digital storytelling – Understand. Think. Then write.

Paper #6: Scholarly Identity, or “Wait, You Can Get a Degree In That?!”

Shakespeare....because Shakespeare is fun, at least if you're me. — Shakespeare….because Shakespeare is fun, at least if you’re me.

My journey to becoming a PhD student in English focusing on Game Studies has been convoluted. As a Master’s student, I focused on Professional Writing because that was my career, and Renaissance Drama because…well, because I enjoyed it. After a successful career that included game development, web design, professional writing/editing, and corporate communications, I started teaching first-year composition. When the opportunity arose to start a PhD program, my thought was to combine my teaching experience with my background in game design to develop educational games that would teach critical thinking skills. My investigations into this field have complicated matters, but I believe there is still a path toward that goal. However, it is one no less convoluted than the one that has led me here.

“Game Studies,” specifically the study of video games, is a relatively new field, one that has attracted scholars from many different disciplines. Formal study as a coherent field is typically traced to Aarseth’s “Computer Game Studies: Year One” article, which stakes out a place for games as an “emerging, viable, international academic field.” As such, a knowledge of professional practices and theory, which served me well in professional writing, is not enough. Likewise, knowing theater, literature, theory, and history, which I used effectively in Renaissance drama studies, is of little help here. My particular flavor of game studies may require a knowledge of composition theory, theories of learning and development, literary theory, psychology, and education (especially common core and the politics thereof), but also game design theory as a whole, the “canon” of popular and niche games, computer programming, visual rhetoric, digital rhetoric, and a host of other fields. Of course, few if any people can claim mastery of all these things, and I don’t claim that I will in the next fifteen or so semesters. But as an interdisciplinary field, unless I am going to stay in one tiny corner (which many successful scholars admittedly do), I need to have at least a passing familiarity with the majority of those subjects.

Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

There are many objects of study that can serve as a focus for game studies from an English studies perspective. My initial interest long before I applied for this program was the changing nature of “narrative,” in an environment where the reader/player/end-user is an active participant in the creation of the story. Janet Murray’s book Hamlet on the Holodeck (1999) is one of the works that kicked off Game Studies as a field of formal academic study, and it remains an area I am very interested in. The kind of skills I want to teach – research and critical thinking – benefit from an engaging, immersive narrative, where the player/student feels that their choices have real meaning and impact. Without narrative (and in some cases, even with it), we are left with little more than a low-stakes multiple choice test, the pedagogical utility of which is a subject of much debate and skepticism.
Other English/Game Studies scholars have focused on the role of writing in games, such as Dr. Kevin Moberly. However, as he rightly notes in his article, “

Other English/Game Studies scholars have focused on the role of writing in games, such as Dr. Kevin Moberly. However, as he rightly notes in his article, “Composition, Computer Games, and the Absence of Writing,” with the development and prevalence of more sophisticated VOIP technologies, the written word is becoming scarce in gameplay as players and designers alike rely more on the spoken word and sound design to convey messages among and to other players. There are many auxiliary texts to games, such as message boards, strategy guides, and player-created resources like wikis, and they may be useful subjects of analysis to see how players generate written content about gameplay, but it remains to be seen how relevant these informal documents are to gauging the average player’s skill with more formal writing or problem solving, since these tend to be created by only the most hardcore fans of a game.

Relatively late in this course, I discovered the world of Dr. Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech, through a mutual acquaintance. I confess to being more than a little embarrassed at having not been more familiar with his contributions to the field, and my only excuse is that I had been more laser-focused on articles than books. I have since remedied that, and found that his work on “procedural rhetoric” to be relevant to my own interests in a number of ways, not least of which is the way games have a rhetorical message to the player, whether intended or not. I believe that further study of his work may yield important insights into how educational games can be used to teach skills like critical thinking, and I look forward to delving further into this idea.

While I have encountered resistance to the idea of games in education in discussions with game developers, educators and game scholars alike, I see their objections more as obstacles to be overcome than brick walls. Gaming professionals have found it difficult to generate interest from schools or the general public in educational games beyond the preschool level, but I found in discussing this with developers at the SIEGE Atlanta ’16 conference that few of them had an understanding of core curriculum standards for different subjects and grade levels, and thus could not demonstrate and apples to apples correlation between the skills presented in their game and the skills students were required to master in particular classes. With an understanding of both game development and education, I believe that this is something that I can address more effectively than those who are only familiar with a single perspective.

