Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games

Reshaping Theory and Practice of Writing

R. Colby, M. Johnson, R. Colby, M. Johnson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137307675
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

An edited collection whose contributors analyze the relationship between writing, learning, and video games/videogaming, these essays consist of academic essays from writing and rhetoric teacher-scholars, who theorize, and contextualize how computer/video games enrich writing practices within and beyond the classroom and the teaching of writing.

PART I

Play

CHAPTER 1

The Game of Facebook and the End(s) of Writing Pedagogy

John Alberti

The temptations posed by social networking—primarily Facebook and text messaging—to distract students from the “real” work of the writing class have quickly become part of the lore of writing teachers in both high schools and colleges. The irony of this situation seems all too obvious: it’s hard to get students focused on their writing practices when they are so busily engaged in their writing practices. This conflict enacts yet another version of the work/play binary, but in this case centered on discursive practices: the serious “work” of the official writing curriculum versus the “play” of the trivial digital writing spaces.¹ Rather than reflexively viewing the “addictive” nature of Facebook and social networking as an obvious problem, I instead argue that there is much to learn pedagogically from this “addiction,” that in fact the absorption, devotion, and even self-reflection engendered by a social networking site such as Facebook can be seen as useful and desirable when directed toward more officially sanctioned forms of discursive activity.

Even further, I want to use the example of Facebook and the idea of rhetorical gaming to extend the critique of “officially sanctioned forms of discursive activity,” the ends of the writing classroom itself. Specifically, I want to reconsider the idea of gaming and gaming theory as a means to some other, more institutionally sanctioned ends. Are games and gaming merely a means to an end in writing instruction? Or does the idea of the rhetorical game as end in itself—the source of fun in Facebook—suggest new, more profoundly ludic, orientations toward writing instruction?

Games and Play

There is, for example, some debate about whether the online practices known as social networking can be regarded as “games” at all.² After all, there is no “winning” at Facebook, and Facebook users don’t typically describe what they are doing as “playing Facebook” (although they may admit to playing games on Facebook, whether Bejeweled or Farmville). However, if we take a working definition of games such as Alice Robison’s (2008)—“games are designed, interactive, rule-based and achievement-bound systems that reflect and inspire rich literacy and learning practices”—then the question of whether Facebook is a game or not seems more a matter of interpretive ingenuity than scientific certainty (p. 361).

Using Robison’s terms, Facebook is clearly “designed” and is by definition “interactive.” In taking on the criteria of “rule-based” and “achievement-bound,” we make the transition from the narrower question of Facebook as a game to the larger question of rhetoric as a game, an argument with its own long and rich history, one deeply implicated in the work/play binary.³ In considering Facebook as a rhetorical game, I will be operating from the following framework in relation to games and play: their experiential, participatory nature; their embrace of trial and error; their open endedness; their focus on process over product; and their emotional affect (i.e., the fact that they are fun).

These same characteristics, not coincidentally, apply to the learning experience as well, particularly the physiological models of learning drawn from constructivist approaches to cognitive brain research.⁴ In her hands-on guide to applying such research to writing pedagogy, Rita Smilkstein (2003) describes what she sees as the “Five Rules of How the Brain Learns” as follows:

1. Dendrites, synapses, and neural networks grow only from what is already there

2. Dendrites, synapses, and neural networks grow for what is actively, personally, and specifically experienced and practiced

3. Dendrites, synapses, and neural networks grow from stimulating experiences

4. Use it or lose it

5. Emotions affect learning. (pp. 71–73)

Or as video game designer Raph Koster (2005) puts it, “learning is the drug” (p. 40).⁵ These ideas are not new, of course, to either composition studies or even the jargon of curriculum and pedagogy at the institutional level, where calls for “active” and “engaged” learning have become commonplace. As Smilkstein (2003) acknowledges, cognitive research builds on and complicates the earlier developmental ideas of Piaget, and as she further recognizes, there are connections here with Freirean problem-posing approaches as well.

For my purposes, the link between the experiential, open-ended, and pleasurable dimensions of gaming and the learning process that Smilkstein (2003) describes has to do with how this process does not discriminate between “real” and “play” learning. Instead, play/gaming is not seen as a means to an end (rehearsal and/or preparation for “real” or “serious” activity); play/gaming is a fundamental condition of human learning.⁶ In a way, we are dealing with the cognitive version of the classical Marxist social alienation workers experience under capitalism: when play leaves, learning leaves.

