Draft Forthcoming

Posted onAuthorKelsey Burroughs2 Comments

KBurroughs Gaming Literacy Activism Seminar Draft

 

Hello classmates,

My draft is above! My technology struggle didn’t ever get fixed. I lost some of what I had written and tried to recover it with no luck, so I rewrote what I could remember. I know I was closer to 10 pages than I am now, but I just couldn’t remember some of what I had already written.

Feedback memo/Writing Reflection

 

  • Why did you write about this topic/subject?

My initial proposal was very broad: literacy activism and video games. I was able to narrow that down to an exploration of a selection of indie (independent) video game creators/developers who are making games that better represent players and/or who themselves are diverse creators. I decided to look toward indie games and their creators because the mainstream/big business game development companies still almost exclusively consist of white male or Asian male creators who are making white male game protagonists/characters. The work to make games and game development more inclusive is falling on indie developers whose time and resources are much more limited than large companies, but they “fight the good fight” nonetheless.

The work of indie developers who are making more inclusive games serves to promote literacy in several ways. First, indie games are often smaller/shorter games that are more affordable (sometimes even free) than most AAA titles and even lesser-quality games created by big companies. Affordability makes gaming accessible for a broader range of people. Affordable indie gaming allows people who have never been able to afford the expensive hobby to become gamers and experience the many literacies involved in playing games (Gee describes over 30 literacies that come from playing games).

The other way that these games take an activist stance that promotes literacy is through more inclusive character design and more inclusive game developers. This increased inclusion boils down to the idea of “representation matters”. Better representation in games and behind the scenes of games shows people that they can be the hero/protagonist of their own story/adventure or that they can pursue their dreams of being a creator regardless of what they look like or where they come from. This is the major aspect of the project that made me want to research this topic.

  • What are you struggling with most with the current draft? What areas of the project are you finding most difficult?

I am struggling with getting the draft done, first and foremost, but I am most concerned about making sure that I am fulfilling the requirements of the assignment and making my explanations clear for folks who don’t game and don’t know about the topic. I want this paper to be clear for a general academic audience and also uplifting for gamers/game developers.

  • What questions about this draft do you want your readers to answer as they respond to your project?
    • Do I explain everything enough?
    • Do I fulfill the assignment?
    • Do I veer off track or ramble too much?
    • How is my organization?
    • If I made this project into an infographic for my presentation, what would be the most interesting parts to include?

2 thoughts on “Draft Forthcoming”

  1. Toward your infographic question:

    Depending on how big of a deal you make out of your difficulty with finding appropriate games to analyze, you might consider an infographic showing your various search attempts/methods/phrases and how few results each one returned.

    Maybe also the inappropriate ones that were returned.

    Also, unrelated to the infographic possibility: it might really make an impact to show the terrible up-skirt game.

    Other comments are in the word doc I emailed back to you.

  2. I’m really excited about your project and how you’re moving forward some gaming literacy work into areas that have been under-explored or fully untreated by scholarship. That’s awesome! One thing that you could do early on this piece, however, is create the exigency for the project: why is it important? You reference Gamergate but I think before you move into methodology, you will want to situate your project in a bigger conversation about gaming literacies and representation so that reader see how your contribution in the form of this study advanced or connects to previous work. Does that make sense?
    Actually, now that I read what you have for methodology, it sounds like that’s more literature review than methodology. The texts you reference there you claim are going to help you with your argument, but they don’t explain how you made your choices of what to analyze, how you developed for framework for analysis, how you selected your data, organized you data, etc, which seems to me more method/ology work. Or do those texts do both things?
    What’s interesting about Anastasia and Montaro, to me, is that both games represent women in traditional genres of adventure — passive characters being leered at or damsels in distress — and that those genres represent literacies that have been sponsored by both fantasy story lines/Campbell-inspired monomyths, as well as heterosexist gaming frameworks. Your project, I’m thinking, is looking at how some of these games might sponsor alternative literacies by engaging players in different practices and structures of play and narrative, yes? Will you be unpacking those different practices of place and narrative as part of your analysis? Am I guessing what track this is heading down (I say this because I’ve not finished reading your draft as I’ve written this paragraph)?
    I’m curious about why your methods section is describing the process of finding the games you chose — if you’re going to analyze the games and how they sponsor alternative literacy practices in players, it doesn’t really matter how you found them. If you’re trying to make arguments about how few games there are or how hard they are to find, however, then this long discussion of your process might make sense. I’m not sure you need to do both in this project, however.
    I’d suggest for this sort of project, one focused on literacy practices and literacies at work in games, that you not try to make the bigger argument that there are more or fewer games or that representation is better or worse, but that you simply study the literacy practices in some of these games which seem to you to work outside the norms of gender/sexuality representation (are those the two categories you’re ultimately exploring, or just one of those?) and then look at how those games sponsor alternative literacies around gender (and/or sexuality) from what mainstream/other games have done. For this project, that’s plenty to do and can then lead to a future project that makes broader claims, perhaps.

Leave a Reply