Instructor: Michael Bell (Just "Michael" please.) Class Meetings/Rooms:	Email: night.gardener@gmail.com (Use this address for all course-related correspondence if a timely reply matters to you.)
Office: HU 357	Office Hours: To be announced

Required Texts/Materials

• First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan
• The Video Game Theory Reader by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron
• World of Warcraft + Three months’ subscription

Get both books right away! We’ll be reading them simultaneously. Also get your WoW account started as soon as you can (as in this week).

Introduction

Hello and welcome to English 203: Writing in Context. Our "context" for this course, as you know, will be games: computer games, table-top role-playing games, and board games. There is no question that games have become a key feature of our cultural landscape, not only outpacing the film and music industries in terms of economic growth, but also introducing new forms of negotiation with cultural texts—the agency of the "interactor" which defines contemporary gaming experience is fundamentally different from the spectator-performance or reader-text dynamic that has until now largely defined art. This course is about exploring and analyzing these new forms of textual negotiation in terms of their formal structures as well as their political and ideological implications. We’ll start with some basic questions: How can the formal structures of games be described? To what extent can games be analyzed in literary terms? How does the presence of an interactor (player) affect this "literature"? At what point do games become experience rather than "text"? How do games resist or express or redefine traditional narrative structures? To what extent do games fulfill the potential of literary experience? And the big questions, at least for us here in this class: To what extent do games reflect and sustain the ideological (patriarchal) structures at work in our culture? What does it mean that the gaming industry remains (apparently) largely defined and controlled by men and boys?

So yes, we’ll be playing games, but it will be a studious sort of play, and we’ll be applying some fairly advanced theory to our observations in the hopes of revealing some of the implications of gaming culture. I suspect that some of you will resist this, at least at first, because our approach will necessarily require you to distance yourself from the immersion-effect that many games strive for, and our research may reveal some rather negative aspects of our subject. However, you will come to understand games much better, and you’ll develop greater ability to critically analyze your observations and experience through writing. My hope is that this course will allow you to add critical thinking and writing to the agency you take with you into gaming environments.

  

About the critical approach of the course

My philosophy as a composition/literature instructor is guided by several assumptions and approaches I’d like to share with you here at the outset. These assumptions are basic features of contemporary critical theory, and will largely determine the emphasis of our discussions and my expectations for your work:

• "Meaning" is made through negotiation between text and reader within specific cultural and historical contexts. Interpretations are not answers to riddles, discovery of the static "hidden meanings" lying latent in texts (in this course many of our "texts" will be games); interpretations are made and remade in the complicated act of each person’s reading/viewing and writing. This is particularly germane to our work in this course: whether the developers of World of Warcraft or GURPS intended specific meanings or not is irrelevant—meanings can emerge from any art independent of creative intentions. This is not to say anything goes. You’ll always have to base your analyses of texts on evidence and careful delineation of your frames of reference, but the "rightness" of your work will be determined by the strength of your analysis, not some external authority. Your individual experience will become a key part of what you bring to your reading, writing (and playing) for this course: "finding meaning" is a creative, and often quite personal activity.
• Consideration of the sensual and irrational in art and literature should be an essential feature of reading and interpretation. The traditional division of "form" and "content" makes discussion of texts convenient, and we will probably have to make use of this convenience ourselves, but we will do so with the awareness that this division can prove to be a liability if we are tempted to push aside sensual surfaces in favor of tidy abstractions, or get so wrapped up in surfaces that we ignore implications. There is a balance to be found, so we will not ignore the sensual and irrational qualities of our texts in favor of the intellectual. In other words, we will certainly be playing our games as we analyze them—after all, it is in our sensual responses that most of us find the greatest joy in the experience of art, in any form.
• Coming to greater understanding is a rigorous, complex process always provisional and incomplete, and an effective idea undergoes a constant process of revision and refinement. Writing with ideas rather than opinions (which are usually just frozen prejudices) is difficult because such writing doesn’t emerge from certainty and never truly rests, but only ideas create knowledge. Trust me when I say I won’t let you rest on the comfort of received notions and intellectual habits. We’re not here to demonstrate what we’ve learned, but rather to build knowledge. Apart from the authenticity of the resultant writing, one of the great upsides to all this sweat and toil is that you’ll usually find yourself caring more about your own writing—it’s not possible to write well unless you have a deep interest in your own work.
• To be able to respond to art effectively, we must be able to situate ourselves within specific (possibly unfamiliar) cultural/historical/personal moments, however provisionally. For example, I can uselessly shake my fist at "kids these days," or I can try to grasp what it is to be a student living in the USA, probably born sometime in the mid-eighties, trying to negotiate becoming an adult during this rather screwed-up beginning of the 21^st century. We all have filters over our perceptions (sometimes blinders) that can dramatically shape our responses to new information. If we remain unable to acknowledge these filters, we’re liable to miss tremendous learning potential in our experience. I know from working with past groups of English 202/203 students that there will be no greater obstacle to your success in this course than an over-attachment to habits of mind and those things and thoughts you presently see yourself "relating" to. To say "I don’t relate to that" is usually just saying "I won’t think about that." To succeed in this course you’ll have to free yourself from your comfort zones somewhat so that you can relate to the unfamiliar in a larger world than the one you live in now. (This goes for me as well of course.)