In “Just for Fun: Writing and Literacy as Forms of Play,” David Michael Sheridan and William Hart-Davidson (2008) introduce a category of game that can serve as a useful transition to a game-centered analysis of Facebook. In describing Ink, an effort at creating a writing-based online game at Michigan State University, they refer to the concept of a “Persistent Alternate World (PAW)”:

As a persistent alternate world, it [the game Ink] supports multiple arcs of gameplay over long stretches of time. Players don’t “win” games with the finality and closure of single-player video games like Pac-Man. There is no score, no “game over.” As a persistent alternate world, Ink offers multiple players the chance to become immersed in a socially, culturally, and sensorially complex ecology. (pp. 325–326)

Although the designers of Ink were largely modeling their game on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), their definition of a PAW game in terms of a “socially, culturally, and sensorially complex ecology” applies equally well to Facebook, especially if we drop the distinction between the fantasy-based worlds of the most famous MMORPGs and the “real-world” relationships that form the basis of the virtual relationships on Facebook. Such a move also allows us to broaden the definition of “role-playing” to include the rhetorical senses of creating a discursive identity.

Rather than a goal-directed game in the sense of working to achieve a predefined objective, Facebook represents a social-directed game whose goals are not singular but multiple, not linear but holistic: the sustaining of a viable, functioning discursive community. A game like the various incarnations of The Sims seems the obvious analogy here, where the goals are to maintain optimal levels of happiness in the multiple interconnecting relationships that the players construct. Even closer to Facebook, the corollary culture of mini PAW games that quickly grew in symbiotic relationship to Facebook—from Mafia Wars to Farmville—both further complicate the distinction between the “real-world” based social orientation of Facebook and the “unreal world” fictionality of gaming and remind us that the singular designator “Facebook” refers to a diversity of activities and textual interactions, demanding an equally diverse range of cognitive skills and engagement. Rather than reify “Facebook” into a monological discursive activity, my goal instead is to use the idea of rhetorical game(s) to challenge the inevitable tendency represented by the creation of a class called “college writing,” “first-year composition,” or the like to ossify “writing” into a homogenous, stable activity, one that too many student writers have already decided isn’t fun, regardless of how extensive their texting and Facebook practices might be.

The Game of Facebook

The discursive, text-based elements of Facebook—the creation and maintenance of profiles, the posting of and reacting to status updates, the use of Facebook as an alternative email/instant messaging site, the listing of social, cultural, and political events—all establish the validity of analyzing this particular form of social networking as a field of writing. Viewing Facebook as a writing game can help us understand why it’s fun. The qualities Facebook shares with what I am calling social-directed gameplaying—a focus on the experiential and participatory, an embrace of trial and error, an open-ended deferral of ultimate goals that stresses process over product, a premium on emotional engagement—align the writing process with the learning process in ways that can extend to viewing rhetoric itself as social-directed gameplaying.

Central to the game is the creation of one’s profile, or, to use the language of MMORPGs, the development of an avatar. As with the description of Facebook as a game, the use of the word “avatar” in this context can seem problematic. After all, the concept of avatars in virtual worlds almost presupposes the notion that whatever form an online avatar might take, it stands in contrast to a player’s nonvirtual identity, however complex the interrelationship between the two might be. Indeed, discussions of online avatars ever since Sherry Turkle’s (2005) groundbreaking analysis of online identity formation have tended to focus on the most dramatic of these contrasts, particularly those involving race and gender, as a means of exploring how online environments both reveal the social (and discursively) constructed nature of identity and the liberating potential, however fraught, that play in online MMORPGs can offer to participants.

The Facebook “avatar,” however, seems at first diametrically opposed to these possibilities, starting with the grounding metaphor of the site, the profile picture, an iconic visual representation that from the beginning might preclude the idea of radical transformation and impersonation. At the same time, one of the standard concerns expressed over sites like Facebook and, earlier, MySpace, was the substitution of “virtual” for “real” relationships, that in spite of the amount of discursive work/play that users put into the construction of their online identities/personas, Facebook friendships suffer from a lack of presence found in “actual” relationships. Thus, these friendships may be more ephemeral, less substantive—in short, more play-like—than real-world relationships.

