugs allowed
    players to create unique effects that even the designers hadn’t thought of, and were preserved as the features of the game
  • Something interesting that Undertale did procedurally was its central mechanic around killing vs sparing enemies. If the player played through the game as they would any other game by killing any monster that stood in their path, they would get a bad and rather depressing ending while missing out on fun story and interactions with the characters they murdered. It uses procedural rhetoric to argue that killing is bad, even if those who you are killing are deemed the “bad guys”. I really hope that most people agree with that sentiment without having to play Undertale though
  • This one is a lil weird but the game Who’s Your Daddy is a game about playing as a baby trying to find ways to kill itself while the other player controls the dad and tries to stop the baby from killing itself. It’s low quality and is hilarious to play seeming very much just a game of a baby trying to die while the dad stops him. But I think a deeper meaning to the game is that it kinda teaches people that babies 1. are a lil dumb and will find themselves in dangerous situations that can result in them getting hurt or killed and 2. that anything can be dangerous for babies and as parents, guardians, and even babysitters have to think outside the box on about what a baby might find fascinating that can be dangerous to them. It’s funny and a lil exaggerated at times but it also kinda expresses the dangers that babies can get themselves into even from random every day household items.
  • I’ve recently played Kirby and the Forgotten Land, and one example of an instance that required procedurally completing a task involved retrieving a star to advance to the next level. The star was hidden behind a set of doors, and to open the doors, a set of torches needed to be lit. A set of steps was required to open the door correctly, which took time due to having to light the torches to open the doors.
  • One example of procedural rhetoric in a game that preforms interestingly is the Hitman franchise. In each mission you are provided with multiple potential solutions to your mission of “eliminating” your target, and as the level progresses, you interact with the environment as it throws guards, hazards, and new ideas at you. To be successful, you need to analyze the area and fully use every tool in your arsenal.
  • The practice of using rule-based representations and interactions to convince others, rather than relying on spoken or written language, images, or videos is known as the art of persuasive communication.
  • The game I can immediately think of is the game that I am currently playing Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. In this game the planet that you live on Pandora has been inhabited by humans who are polluting the world and it is the players job to stop of pollution facilities and take back Pandora. It is a commentary on how if we don’t stop what we are doing just like in the game earth is going to die from over pollution, we only have one world, we don’t get another.

    • One particular instance of a game that I have played interestingly using procedural rhetoric would be a game called Lethal Company. The company that the players work for sets a monetary quota that resets at a higher value every time it is met. If the players cannot meet the quota in the allotted time, they are thrown into the vacuum of space, resetting the game and establishing that the players are only valued when they meet the company’s expectations. This stands as a commentary on the perspective some modern corporations have for their employees despite the rough working conditions they put them through.

  • When reading about Animal crossing the author was talking about how you have to earn money to buy more things and how you have to make decisions on what you buy. Way back in elementary school I played these games there were always called Papa’s and than what ever you were selling where you either inherited or got a restaurant and you had to earn money to either buy upgrades or decorations for your restaurant. You always wanted to buy upgrades to make the process of making the food faster or better but always wanted to make the place look nice. And like Animal crossing I feel like this game shows the idea of mundane work, and from my own experience of these games, as many as there were I never finished them because they always just felt like they went on forever.
  • One of my favorite games, Bioshock, is set in a world governed by ideas presented by Ayn Rand in her books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I really enjoyed Atlas Shrugged; however, one of the most jarring aspects of the novel for me was how extreme Rand’s views could be in a world constructed by her and around her ideas. I found Bioshock to be interesting in that it provided a direct insight into the worlds and ideas presented by Rand, but from a third person perspective in the eyes of the game developers and shedding some light on some of the shortfalls of the absolute, rigid ideas presented in Rand’s works. Admittedly, Bioshock does so to the opposite extreme, but by evaluating both Rand’s novels, and the opposing ideas presented and
    explored through Bioshock, I believe a more complete personal opinion on the ideas can be formed.
  • One game that comes to mind when I think of procedural rhetoric is Cyberpunk 2077; in the game, there are side quests to stopping crime. As you slowly stop crime as you play, the environment becomes nicer, and there are fewer threats to the player as you walk/ drive around the city
  • A time I can think of when a game did something interesting procedurally is the Persona series use of shadows and personas where the playable characters have to overcome negative aspects of themselves to gain power and strength to fight back against foes in the real and cognitive worlds for a better future.
  • There is a game I played a while back called game dev inc. where your goal is to create your own game development studio. The game is great and you start by making a game and try to make it a hit. Over time the years go on and new systems come out, while you need to keep relevant and keep producing games to keep your company afloat. The interesting procedure of this is that you are behind the scenes running everything and trying to make the company succeed