And so we proceed…part of what will make our work exciting, and why I do what I do, is that in literature we approach basic questions of what it means to live in the world and communicate our experience. It is art that teaches us (or warns us) what it is to be human—this is why literature is so important, and ultimately, through all the rigorous work we’ll do, my hope is that we all emerge happier human beings of greater awareness living in a richer world.

 

Course Objectives

You will develop greater skill in observation, analysis, and critical thinking, able to read closely, attend to complexities of meaning, and make specific and significant connection between texts, your own experience, and the world.

You will further develop your skill in the process of analytic writing.

You will be able to take part in authentic academic literary discourse.

You will be able to connect texts to their cultural/historical contexts, other texts, and the contemporary world, and through this practice come to greater awareness of your own specific and complex position within culture, literary tradition, and history (including your personal history).

You will be conversant with some key concepts and structures described in contemporary culture-theory.

You will have greater skill in giving and receiving careful critique of writing in progress.

You will be able to use artistic texts as points of cultural reference as you communicate and clarify your ideas.

You will develop your ability to communicate and build ideas within an academic community, favoring cooperative, analytic styles of discourse over contentious, debate-style argument.

You will be able to seek out and evaluate information about literary works: their subjects, their contexts, and their interpretations.

You will have increased fluency in the conventions of writing, on both the global and local levels.

You will learn to find greater personal connection to a greater variety of texts and subjects.

  

Course Requirements

Readings: I expect you to come to class having prepared assigned reading. ("Reading" for our purposes will include tasks in-game.) The reading is the center of this course, and your success is absolutely dependent on your ability to prepare assigned reading before we come together for class meetings. "Preparing a reading" in a college course is an act of composition. This means that you’ve read deliberately, carefully, thoughtfully, with specific purposes, within a specific reading community. It means you’ve re-read key sections, made comments in the margins, perhaps even done some journaling in response. Since you’ll have to write something about virtually all the assigned reading, skimming and skipping (or wikipedia-ing) won’t be a viable option if you want to do well. The reading for this class is not easy—don’t expect to be able to do the reading effectively the night before (or the day of) a reading assignment.

Reading Quizzes: To help you prepare the reading and to prompt discussion, we’ll have frequent unannounced short reading quizzes. These quizzes will be focused on basic information rather than analysis—do the reading, and you'll do well on them. The quizzes are a significant factor in your final grade. At the end of the quarter, I’ll grade your quiz performance cumulatively as one of your informal writing assignments, with 90% or higher achieving a "strong."