The games I have enjoyed as a player, and have worked on as a developer, are highly immersive and require a significant investment of time on the part of the player. This time can be shortened to some degree with good design, but to achieve genuine engagement with the game itself requires more time than is typically available in a grade 6-12 class period, and educators might be understandably concerned about assigning hours of gameplay as homework. I think this can be overcome, however, especially as more content is delivered electronically and expectations for screen time as part of education continue to expand. To set up an interesting scenario takes time, and

Telltale Games' — Telltale Games’ “The Walking Dead” takes an average of 12.5 hours to complete

if the game is not enjoyable, at least to some degree, playing it will be just another rote exercise that students do not want to do. But perhaps that is part of the disconnect between designers and educators – the relationship between time invested willingly vs. unwillingly, engaged or obliged. In “The Motivation of Gameplay,” Marc Prensky states, “Remember, game designers focus primarily on motivation; educators don’t. The most important thing that educators can learn from game designers is how they keep the player engaged.” And that may be the area in which I can contribute the most.

I think ODU’s program is uniquely suited to the subjects I need to learn more about to pursue this path as a scholar, allowing me to delve deeply into both the composition pedagogy and new media areas I need to learn more about. However, I am going to have to do significant work above and beyond my coursework – learning Unity and/or Unreal, getting familiar with the “canon” of games, and learning as much as I can about the business and development of games, as well as the scholarly literature. The good news is that, as a game designer myself as well as a scholar, I already have some degree of credibility with both sides of that divide, and a significant network of contacts to draw on. There is a lot of work to do, but I feel like I have both a plan for how to get there, and more importantly, a real contribution that I can make to both scholarship and industry. I know there are frustrating times ahead, and more work than I have ever had in my academic career. But I have now what I have lacked in other programs: a genuine purpose, and a calling.

Aarseth, Espen. “Computer Game Studies – Year One.” Game Studies, vol. 1, issue 1, 2001. Web. 20 Sept. 2016.

Moberly, Kevin. “Composition, Computer Games, and the Absence of Writing.” Computers and Composition 25.3 (2008): 284–299. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

Prensky, Marc. “The motivation of gameplay or, the REAL 21st-century learning revolution.” On The Horizon, vol. 10, no. 1 (2002). Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

PAB #7: From Counter-Strike to Counter-Statement: Using Burke’s Pentad to Analyse Video Games

Bourgonjon, Jeroen et al. “From Counter-Strike to Counter-Statement: Using Burke’s Pentad as a Tool for Analysing Video Games.” Digital Creativity 22.2 (2011): 91–102. Web.

In From Counter-Strike to Counter-Statement: Using Burke’s Pentad to Analyse Video Games, Jeroen Bourgonjon et. al. use rhetorical theory, and

Burke's Dramatic Pentad: Act-Agency-Scene-Purpose-Agent — Burke’s Dramatic Pentad:
Act-Age-Scene-Purpose-Intent

specifically Burke’s concept of the pentad as a methodological tool for the analysis of video games. Rhetorica.net describes the pentad as a series of questions, stating that “Burke believed that all of life was drama (in the sense of fiction), and we may discover the motives of actors (people) by looking for their particular type of motivation in action and discourse.” From the perspective of narratology, then, this provides a useful way of looking at the reasons behind the actions people take in video games. The authors also explain that utilizing the pentad can help the researcher to understand the game from multiple perspectives, including that of the designer (author) and the player (reader).

The authors also use what Ian Bogost terms procedural rhetoric, which they define as, “based on meaning making through the selective simulation of speciﬁc rules. Games do not as much persuade players by telling them things (games as representations), but rather by confronting them with the results of their actions through the game rules” (91). Published in 2011, this shows one of the ways the field has moved past narratology and ludology into a methodology that uses game mechanics, or rules, as a way of communicating meaning, which in turn is given context through the narrative being told by the game.

Ian Bogost, researcher and author of "Persuasive Games" — Ian Bogost, researcher and author of “Persuasive Games”

What is most fascinating about this article is the way in which it applies traditional English studies methodologies and theories as a way of analyzing games. The statements made by early game researchers that games were too important to be left to scholars of other disciplines is squarely put to rest by this, as the authors utilize traditional rhetorical theory, dramatic analysis theory first applied to literature, and Bogost’s procedural rhetoric notion, which was first explained in Persuasive Games: the Expressive Power of Video Games (MIT Press, 2007), which is considered seminal in modern video game scholarship. Procedural rhetoric, as applied to this situation, addresses gameplay as a form of procedure, that can then be applied for rhetorical purposes.