Project One: Procedural Analysis

Our first project this semester is based on Jason Custer’s article on teaching procedurality. In the article, Jason distills the Bogost article you read (and a few other materials) into a “heuristic,” a set of generative questions we can apply to any game. I’ve modified those a bit, so here’s our collective heuristic:

  • What does this game represent? [What is the theme? Rhetorical Purpose? Argument? Message?]
  • Mechanically, what stands out to you?
  • What mechanics does the game use to support that representation?
  • What are some potential arguments made by the mechanics?
  • In what ways do the mechanics match the argument?
  • In what ways do the mechanics clash with/ignore the argument?
  • How might we modify the mechanics to create more procedural harmony/aesthetic impact?

Project 1 Game List

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ENG 328 1.R: Design Sins & Mini-Project 1

Posted on January 11, 2024 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Cool Designs
  • Lay Out Sins
  • Mini-Project 1: The Remake
  • Homework

Cool Designs

Let’s start with something fun–reviewing the designs y’all posted to Canvas.

Layout Sins Scavenger Hunt

Last class I distributed a handout from Golumbiski and Hagen’s White Space is Not Your Enemy. This class I’m going to send you out for 30 minutes to find examples of their sins in the wild. To Canvas–there’s a PowerPoint.

Mini-Project 1: Re-Make It Work

For homework I want you to read chapter 3 of the WSINYE, in which Hagen and Golombisky share their “Works Every Time” layout. They outline 7 parts of the layout:

  • margins (no bleed)
  • columns (two)
  • visual (graphic image)
  • cutline (alt text for image, not common)
  • headline
  • copy (body text)
  • tags (logos, etc)

[Marc–share some grid ideas from chapter 6]

You can choose one of the flyers from your layout sins presentation for this mini-project. You can choose a flyer currently hanging on the bulletin board right around the corner, or something you saw hanging anywhere else around campus. Whatever you redesign, it should be something that is physically hanging on a wall around campus. You may not redesign something you find online, no matter how atrocious it might be.

What is a bleed?. I am going to ask you to print your design, so no bleeds on this one.

I’ve debated what technology to use for this first project. I’ve decided against Canvas–what I really want you to practice/internalize here is Golumbiski and Hagen’s formula, the “works every time” layout. I want you to practice selecting and sizing text, blocking out a page (working with space, proximity). I want you to select colors that work together and develop contrast. So, rather than work with a template, I’d like you to design your 8 1/2 by 11 flyer from the ground up.

If you have previous InDesign experience and want to use that, fine. You are also welcome to use Photoshop. Those who feel a bit of anxiety can design this thing in Microsoft Word. However–Word doesn’t allow you to design a document that uses a bleed (color/image/content all the way to the edge of the page). Word also can be incredibly annoying when it comes to placing blocks of text, aligning items, etc. I recommend using Photoshop for this one if you can. Just be sure to set your Canvas size to 8.5″ by 11″. If you have advanced skills, the resolution of this image (for printing) should be set to 300 px per inch. If that sentence frightens you, then you can ignore it (for now).

  • If you design this in InDesign, then I will require you to turn in a .pdf. Do not turn in the .indd file.
  • If you design this in Photoshop, then I will require you to turn in a .jpg or a .tiff. Do not turn in the .psd file.