 Group Work/Presentations: You’ll be assigned at least one collaborative reading/writing task for classroom presentation. (You’ll be talking about a game of some kind that particularly interests you.) These presentations will be evaluated as informal writing assignments. I realize group work can be problematic, but I’ve been working on ways to encourage balanced groups in which all members take part.

Conferences: You’ll be meeting with me outside of class (usually in my office) for required one-on-one conferences of about twenty minutes on several occasions. These will be relaxed conversations in which we’ll talk about your ongoing work. Most of the time we’ll focus on particular assignments, but I will always be open to discuss anything you wish—the conferences are your time. Your participation in conferences is vital to your success in the class, allowing me to give you intensive personal attention that the classroom doesn’t always allow.

Formal Essays: There will be just two formal essay assignments of 5-7 pages each, but each of these assignments will include multiple drafts. These particular genres are new to English 203, so I can’t point you to clear models, but I will of course describe specific requirements in greater detail later, with full assignment sheets and accompanying grading criteria.

• Formal Essay #1: Critical Ethnography. For your first formal essay you’ll be exploring and describing World of Warcraft from a participant-observer perspective and applying specific critical theory to your experiences. You won’t have to be a trained anthropologist to conduct this research, but I will be giving you some guidelines regarding the preparation of field-notes and the application of specific theory from our reading. The goal for this paper will be to explore the implicit meanings of World of Warcraft considered as both experience and text, placing it within the overall MMOG genre.
• Formal Essay #2: Critical Game Specification. Your second essay will require you to design a game "spec," basically a thorough description/plan of a game or write a GURPS role-playing game environment. Both options will require a critical/theoretical component. In other words, you’ll be designing a game or game-environment within an explicit critical framework, explaining your creative decisions in theoretical terms. This will be a highly challenging assignment, with both creative-writing and academic-writing components. The writing of this paper should give you a greatly enhanced ability to perceive meaning in other game-texts.

 A note regarding "format": I’ve heard this word a lot in my classes, usually from students who seem to want to plug information into some kind of conventional template. Don’t get hung up on "format" in this course. The essay assignments above aren’t "formats," but rather defined approaches to interpretation. Although analytic writing includes certain essential features—ideas, evidence, development—specific applications of the analytic process can take many forms, and the rigor and creativity of your specific analysis is far more important than any "format." What you’re learning in this course isn’t a writing formula you can plug into future essay assignments for other classes: you’re practicing the kind of sound analysis that goes into the writing of an effective essay of whatever genre. "Good writing" is dependent on whatever discourse community you’re working with, not it’s adherence to some universal standard.

 

Course Notebook/Journal: Since this course is so much about developing a unified process of thinking, reading, and writing, I’m going to ask you to document your growing facility with this process in the form of a course journal. This journal will include all of the written work you do in the course, including drafts of formal essays, in-class writing activities, informal writing assignments, and online work. You should also include all handouts, research, and other assignment materials, as well as any journal-writing you do in connection with your coursework. Strong journals will be beautifully organized, totally complete, and thoroughly document active engagement with writing assignments and class activities through a wide range of interesting goodies. This notebook weighs heavily in your course-grade: start collecting now.

  

Informal Writing Assignments: The informal writing assignments will prepare you for class discussion and activities, help you to engage the reading from new angles, and function in some cases as clear approaches to your formal essay assignments. However, these 1-5 page tasks are rigorous, graded assignments in themselves, and your attention to them will largely determine your overall success in the course. I’ll be assigning several different kinds, with full instructions later:

• Response Pieces in which you’ll examine your personal response to a given text analytically or descriptively.
• Research Pieces in which you’ll explore information (or experience) associated with a text.
• Expressive Piece in which you’ll respond creatively to a text.

The informal writing assignments usually end up being a lot of fun, and I’m always trying to dream up weird new variations of them. The formal essays are where you’ll do the heavy lifting, but the informal assignments are where you’ll do much of your experimentation.