We don’t need to rehearse Derrida’s familiar critiques of presence, of the phonological association of face-to-face speech with immediacy and therefore truth as opposed to the absence and lack supposedly represented by writing, to strengthen the links between the creation of the Facebook avatar/persona and the observation that all relationships are ultimately text based, that identity is a textual construction, whether in the form of a handwritten letter, a Facebook profile, or a face-to-face meeting. It’s not that these forms of social interaction are all equivalent, but that they are all textual transactions, and as such none has any more absolute claim to authenticity over any of the others.

In fact, part of the play and game of Facebook has to do with the permutations surrounding the creation of a profile identity. The user may be limited to a single textual name to mark his or her site, but there is room for a great deal of play in relation to both profile pictures (and it’s not unusual for users to have profile picture folders containing over 100 variations) and the “Info” categories. The profile pictures may in fact be anything and anyone—my own is a picture of my dog; I have a friend represented by a lighthouse; and many users change their profile pictures to reflect their day-to-day moods—and they function as a kind of logo or even branding within a game of visual rhetoric. The development of the “Timeline” feature on Facebook further expands this form of rhetorical play by encouraging users to see their pages as evolving autobiographies, online histories of the textual/visual/personal mutations of their identities. Timeline allows for the ongoing multivalent transformation of identity, incorporating, merging—in short, playing—with how users negotiate their various avatars/personae related to school and work, the personal and the professional, the formal and the informal. It’s hard to predict how the Timeline feature will evolve, but it already indicates the ability of Facebook to function as an ultimate online résumé, a textual nexus for the rhetorical game of maintaining a complex textually constructed identity.

In terms of composition theory, such discursive self-awareness positions Facebook as a manifestation of the goals of social epistemic rhetoric, inviting users/players/students to consider discursive constructions of identity in relationship to the larger discursive and ideological formations of social life (starting with deciding whether and how to respond to the “Politics” prompt on the Info page and continuing with Facebook’s own intrusive attempts to recommend politically oriented Facebook pages on the basis of the user’s play). That such a connection might seem novel stems from what Albert Rouzie (2000) has pointed to as the degree to which the work/play binary operated within the development of social epistemic theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

Social epistemic rhetoric could possibly free composition of the split between objective and subjective rhetorics by offering a more complex model of the social construction of the self that is thoroughly grounded in poststructuralist theory. However, rather than freeing composition to explore discourse that might cross the work/play gap, the legacy of social epistemic rhetoric has often been a narrow focus on political consciousness-raising, closing off considerations of play as anything but a ludic escape from the hard work of analyzing dominant ideologies. (p. 638)

Of course, skepticism about the pedagogical and critical efficacy of Facebook also stems from Facebook’s status as a profit-driven corporation within the consumer entertainment industry. But play and gaming as central social and cognitive activities predate their co-optation by capitalism, and the contemporary manifestation of the work/play binary was itself rooted in the developing ideology of market-based economies, making the divorce of play and games from writing pedagogy as much a sign of the triumph of that ideology as a measure of the seriousness of one’s commitment to critical praxis.⁷

The “Goals” of Facebook

Thus, the most playful aspect of Facebook lies in its radical process model of rhetoric, and it is in the context of this process focus that the goals and objectives of Facebook as a rhetorical game emerge. Facebook shares with all web-based writing the dematerialization of writing as a product. No Facebook page, no more than any other web page, is any more permanent than the flickering pixels on the screen. This aspect of Facebook in itself poses a challenge to conventional teaching practice, in that there is no stable product to evaluate in terms of a “final,” reified grade. As in rhetoric and writing understood as ongoing processes of social dialogue and performance, there is no “A” student in Facebook; there are instead users/players/writers who tend to be more consistently successful (as defined below) in their rhetorical play, but this consistency refers to trends in behavior rather than an essential, permanent quality of the player.

As such, success (or “winning”) at a social-directed game such as Facebook is dynamic and experiential, at its basic level an effort to be noticed and to attract a response. There are quantifiable measures of success built into the game, most notably the number of comments and/or “likes” that each post garners. But this quantification isn’t cumulative, leading to an overall score. Instead, as in a conversation, the goal is to maintain rhetorical contact. Many early media accounts of social networking sites such as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Foreword
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games
• Part I   Play
• Part II   Composition
• Part III   Rhetoric
• Afterword
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index