One other thing: Golumbiski and Hagen’s “works every time” layout is designed around a strong, graphic image (“graphic” is a tricky word to define here–but it generally means something like stunning, engaging, vibrant, etc). I encourage you to take a photograph that you can use in your design. This could be a picture of a building, of students studying, of a book or pile of books, a tree–whatever fits your subject matter. If you can’t think of how to take a picture to fit your subject matter, talk to me! If you really, really don’t want to do this, then you can use an existing image for your design–but you might struggle to find a high-resolution image large enough that it doesn’t pixelate when inserted in a 8.5 x 11 inch document with a resolution of 300px.

If you take a photograph, think about adjusting the size, lighting, contrast, color, etc in Photoshop.

A few tips for taking a good photograph:

  • Lighting: if you are outside, make sure the sun is behind you casting natural light on your subject. If you are inside, you want indirect light behind you–if you have a lamp directly lighting your subject, then you are going to get glare. Throw a tee-shirt over a lamp (make sure the tee-shirt is not touching the bulb or you might start a fire). Do not use a flash.
  • Rule of thirds; this is a rule that you must follow until you have permission to break it
  • Zoom in with your feet. Don’t use the zoom on your camera. If you want to be close to your subject, then get close.

Homework

Your “Works Every Time” revision is due before Tuesday’s class.

You are welcome to use any technology for this redesign. For those that want to begin playing around with Photoshop,
I did have time to throw together a quick .psd template of the works every time layout in the Draft assignment in Canvas. Here’s a link to it.

Idea for a remake project. Here is the sad sign posted on the hallway door to the faculty offices in Ross.

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ENG 319 1.R: Lanham

Posted on January 10, 2024 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Rhetorical Analysis
  • Lanham Write Ups
  • Homework

Rhetorical Analysis

Today I want to return a bit to our conversation of logos, ethos, and pathos from Tuesday’s class. I want to use those terms to ground a rhetorical analysis of a contemporary news story. In this case we will be examining 3 short news articles on the same event. I don’t want to name the event for reasons that I might clarify (if I remember to) after the event is complete.

First, a bit of set up. My ENG 231 Analyzing Video Games class read an essay by Ian Bogost on procedural rhetoric for today. In short, procedural rhetoric is persuasion via experiencing computer-enacted rules and/or value systems. It thinks about how actions and systems persuade us rather than words or symbols. In the article Bogost explicates Kenneth Burke’s idea of ethos, what Burke terms “identification”:

20th century rhetorician Kenneth Burke identifies the need to identify with others as the ancestor of the practice of rhetoric. He extends rhetoric beyond persuasion, instead suggesting “identification” as a key term for the practice. We use symbolic systems like language, says Burke, as a way to achieve this identification.

What I like about this passage, why I use it to frame today’s activity, is that it sets us out paying particular attention to the language that underwrites an identity. It is a claim that no language can be identity-free. Let’s test that claim.

I have distributed three news stories. Working in groups of three, you will read each story and identify a moment within it that speaks to logos, ethos, and pathos. You are free to identify more than one moment for each rhetorical element. As you are doing this, you should also mark off words that sting or sing to you. What words stick out, call to you, indicate that something rhetorical is going on? What words reinforce an already existing identity? For whom or to whom does this particular text speak and what words tell you that?

Write-Ups

Any first week volunteers?

My Write-Up is here.

Homework

We have two readings for next Tuesday, and another reading for next Thursday. The Write-Up, due before Thursday’s class, should focus on one reading but find a way to put the other two in contact with it in some way.

For Tuesday:

  • Kenneth Burke, 1939, “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle”

    • . The essay really picks up at page 199, so feel free to start there.

  • Trish Roberts-Miller, 2017, excerpt from Democracy and Demogoguery. This is a really accessible version of Miller’s lifework book, called Rhetoric and Demagoguery, which took her nearly 20 years to research and write.

For next Thursday:

  • Jennifer R. Mercieca, 2019, “Dangerous Demagogues and Weaponized
    Communication”
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ENG 231 1.T: What is Procedural Rhetoric?

Posted on January 9, 2024 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Syllabus
  • WTF is Rhetoric?
  • Ian Bogost and Procedurality
  • Homework

WTF is(n’t) Rhetoric?