Website: I’ve prepared a website for us at http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/~bellm. (Note that this is not Blackboard! I’m not using Blackboard.) I’ll use the website quite a bit, so I recommend that you check the site several times a week, at the very least the evening before each class. I’ll post assignments and handouts, supplemental texts of various kinds, visual supplements, relevant links, announcements, and a kind of an English 203 blog. Most importantly, you’ll be required to take part in an online discussion group, with weekly prompts for your response. Your participation in these groups will be evaluated at the end of the quarter as a key component of your final grade. In the past, a fairly thriving community of students has formed around the website, and you may find some of the more hardcore there still.

Final Project: The final project for this class will comprise two main parts. The first part will be a writing portfolio including a thorough polish of one of your two formal essays (or the expansion of one of your informal pieces to essay length), a revisited informal writing assignment, and a 3-5 page introductory piece in which you’ll reflect on your development as a writer in the context of the course as a whole.

The second part of your final project will be a complimentary expressive piece (an "art project"). For the expressive piece you may decide to work alone or with a group, and I’m going to leave the form up to you and give free rein to your ambitions. I’ve seen all kinds of interesting responses to this part of the final: you may decide to present a piece of your writing in a fictional genre, prepare a photo-essay or other artwork, document an exploration through sound or video recording, prepare a website, present one of your essays, write a small play, make a movie, or present some research done in connection with the coursework. We’ll be negotiating specific terms later, but this latter part of the assignment is going to allow quite a bit of flex. My goal for the final project is that you produce something that satisfies your own learning style, fascinations, and predilections, and provides you with pleasant and memorable closure to your work.

 

Course Policies (Grading and Attendance)

Attendance Policy: This is a small, discussion-based course. Regular and punctual attendance is vital to its success, and by extension, to your success as a member of the course community. Think of it this way: in our ten-week Tuesday-Thursday course, missing two classes is missing 10% of them. Since a student who misses this much class hasn’t totally fulfilled a course so focused on collaborative process and development, attendance is a significant part of final evaluations: no more than two absences are permitted for an A or A-, no more than three for a B-, B or B+, and no more than four for a C-, C, or C+. Students who miss five or more classes may be asked to withdraw. Note that coming to me the day after you missed class to say you’re sorry you missed class doesn’t strike the absence from the record. Other than personal misfortune, the only way to excuse an absence is to let me know what’s going on well in advance, with accompanying documentation. Absences due to illness will be excused only after you've presented documentation.

This class also features a +1 hour arranged component, which will be conducted online, in-game (barring some situation beyond our control such as a server outage). Your attendance at these gaming sessions will be part of your attendance requirement, so make sure you have all your technical issues sorted out in advance.

Furthermore, late arrivals to class will be noted. Every forty minutes of tardiness will be counted as one absence. (For example, if you were ten minutes late on two occasions and twenty minutes late on one occasion, you’d have one full absence on your record.) Much more happens during the first ten minutes of class than roll call: I make announcements, collect drafts, answer questions, comment on previous meetings. Furthermore, the first ten minutes of this class will often involve some kind of presentation, either mine or a student’s, which late arrivals disrupt. I’m not trying to flex any authority here; I just want my classes to work well for the people in them.

 

Writing Evaluation: Evaluation of student writing is one of the most difficult aspects of any writing class. As writing can be an intensely personal endeavor, essay grades can sometimes seem like personal judgments (as in "I got a C because my teacher doesn’t like my style/my ideas/me"). Furthermore, as ambiguity is the very medium of a rigorous writing/literature course, there are rarely clear "right" answers to the work we do.

For this reason, students sometimes feel that evaluation in writing courses is "too subjective" and therefore dependent on the whim of the instructor, or luck. Please be assured that I will not see your writing as the measure of your intelligence or your value as a human being, nor will I apply some mysterious personal criteria to your work. How well I get along with you personally will have nothing whatsoever to do with my evaluation of your writing. I don’t give the least preference to English majors, nor do I weigh grades toward particular styles or subjects—if you begin to push analytic writing into breathtaking new forms I’ve never seen before, you’ll find that I’m your biggest fan, and if you’re interested in something outrageous or weird or taboo or (gasp) "non-academic," you’ll find me right there with you, encouraging you to take it even further.