I also found their recap of other existing methodologies (all aligned with the ludology side of the force) for analyzing games especially helpful, as they reference Aarseth, with whom I was already familiar, but also works by Konzack, whose approach focused on the analysis of, “hardware; program code; functionality; gameplay; meaning; referentiality; and socio-cultural aspects,” (98), as well as Maillet who suggested that the analysis of a game may include more than just gameplay, such as walkthroughs, cut scenes, and forum postings, thereby expanding the scope of games as objects of study.

Bioshock, the popular first-person shooter with overtones of Ayn Rand and George Orwell

The authors utilize Burke’s pentad as a way of seeing “ratios,” or relations between different aspects of a game – in this case, Bioshock. In their conclusion, they show how this kind of analysis can be used in education, and to connect the analysis to curricular goals.

Ultimately, this article provides an analysis model that includes both rhetorical theory and traditional literary theory to analyze gameplay and storytelling, using the tools of multiple sub-fields within English studies to better understand one of the most popular games of the last decade.

Additional Readings:

Professor Andrew Cline’s site, Rhetorica.net, defines a number of useful concepts, including “Burke’s Pentad: Dramatism.”

Bioshock is the primary focus of the article, and this wiki entry covers the basics of the game.

Ian Bogost’s website, covering his books, games, and research.

PAB Entry #6: “Game-Based Curricula, Personal Engagement, and the Modern Prometheus Design Project”

Barab, Sasha, Patrick Pettyjohn, Melissa Gresalfi, and Maria Solomou. “Game-Based Curricula, Personal Engagement, and the Modern Prometheus Design Project.” In Games, Learning, and Society: Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age, edited by Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire, and Sasha Barab, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp 306-326.

In “Game-Based Curricula, Personal Engagement, and the Modern Prometheus Design Project,” authors Barab, Pettyjohn, Gresalfi, and Solomou explore the possibility of basing an entire curriculum around games. Their ideal curriculum “involves trajectories or missions that include rich storylines, multiple tasks, …and interactive objects…that require the player to make conceptually informed choices” (307). The game that they created is a single player exploration of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the player is exploring the world of the novel, and must solve problems make both practical and ethical choices that have persistent impacts on the game world.

Key terms they establish early on include intentionality (player choices impact meaningful goals), legitimacy (methods utilized are relevant beyond the context of the game), and consequentiality (player actions have a meaningful impact on the game world). When all these elements are present, they term this kind of participation transactive engagement. This term captures an important element in any immersive experience – the notion of the transaction, which makes the player an active participant and not merely a spectator.

Intentionality is important, because without a context, goals are not meaningful; busy work is work for the sake of work, without a purpose. Legitimacy is something that is gaining widespread attention in education, because if students do not see a real world application for a skill, if it seems like something abstract that just has to be learned because there will be a test, they will not engage with the skill as deeply. If they see transferrable applications, and have the opportunity to use the skill in context, there is a greater potential for deep learning. Consequentiality is something that requires extremely responsive game design, which means time and money on the development side. For that reason, many games do not have persistent environments – but setting a game in a persistent world where player actions can have meaningful, lasting impacts on the environment and the responses from other characters increases immersion and engagement.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the basis for the — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the basis for the “Modern Prometheus” game

While much of the article understandably deals with the specifics of their Modern Prometheus project, it’s iterations and why they made the choices they did in its creation, the part that is the most interesting to me is the way that they establish the educational value of immersion and engagement. They state that “supporting transactive engagement involves fostering a deep sense of immersion in which the learner enters into a situation conceptually and perceptually, has a goal, has a legitimate role, and engages in actions that have a consequence – whereby both the learner and the situation with which he or she is engaged become transformed” (307). By getting the player to buy in to the game setting, rather than remaining detached from it, their choices have context and meaning.

There are many techniques that can be used to create that sense of the game world having meaning and consequences (some of which are also addressed in Extra Credits’ “What Makes Us Roleplay” below), but this feeling can also be fostered by everything from the interface design to the soundscape players hear, and the art style they are seeing. The game’s mechanics also play into this, although these elements are not explicitly addressed by Barab, et al. Ideally, these elements are all so seamlessly integrated into the game experience that they are not consciously perceived, because to do so brings the player out of the experience and makes them aware of the artificiality of the environment. For players, and students, to feel that their choices have meaning, they need to be invested in the game world.

Additional Watching and Reading
The Extra Credits episode “What Makes Us Roleplay” deals with immersion and how games make the player’s choices matter. Roleplaying (taking on the personality of a character that may or may not make the same choices that they would in a real world situation) can be a distraction from learning in some situations, but the design choices dealing with it also create an immersive environment in which the decisions you make impact the game world – the consequentiality described by Barab, et al.