Very soon I will ask you to conduct a rhetorical analysis of a video game. Which means you need some sense of what it means to be rhetorical. Over the next 5 minutes I will do my best to complicate that word, stretching rhetoric from what you might think it means to what I have convinced myself it should mean. Here we go.

First, let me get this out of the way. If you are familiar with the term rhetoric, then you probably think it means “persuasion.” That’s its most common academic definition. We have Aristotle to thank for that. But Aristotle is a philosopher. He wants rhetoric to mean persuasion so that rhetoric is reduced to communicating truth. Philosophy finds truth, then rhetoric figures out how to communicate that truth to other people. Usually dumber people who cannot identify truth on their own. Aristotle and Plato weren’t really confident that people could think for themselves. I do not think that rhetoric is merely about how to communicate things. I reject the definition of rhetoric as “persuasion.” I think that I think people can learn to think if we give them space to do so.

If you heard the word “rhetoric” in most contexts, then you would think someone is being manipulative. They are being evil. Or they are spouting bullshit. This is in part a legacy of Aristotle and–more importantly–his teacher Plato. Obviously I have not dedicated my academic career to learning bullshit.

Okay, so that basically covers what I don’t think rhetoric is.

I would argue that rhetoric is the foundation of what we call the humanities (classically, the humanities emerge from two rhetorical scholars in Rome–Cicero and Quintillian; they are radically transformed by Petrarch, moving from a civic education to a personal/aesthetic one). Convenient, since ENG 231 counts as your LAC 1 Arts and Humanities credit. While I have bunch of titles and credentials: professional writer, UX specialist, curriculum expert, I tend to self-identify as a rhetorical theorist and a postmodern theorist. My areas of expertise include asymmetrical ethics (ethics of hospitality) and digital technology. In fact, as I just wrote about, the former help us recognize the importance of the latter.

Rather than attempt to define rhetoric or humanities or asymmetrical ethics I will just read a bunch of quotes I like:

Emmanuel Levinas:
“Ontology [philosophy’s investment in truth, definition, categorization], which reduces the other to the same, promotes freedom–the freedom that is the identification of the same, not allowing itself to be alienated by the other.”

“We name this calling into question of my spontaneity [freedom] by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics.”
(Totality and Infinity 42-43; “freedom” in direct conflict with “responsibility/obligation”)

Diane Davis:
“An ethics of decision in a world that has lost its criteria for responsible action begins with straining to hear the excess that gets drowned out, sacrificed for the clarity of One voice, One call, One legitimate position.”
(Breaking Up at Totality 19)

Michael J. Hyde:
“Rhetoric facilitates acknowledgement by transforming space and time into dwelling places where people can feel at home with each other, engage in collaborative deliberation, and know together ways of resolving disputed concerns. […] The rhetor is an architect, a builder of dwelling places, homes, habitats, where the caress of others is a welcoming occurrence.”

Adriana Cavarero:
Thinking and speaking are different activities. Thinking wants to be timeless […] furthermore, it is always solitary, even when it takes place between several people […] As Maria Zambrano notes, too, “logos proceeds without any other opposition than what it, in order to better show itself, poses to itself.”

Speaking, on the contrary […] does not know in advance where it is going, and it entrusts itself to the unpredictable nature of what the interlocutors say. In short, thought is as solitary as speech is relational.

Victor Vitanza:
My position is, especially in the next chapter, that we are not at home in our world/whirl of language. Any and every attempt to assume that we are has or will have created for human beings dangerous situations. (Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, 157

Now it is crucial to understand that, for Heidegger, all that “we speak” by way of logos/language, or “speaking/saying” is perpetually an act of concealing/unconcealing. For Heidegger, this Being/essence cannot be realized, completely revealed or unconcealed. Any and every attempt to unconceal or answer definitively is to perpetrate an act of violence on Being and on human being. (NSHoR, 177)

Thomas Rickert:
Dwelling places us in the insight that rhetoric, being worldly, cannot be understood solely as human doing and that persuasion gains its bearings from an affectability that emerges with our material environments both prior to and alongside the human…

Julia Kristeva:
To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts. (Strangers to Ourselves)