Ultimately I hope to demonstrate that there is no such thing as "good writing" in any absolute sense. There is no static essay-writing formula that you can master, and what worked for you before probably won’t work now. Academic writing evaluation depends on the requirements of a specific assignment in a specific academic context—what might be highly successful in one context could be unacceptable in another (and this sure as anything isn’t high school, or even AP English). With this in mind, every assignment sheet I hand out will be accompanied by specific guidelines, requirements, and grading criteria. A key goal here is that you come out of the class with greater ability to tailor your writing to specific contexts, with a greater level of commitment.

My specific grading system (described on the following page) might seem a bit unconventional to some of you. I adapted this system to allow me to grade your coursework in broader strokes—I see most all the work you do during the course as "work in progress." I allow revisions of everything until the tenth week, so no hairs need be split until I have to prepare your final course grade. I’ll be meeting with each of you at the end of the quarter to discuss your cumulative grade going into the final project. It’s highly unlikely your final course grade will come as an unpleasant surprise. If you pay attention, my grading system basically allows you to choose your grade.

 

Grade Designations: The work you turn in for evaluation during the course will receive one of the following descriptive designations.

Strong

A "strong" grade means that the work exceeds expectations, fulfilling the assignment with power and originality. A "strong" celebrates work going beyond basic requirements into true excellence, with breathtaking levels of engagement, surprising new insights, powerful evidence, and language of exceptional range and clarity. "Strong" grades are fairly uncommon, as they should be if "excellent" is going to mean anything. "Strong" work means that I am a fan of you.

Effective

An "effective" grade means that the work adequately fulfills the basic expectations of the given assignment and college-level writing (the work does everything the assignment requires), however there are probably minor logical contradictions or conflicting digressions, gaps in evidence and analysis, ideas that have not been adequately developed or have a "borrowed" quality (cliché), and/or significant clarity issues. "Effective" work does the job, but hasn’t quite earned the writer a dozen roses and a night on the town.

Developing

A "developing" grade would indicate that the work just barely meets the expectations outlined in the grading criteria; you should be extra diligent in looking for opportunities to make your work effective. Essays receiving this designation usually exhibit obvious gaps and deficiencies in idea development, argument, and evidence. "Developing" work is moving, but the writer is often waiting for the fog to clear before things really get underway.

Not Yet Acceptable

Work that receives a "Not Yet" designation must be brought up to at least "Developing" through further revision BEFORE the final project is due. Work receiving the "Not Yet" designation is typically fundamentally incomplete in some way. These grades have been far too common in the past. I’d like to see none of them appear this spring. If your life is getting too complicated for homework, let me know before it comes to this.

(Note: graded drafts MUST be attached to all revisions.)

 

Final Course Grade Contract: Your overall course grade will be determined as follows:

To receive an A- or higher, you must earn a "strong" on three informal writing assignments and one formal essay, demonstrate "strong" performance in online discussion groups and the course notebook; earn a "strong" on the final project, record no late, unacceptable, or missing work, attend all conferences, and miss no more than two classes. All other work must be at least "effective."

B or higher requires a "strong" on one informal writing assignment and "effective" or better on three others, "effective" on one formal essay, "effective" performance in online discussion groups, an "effective" on the notebook, an "effective" or better on the final project, no late, unacceptable, or missing work, attendance at all conferences, no more that three absences.

C+ or higher requires at least three "effective" informal writing assignments, "effective" work on one essay and the notebook, "effective" performance in online discussion groups, an "effective" or better on the final project, no unacceptable or missing work, no more than four absences.

C- or higher requrires "developing" or better on all essays, informal writing assignments, and the notebook, a "developing" or higher on the final project, and no more than 4 absences. One "not yet acceptable" may be okay for a C- IF the final project is "effective" or better.

