Today’s Plan:
- Upcoming Calendar (5 minutes)
- Quick Paper Expectations (5 minutes)
- Sicart Group Activity (20 minutes)
- Sicart Discussion (20 minutes)
- Homework
Upcoming Calendar
Here’s how I see the next 2 & 1/2 weeks:
- Monday Jan 27th (today): Review Sicart Reading
- Wednesday Jan 29th: (Ross 1240 Computer lab): Developing a List of Potential Games for Project 1. APA format mini-quiz. HW: Read Sicart Chapter 6.
- Friday Jan 31st: Discuss Sicart Chapter 6. Crash Course on Writing a Paper
- Monday February 3rd: Review Sicart Papers. HW: Play your video game for 2 hours.
- Wednesday February 5rd (Ross 1240 Computer Lab): Williams and Bizup on actions (sentence syntax workshop). Gaming Journal Pre-writing assignment: spend 20 minutes writing about a decision in your game.
- Friday February 7th: Share pre-write assignments, talk about games and ethical decision making. Homework: Play your game, begin drafting your analysis paper.
- Monday, February 11th: Open Date (let’s see how the papers are going–but I’ll plan on focusing on integrating sources). Play your game, draft your paper.
- Wednesday, February 13th: How to write an introduction; Writing Day
- Friday, February 15th: Peer review. Revision and editing checklist. Final paper due Sunday at noon.
- Monday, February 18th: Introduce Project 2
Quick Paper Expectations
There are two upcoming paper assignments. The first is the Sicart summary paper. That paper will be due next Monday. The “A” papers from last semester were generally 800-1000 words.
On Friday, I will give a one day crash course on writing an academic paper; while much of this should be review (because this is a 200 level writing class and assumes you have already taken ENG 122 or ENG 123), I recognize that for many of you this might be the first formal academic paper you’ve written in college. If so, don’t panic. I like to ease into things. So I will only score the first paper on 4 criteria:
- Does the paper have an explicit thesis statement (that is, make an argumentative claim regarding the central topic(s) in Sicart’s argument) and contain some kind of road map?
- Does the paper provide meaningful transitions into quotes from the reading?
- Does the paper sufficiently summarize and explicate quotes?
- Does the paper begin paragraphs with claims (topic sentences) and end paragraphs with closure/purpose/reflection?
In Friday’s crash course, I will cover all of these things. And don’t worry if you don’t get them all the first time. I consider these the foundation skills of writing, and we will work on them all semester.
Sicart Group Activity
I’m going to break you up into groups.
From Group Work to Heuristic
We will work together to populate this heuristic [heuristic is a rhetorical term; it means “flexible system of questions used to help generate ideas”]. This heuristic will be our critical lens–that is, as we read we will consult these questions in order to help us understand whether Sicart would consider this an ethical game. At the same time, elements of our game play might suggest new questions–it might show us questions that Sicart doesn’t articulate, elements of ethical gameplay that he does not address.
Homework
Remember–if you have questions about your game or the reading or anything else, I have office hours from 12-3 tomorrow.
Also, being a first-year college student can be disorienting. If you have questions about choosing a major or how to navigate the university, feel free to come to office hours to ask those too. I’m a resource–don’t be afraid to ask me about stuff!