Taken collectively, these quotes express why I value a particular kind of (postmodern) rhetoric and what I see as the mission, the importance, of the humanities. Rhetoric is less a tool for manipulating others as it is a methodology for opening spaces in which we can encounter each other’s otherness. It is as much introspective (who am I? what do I value?) as it is explorative (who are these others? what do they value?). Both rhetoric and the humanities teach us how to productively orient ourselves towards others. How to be in a world without certainty. How to temper our desire to force others to match up with our categories, ideas, desires, and comforts. How to handle the disorienting feelings that another person can engender within us. Levinas wrote that, by our nature, we are allergic to difference. The humanities offer medication that can help remedy the symptoms. I believe some video games are learning how to maximize their potential for teaching us how to better experience alterity, deal with ambiguity, and reflect upon the “selfishness” of our own commitments, ideas, and values. This is a class about those games.

Okay, there’s your “out there” theoretical foundations of the course. How about something more grounded. Let’s swing back to the idea of a rhetorical analysis. Maybe you have had to write a rhetorical analysis before, in high school or in ENG 122 here at UNC. Let me riff a bit on how one might typically approach the rhetorical analysis of a video game.

  • Text: What is the *purpose* of this text? What statement does it *intend* to make about our world, society, human condition, struggles? [Logos, meaning, argument]
  • Player: How do you relate to the game’s intended purpose? Does it resonate with you? [questions of pathos and feeling]
  • Writer/Designer/Programmer: Who are they trying to be? What voice/style do they assume? How do they position themselves in relation to genre/audience? Are they shouting or intending to be invisible? [Questions of Ethos]

So, the standard stuff–logos, ethos, and pathos. When we analyze a narrative, whether it is a book, a television show, a movie, a podcast, we ask ourselves variations of these questions.

Video games, however, are interactive in a way these other mediums are not. They at least afford us an image of agency, as if what we do matters to the world we traverse and the story we experience (this is a vibrant field of video game scholarship–determining to what extent our choices in games actually matter, and veterans of 225 will hear some Sicart stuff circulating here).

The interactive nature of video games, that fact that we “act” instead of merely “witness,” means we need to add a new, more complicated dimension to our rhetorical analysis: one that analyzes the actions a game forces us to take, and the rules that compute, score, or resolve that action. Philosopher Ian Bogost has termed the such action and computation as the game’s “procedurality.”

Ian Bogost and Procedurality

The first way we will analyze games this semester stems from Ian Bogost’s theory of procedural rhetoric. Bogost seeks to add procedural rhetoric to its other dominant traditions–oral/written rhetoric and visual rhetoric (which has gained increasing importance in the late 20th and early 21st centuries). Given the messy diatribe that preceded this paragraph, let’s just say that Bogost tends to define rhetoric as “influence,” close to persuasion, but recognizing non-rational and non-conscious dimensions to rhetoric. That is, we are being “persuaded” at almost every point in our lives by forces explicit and implicit (for instance, the ways that desks are arranged in rows are “persuading” you to accept my authority etc etc). Bogost believes video games are extraordinary good at this kind of passive, non-conscious persuasion. Let’s read some of his work.

Okay, let’s play something.

Okay, let’s play something else.

Okay, one more game.

Homework

Your first assignment is due before Thursday’s class. Read Bogost’s 2017 article “The Rhetoric of Video Games” (.pdf in the files section of Canvas).

I’m curious to learn you perception of this article–do you understand what Bogost is talking about? Do you find this article difficult to follow?–and so I’m going to ask you to reflect on a few questions. You can write your answers directly in Canvas or submit them as a Google Doc / Word docx.

These responses are meant to prime you for Wednesday’s discussion. I’m hoping everyone comes to class Wednesday with something to contribute (so you don’t have to be super happy with every response below, but you should be ready to share two of them).

  • Question #1: Find me the line where Bogost defines procedural rhetoric. Try putting it in your own words.
  • Question #2: Is there a term/part of this article you don’t understand or want me to address in detail? And/or is there a part of this article with which you disagree?
  • Question #3: What do you make of Bogost’s analysis of Take Back Illinois and Bully?
  • Question #4: Can you think of a time when a game did something interesting procedurally? What game? What did it do? Or can you think of a game in which the procedures and mechanics lack any kind of meaningful relationship to the argument/purpose/theme?