A failing grade for the course is possible. If you’ve missed five classes after the drop deadline, you risk having to re-take the course, even if most your work is "strong." You may also have to re-take the course if you neglect to turn in ALL required assignments.

Explanation of "or higher": Anything beyond a given category, however small, will result in a jump to the next highest grade: C+ to B-, B to B+ and so forth. Those of you poring over this for loopholes and shortcuts are welcome; the system is designed to allow you to focus your revisions on what you need for the grade you want. The system I use is designed to allow you the highest grade possible going into the final project evaluation and to allow you the most benefit from the course without penalizing you excessively for "developing" work. I want to recognize and reward process as well as product.

A word of caution: This system has always allowed those students who really wanted an "A" to earn one, but it has been wickedly surprising to the careless or forgetful owing to the course notebook and online discussion requirements. Both of these things you just do—your engaged participation is all that I evaluate. However there’s no way to make up for lost opportunities for discussion online, and slamming together a decent notebook during the 9^th week of the quarter is virtually impossible.

Due dates: Much of what we do and talk about in class coincides with the writing homework. If you haven’t completed the work, what we do in class will be fairly confusing. You won’t be able to participate effectively, and you won’t get much benefit from the discussions. You’ll just sit there staring around and trying to fake it. Therefore please do everything you possibly can to turn in your work on time. If there is somewhere you have to be on the day an assignment is due, tell me about it beforehand so that we can work something out. (Usually this means turning in an assignment early.) I will of course allow extensions in the event of disaster, but please be advised that printer malfunction or "out of paper" errors aren’t included in this category. To encourage you to keep up with the pace of the course, I’m going to reduce a late assignment’s grade as per the following:

• One-two days late: maximum designation possible would be "Effective."
• Three days late: maximum designation possible would be "Developing."

I’ll read and respond to work turned in more than four days late, but I won’t enter a grade into the book other than an indication that you’ve completed the task. Nevertheless, all of your work must be turned in before I can give you a passing grade for the class. In other words, you couldn’t just skip an assignment because it was a week overdue. You would still have to complete it and turn it in.

I don’t want to be a cop; I just want you to get as much as you possibly can out of the course. If I let things slide for you, all I’m doing is leading you toward a "K" grade (incomplete) as things pile up and pile up until there’s no way for you to do it all. (And in my experience, most "K" grades eventually become "F" grades.)

Course Schedule: I keep the course schedule online at http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/~bellm/203schedule.html. Check the schedule often in case any changes are made during the course (and there are always changes). A due-date might change after an assignment is given out (always in your favor); barring some kid of computer disaster that prevents me from making an update, the due-dates on the on-line schedule are the up-to-the-minute last word, so that’s where to go if you aren’t sure when something is due.

A few words about plagiarism: Plagiarism is when you claim someone else's ideas or writing as your own, knowingly or not. It also occurs if you allow someone else to claim your words or ideas as their own or if you represent finished work of your own from a previous course as original work in a following course. Plagiarism usually results from student carelessness or ignorance of citation conventions. We will be going over proper citation conventions during the course to ensure that you know exactly how to differentiate your own work from the work of others in your writing. Cases of egregious plagiarism are dealt with quite severely. In the past, students found to have intentionally plagiarized work have been required to drop the class with a severe GPA penalty.

Dreams and Promises. I’m delighted to be here with you, and I want to assure you I’m absolutely committed to your learning. Please feel free to ask me anything about the course, the assignments, your work, or my reasons for doing something a particular way. I think carefully about everything we do, but I’m always seeking ways to better adapt my methods to you as individuals and students. Furthermore, should something come up that makes you feel uncomfortable or slighted, please feel welcome to talk to me about it. There are over 12,000 students on this campus, but it’s not a diploma factory (yet), and I’ll do everything in my power to make this course productive, enjoyable, and meaningful for each of you.