Today’s Plan:
- Revising Sicart Summary Papers
- Williams and Bizup on Characters and Actions
- Working on Some Examples
- For Next Week
Revising Sicart Summary Papers
I have put a Google Doc together and given you a handout.
Williams and Bizup on Characters and Actions
I’ve published a few articles that emphasize that writing cannot be taught, only learned. That is, there are few, if any, rules that I can teach you that will make you a better writer. And I can’t teach you them, so much as ask you to learn (understand as abstract concept, translate into repeatable practice) them. I consider Williams and Bizup’s guide to sentence syntax an exception to this claim.
Put simply, W&B ask us to check all of the subjects and verbs in our sentences to make sure that the subjects are characters and the verbs are actions. Those of you who have worked in theater will understand this: I need to be able to block your sentences: that is, I need to be able to imagine your sentences on a stage. Who is standing where? What action are they doing? To do this, the subject of a sentence can’t be some abstraction, some concept, some thing–it has to be a person or animal.
Take the following sentences:
- A run to the store was made by a boy named Billy.
- It is clear that because the dog found food left on the floor that mistakes were made.
- For the rest of the semester, courses are on Discord.
- During the self-isolation period, there were lots of people who did not want to follow the suggestions and so it was decided that no one could leave their homes unless essential services were their goal.
Unfortunately, these sentences are grammatically correct. But they are also terrible. They aren’t engaging. They are difficult to parse. Worst of all: they can actually work to obfuscate responsibility. In W&B’s estimation they are bad sentences because they fail to clarify/emphasize who is doing what. If you think back to my “cat came through the window” bit, this is asking your reader/listener to imagine a lot. Likewise, what can get lost in a sentence like this is the agent responsible for the action–who decided courses would be on Discord? We can’t know. This can be a nefarious way to hide responsibility for unpopular (or reprehensible) actions.
What we need to do is to identify the characters and actions in these sentences and make sure they are the subjects and verbs. Think like a theater director–you want to “stage” the action here. You need to know who is standing where and what they are doing.
So:
For the rest of the semester, courses are on Discord.
The subject of this sentence is courses, the verb is are. Courses cannot be put on a stage–they are a concept and not a character.
We begin the revision by identifying what action has happened. That will give us a new verb to replace “are.” Then we figure out who did that action. Give it a try now.
Try this:
Dr Santos determined that courses will be scheduled on Discord.
OR
Dr Santos scheduled courses on Discord.
OR
The University’s administration determined that courses will be scheduled on Discord.
The first sentence has a generic noun as its subject–“courses.” But courses are not a character. They cannot act. Choosing an abstract noun as your sentence subject pretty much ensures a boring sentence. As you can see, when I change the subject of the sentence from “courses” to a character or characters, I not only make a more active sentence (that awful “are” verb is gone), but also I have to clarify *who* made a decision.
And, this can get even worse when you craft an abstraction as a subject. For instance:
During the self-isolation period, there were lots of people who did not want to follow the suggestions and so it was decided that no one could leave their homes unless essential services were their goal.
I bet there’s a bunch of you who couldn’t identify the subject of that sentence! (It is “there”). When you use an abstraction like this, you are making your reader do A LOT OF WORK, since they have to unpack the thought of the sentence to determine who is doing the action. Let me revise the sentence:
During the self-isolation period, Governor Polis implemented a stay-at-home order, meaning citizens could not leave their homes unless they needed essential services, because too many people failed to follow the CDC’s initial suggestions.
Notice how this revision inverts the order of material from the previous sentence. THIS WILL HAPPEN OFTEN, BECAUSE WHEN WE DRAFT WE DEVELOP AN IDEA CHRONOLOGICALLY AND WHEN WE ARGUE WELL WE DEVELOP IDEAS LOGICALLY (CONSEQUENTIALLY). This is why good writing requires revision. We have to dramatize a thought to make it easier to block/play on the recipient’s mental stage.
A few other points:
- Notice how I use “because” in the second sentence. When developing characters as subjects and actions as verbs, you might need to develop “If… Then” or “X because Y” syntax. Do not be afraid to use these causal transitions; they help a reader
- Often you will have to identify or invent a character. While this sometimes comes from another word in the sentence, other times it requires complete invention (so “Misery was filling the room” becomes “Tyler’s misery filled the room”)
- Try to cut out unnecessary prepositions. Prepositions make readers work hard.
My overarching goal here is to use the character/action syntax to make it easier on a reader to visualize and comprehend our prose. Or:
When we use the character/action syntax, readers find it easier to visualize and comprehend our prose.
For Next Week
Last week I asked you to play your game and submit your gaming journal. Now it is time to revise your Sicart summary papers and write your analysis. I have generally commented extensively on the first half of your drafts and have discussed player complicity in depth today. It is your job to revise, compress, and/or document both meaningful choices and (if you discuss it) reflection.
Final papers should be 1800-2200 words. That is a HARD ceiling. This will require that you condense your Sicart summary papers to (probably) no more than 600-800 words. Here is *one* way to arrange the longer paper:
- Introduction: 200-300 words (thesis, identify define key terms, road map parts of the paper)
- Explicate Sicart: 600-800 words (explicate those key terms, likely to be player complicity, meaningful choices/wicked problems, building space/time for critical reflection–what does a designer do to make you stop and think; examine Sicart pp. X-Y)
- Analyze Choice #1: 300-500 words
- Analyze Choice #2: 300-500 words
- Analyze Choice #3: 300-500 words
I will provide more details on the Sicart Analysis paper next week (working on polishing up APA format). If you can bring a laptop to work on the paper in class next week, that would probably be helpful. Remember that the library allows you to sign out a laptop.
In terms of analysis, let me (again) provide a mini-heuristic to help you generate ideas and reflect on your game play. Not all of these questions will be as equally interesting for every player and every game. There’s even more questions here.
- Player Complicity: Did I feel invested in this game? What was the hardest decision you had to make? Why was it hard? What do you make of your decision (go back to last week’s mini-lecture–on what grounds did you make the decision?)
- What was my relationship to my avatar? Did the game flush out the avatar as a character? Or was the avatar more of an empty shell that I could more easily step into (was the avatar me, or another character?)?
- What did the designers do to make me care about my avatar?
- What did the designers to to make me care about the npcs?
- Were the designers successful?
- Did they do something, try something, that you didn’t think worked?
- Meaningful choices: when you made a choice, were the consequences clear? If so, did they seem appropriate or did you cry bullshit? If not clear, did that frustrate you in a good or bad way [meaning, did the lack of immediate closure pull you into the game more?]?
- AFTER YOU PLAY: Did you Google that decision to see other possible outcomes? Did you survey other player responses to the decision? Do player forums etc suggest that folks are making instrumental or ethical choices (do you want your paper to incorporate how other people respond to the game? Use Reddit forums as sources? I am cool with this kind of player research!)
- Can you find any formal statistics, like you can for he Walking Dead, on how players have made decisions?
- What design features helped you pause and think about your decisions (remember that Sicart talks about how important it is that games, in addition to developing complicity and containing wicked problems, also provoke reflection–if you do this in the paper, make sure you bring Sicart in)? Some games, like Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us, are really good at this!