Marshal G. Jones’ (apparently?) unpublished paper, “Creating Engagement in Computer-Based Learning Environments” is what it says on the tin – an exploration of how designers get players engaged and invested in learning games. Jones explains that in this case, engagement refers to “the notion that the program makes the learner want to be there.”

The Education Business Blog has an article on an early iteration of the Modern Prometheus game.

PAB Entry #5: Harrison Pink’s “Can I Borrow a Feeling?”

Pink, Harrison. “Can I Borrow a Feeling?” Gamasutra. 2014. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HarrisonPink/20140303/212088/Can_I_Borrow_A_Feeling.php

While Harrison Pink’s article is written from the perspective of a designer as opposed to a purely academic critic, his practical and pragmatic approach is informed by years of successful game design, as well as an academic grounding in the MFA program in Game Design and Development at the Savannah College of Art and Design, placing him among the rare designers who can speak to both theory and practice with equal credibility. His design process is very similar to that used by designers at White Wolf, a primarily tabletop roleplaying game company where I worked in the mid-1990s, which made it of particular interest to me.

At the SIEGE 2016 conference in Atlanta, Harrison Pink gave a presentation titled “Crafting an Experience: Designing a Game Feelings First.” It was a slightly expanded version of an article he published on the Gamasutra website in 2014, prior to his being hired in his current position at Hangar 13 Games. In both, he presents a new perspective on one of the ongoing debates within game studies – which is more important (or, alternately, which comes first): mechanics or theme?

Successful games have been developed that began from either choice, though each presents its own challenges. Pink suggests that rather than starting from either of these, the designer should instead start with the question of what feeling(s) they want to elicit in the player. Ultimately, feelings drive engagement, and engagement leads to continued play and increased enjoyment. Pink states that, “Every design begins with the goal of evoking a specific feeling from the player. A game uses both the theme and mechanics to evoke that feeling.” Whether you prioritize story or gameplay more (and most successful AAA titles include both), an understanding of what feeling you want to elicit from the player will guide successful development of both.

Theme - Feeling - Mechanics diagram — Rather than theme and mechanics supporting each other, Pink suggests that both support feeling instead

Pink references the widely praised MDA model of game design explored in “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research” by Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubec, which focuses on Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics. In it, the authors explain that the order in which designers create games using these elements is the opposite of the way that players experience games. In his piece, Pink reframes dynamics as theme, and feeling replaces aesthetics. However, as seen in the triangle diagram above, Pink’s model does not fit the linear format of the MDA framework. This is a somewhat misleading equivalency; dynamics are significantly broader than specifically theme, and have a clearer relationship to mechanics. Likewise, aesthetics can and do strongly influence the feelings that are generated as a result of gameplay, but it would be inaccurate to imply that mechanics and theme create aesthetics. Pink’s reinterpretation of the MDA model, while dealing with similar components, reinterprets the design process and does not address the player experience.

Although I don’t believe that the game design process can ever be entirely simplified down to three components, Pink’s model is a useful one. In many, if not most circumstances, one of the primary drivers for the creation of a game may be market analysis and business expediency, which can lead to early determinations of elements of theme, mechanics, or feelings (though given that the latter is not as easy to quantify in a business analysis, it is less likely to be a stated objective). These business requirements place expectations and restrictions on the development process. Constraints can spur creativity, though, and these requirements may lay out a framework, but the design process is necessary to go from business objective to game concept.

The value of player engagement, and the study of how to create that connection between player and game, is one of the great challenges facing the industry right now, and is an important foundational concept for my own interest in creating educational games. Designing “feelings first,” as Pink puts it, gets the player invested, and students who are engaged with material can achieve mastery much more quickly than if they are learning out of a sense of obligation, resentment, or the threat of failure. Whether or not the reader buys into Pink’s vision of the design process or the more traditional MDA model, his argument about the value of feelings in determining a player’s enjoyment of a game provides an important missing piece in the ongoing struggle between story and mechanics.

Further Reading (and Watching):
From Stanford University’s Interactive Media and Games Seminar Series, Katherine Isbister from the Center for Games and Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz discusses her book, How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design

Wired‘s “Her Story and Papers, Please are changing gaming forever” describes two recent games that are designed to evoke strong emotions in the player.