Syllabus

We will look at this.

Hey Marc–comment on Ethan S’s Stray paper, sp24:
The “action” / theme of Stray is obviously tied to the fact that this world is devoid of humans, and coming to realize what happened to them (and, as you indicate near the end of the paper, asking from where these robots came and their surprising form of consciousness). Those aren’t really procedural questions.

But a procedural question might be: does experiencing those questions in the form of a cat change the way we think about them? About the weird world the game constructs? Would we feel the same if we were ?experiencing them as a human?

Does the weird immersive experience of being a cat suspend/influence our everydayness of being human? Does it make us more open to think about humanity “from a distance,” which, I think the game’s story/theme is attempting to do?

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ENG 328 1.T: The Basic C.R.A.P.

Posted on January 7, 2024 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Welcome
  • Visual Rhetoric and Design
  • The Basic C.R.A.P.
  • Homework

Welcome

I’ve got a quick Google Form for you to complete.

A Quick Intro: Why Learn Design?

First, a little bit about me. My undergraduate degree is in British Literature, and my MA focused on 18th Century British Literature. I wasn’t a big fan of computers until I got into PhD program, way back in 2003. I had to mess around with Photoshop a bit teaching a first-year writing course (IIRC, the project required students to write liner notes and design a cover for a favorite CD). I got hooked on technology, and learned HTML, CSS, and some Java back when English majors could get jobs designing websites. I taught web design and writing at my first job. But by around 2012, I noticed things had changed. Web design and coding jobs required more sophisticated, back-end skills those jobs weren’t going to English majors anymore. And front-end CMS sites, like Squarespace and WordPress, were taking over the web writing world.

But, because learning to develop web sites had taught me the fundamentals of visual rhetoric and design, I was able to transition my skills into other media–videography (I teach ENG 229) and print design and production. I feel more confident about the latter than the former (hence why production is a 200 level class and design is a 300 level class).

As I indicate in the syllabus, I see this course as serving a multitude of different purposes; I hope the course is flexible enough that the exact learning outcomes conform to your trajectory. All student should benefit from learning how to design more coherent and striking presentations–from something as seemingly simple as selecting a template, to pairing image and text, to maximizing contrast, and improving readability. I’m going to get this out of the way right now: don’t ever center-align text. A title? Maybe if you are lazy and uninspired. Text that you actually want me to read? Nope.

Those skills should translate into developing flyers and handouts (both for academic contexts and professional ones). Those looking to pursue a career in publishing benefit not only from knowing how to use InDesign as a technical tool, but also from understanding how the “flow” process influences textual formatting and use of styles (in, say, Microsoft Word–how do you prep a Word document for publication?). And, as I emphasize in 229, knowing how to take and edit a photograph always has value–both professionally and personally.

The first 8 weeks of this course will emphasize the professional and technical elements of the course, as we learn key design concepts and softwares (primarily Canva and InDesign). The second half of the course is constructed around 3 community engagement projects. Let’s take a look at the syllabus.

The Basic C.R.A.P.

The first design book I ever read was Robin Williams’ The Non-Designer’s Design Book. I assign Golumbiski and Hagen’s White Space book because I believe they are more comprehensive, and because I appreciate their work on color. But William’s opening lessons on the basic CRAP of design are immediately accessible and actionable. And so, I begin with them today. There’s a .pdf in the Files section of Canvas.

So let’s do something.

Recognizing Bad Design

Over the course of the semester, we will learn a handful of design principles. That’s not the same thing as learning beautiful design. We might end up disagreeing on what makes good design, but we’re probably going to agree on what makes bad design. So I like to start this class by focusing on recognizing bad design, by becoming familiar with some cardinal design sins.

Let’s turn to Golumbiski and Hagen, specifically their Design Sins.

Homework

Due Tuesday before class: There is an assignment in Canvas called “Reading and Effective Design” due before Wednesday’s class. It requires you do some reading and then analyze a cool design of your choice.

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