Today’s Plans:
- Quick Sicart Notes
- Introductions and Conclusions
- Paper Rubric Passes
Sicart and “Neutral” Problems
Lori asked a question about where in his writing Sicart emphasizes the need for “neutral” choices. I have a few quotes that can speak to that. First, from the “Moral Dilemmas” article:
Game designer Sid Meier once defined games as “a series of interesting choices.” Meier argued that for players to be engaged in the game, they have to be presented with choices to which they feel emotionally attached, and these choices must not be equally good. The player also should have enough information to make an informed choice, and no single choice should be best. (“Moral Decisions,” 33).
From this quote, we can see that while not all choices are equally good, no one choice should be the correct answer. From this, I would argue that games need to present choices in such a way that we, as players, should not be able to easily identify which choice the designers consider the best. We should not suspect that they want us to pick a particular choice. The easier to identify the “right” answer, the less we are engaging what Sicart in that article calls “ludic phronesis.” The less we are ethically engaged. [Who sighted the “You want to be good” essay?]
Introductions and Conclusions
Introduction: Articulates the problem that generated the research question(s). Lays out some context: why discuss this now? why is this research valuable? Poses the research questions clearly (can lay out hypotheses). Lays out the thesis: which is the answers to the research questions. ANSWERS. No Scooby-Doo mystery meat. Do not tell me what the paper “will do” but report specifically what the paper has done. You write this last so that you can preview what the paper *actually* proves instead of laying out what it hopes/aims to do. BE AS DETAILED AND SPECIFIC AS POSSIBLE.
See crafting a thesis paragraph (down the page).
Conclusion: I think conclusions are quite hard to write; they have to summarize the entire paper (which, REMEMBER, the introduction should do) and either end emphasizing a change (if you did not do this in the discussion), a hope, a direction for future studies (say, what you would do next or what you would have done differently if you could start over or had more time).
Paper Rubric
Passes
Passes are reads through the whole paper with specific foci. Here’s my “suggested” list of reads before you submit the draft on Monday.
- First sentence of every paragraph: Does it offer a claim that sets up the paragraph’s purpose?
- Concision: Read your paper out loud until you hit a sentence that makes you stumble or irks you. First, can you revise it to have a clear character and action? Second, can/should it be cut into two sentences? Third, can you make it more concise (cut unnecessary words, adjectives, prepositions)?
- MLA / APA / Chicago: The drafts I saw in conferences were pretty horrendous on this front.