EDIT: Late breaking addendum! SIEGE just posted a few of their sessions online, including Harrison’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ7pljOIO9Q&feature=share

Paper #2: Big Questions

The field of computer game studies is a relative newcomer to the scholarly landscape, but it is not without controversies. Even the words used to define the field have been challenged, defined and redefined – is “computer game” the best term, when many of these games are played on game consoles and phones? Is “game” accurate, if no skill or agency is involved?

If we trace the formal study of game studies to the late 90s, as established in my previous paper, one of the earliest conflicts with the field was between the camps of Narratology and Ludology. Jasper Juul, writing in 2001, laid out the differences between games and stories, which essentially came down to the idea of interactivity. A story is something you consume passively, while a game is something in which the player (no longer just a reader) is a co-creator of meaning. He allows that there is a role for the study of narrative in games, but states that, “relying too heavily on existing theories will make us forget what makes games games: such as rules, goals, player activity, the projection of the player’s actions into the game world, the way the game defines the possible actions of the player. It is the unique parts that we need to study now”. When combined with Aarseth’s statement that games are “too important” to be left to the scholars of other areas, the ludologists staked out their territory. Leave narrative, an inessential part of games, to the literature and film studies people. They were going to address the more important aspects of games – the structural elements that helped to define something as a game.

Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace focused on the evolving role of narrative, though at that time the struggle between narratologists and ludologists was in full swing. Her title is important, though – she was examining the future of narrative, and already in 1997 allowed for not only the possibility but the necessity of it becoming interactive. Rather than the “game” elements being the main point and any narrative elements merely providing a context or pretense for the gameplay, Murray, although limited by the technology at the time when explaining what was possible at the time, incorporated science fiction elements into her prediction of the future direction of narrative. Cyberspace was a far cry from virtual reality, and further still from Star Trek’s holodeck, and Murray’s book dealt explicitly with interactive stories, which need not necessarily be games. Given the definitions they were working with at the time, the two camps’ positions make sense. But in the nearly two decades since then, our definition of what a narrative is has shifted.

Certainly, there are still people who take an arguably formalist approach and focus on games-for-games-sake, but as the role of storytelling is acknowledged in fields far beyond games – marketing , health literacy, and education – denying the value of storytelling in games becomes more difficult. In the years since ludology was first established in contrast to narratology in the study of games, fewer and fewer articles have been published. The initial conflict – whether or not games had stories – is less of a focus, because the definition of narrative has expanded. While Juul explained some fifteen years ago that games were not simply narratives, because narratives lacked interactive elements, the goalposts have been moved. It is generally accepted that narratives can be interactive. That doesn’t mean that things like mechanics and gameplay do not matter – on the contrary, they have been subsumed as part of the overall definition, and now are the vehicle through which stories are made interactive. Even in Henry Jenkins’ 2006 article “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” the line has blurred, and game elements are pressed into service to create narrative spaces, in which a non-linear narrative can be uncovered by players as they move through the game space.

Carolyn Handler Miller's Digital Storytelling: A Creator's Guide to Interactive Entertainment — Carolyn Handler Miller’s Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment

Carolyn Handler Miller’s book, Digital Storytelling is subtitled A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment. Storytelling is now interactive. Narratives can allow for agency on the part of the reader/player/end user. Rather than focusing on games, the book explores the nature of interactive stories, with a primary focus on what you can do with them, and how they can be applied to the burgeoning field of transmedia storytelling.

The more pertinent question now seems to be not whether or not games have stories, but how stories can be used in combination with other game elements to create an immersive experience, in which the player (for lack of a better word) is invested in the outcome. Not only does this deepen the player’s connection to the game’s outcome, this can be transferred to apply to a consumer’s connection to a brand, a student’s desire to master a skill, or countless other interactions that apply to games, but also beyond them. In spite of some early game theorists’ desire to stake out their own territory separate from that of other fields, the floodgates are open, and computer games – which always incorporated multiple disciplines in their creation – now are a part of countless other industries. There is certainly still a role for game theorists, but meaningful contributions can now come from many fields, and the work of game studies scholars has implications far beyond that of entertainment. Game elements and story elements are both pressed into service into the creation of interactive narratives, of which traditional computer games are one among several forms that they can take.

Sources and Further Reading

Aarseth, Espen. “Computer Game Studies – Year One.” Game Studies, vol. 1, issue 1, 2001. http://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html. Accessed 20 September 2016.

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”. In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, Ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. MIT P, Cambridge, MA, 2006.

Miller, Carolyn Handler. Digital Storytelling (3^rd ed.). Focal Press: New York, 2014.

Juul, Jesper. “Games Telling Stories?” Game Studies, vol. 1, Issue 1, 2001. http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/ Accessed 5 October 2016.