Rhetoric: March 2004 Archive Page

My "Computer Connection" section (in a distant corner of the main exhibition hall) was more interactive than I had expected, so I didn't get to cover all my material -- notably this list of "good practices" for using blogs in the classroom. Since a "real" weblog is a license to write whatever and whenever you want, an instructor who assigns the topic, frequency, or length of blog entries (in order to facilitate grading) violates the spirit that draws voluntary bloggers to their avocation.

The "forced blogging paradigm" is the resistance that results when even voluntary bloggers feel hampered by the imposition of academic rules and standards. It's also the resistance that results when students who don't really want to blog at all are forced to do so. Here are a few strategies I've found helpful.

In Class, Refer to Student Blogs. In the minute or two before class starts, I sometimes chat with students about the content of their blogs. Of course, the best bloggers will tend to get the most attention, and the result is that the infrequent bloggers will feel marginalized. That?s the way it is in the blogosphere outside of academia, but it makes good pedagogical sense to recognize the achievements of less committed bloggers, too.

When asking a student to repeat for the class the contents of a particularly good blog entry that I feel might be useful in sparking a discussion, I find that students sometimes need their memory jogged if they are expected to talk about something they blogged in the wee hours of the morning or maybe a couple days ago. Calling the blog entry upon on the screen, saying a few words about why it seemed significant to you, and then inviting the student to click through their weblog seems to be a good strategy.

Begin Oral Presentations from Blogs. I ask my students to blog their notes for their oral presentations. In my upper-level course, peer pressure encourages students not to identify this kind of forced blogging as an assignment -- students just casually mention a thought that occurred to them while reading Plato, and then launch into their subject from there. Since I encourage them to link to their sources, it's easier to encourage them to emphasize their own ideas, rather than spend most of their oral presentation summarizing what they find on SparkNotes or other curiousity-killing "study guide" websites.

Give Flexible ?Forced Blogging? Assignments. Requiring students to post X comments of length Y every week may force some middle-of-the-road students to write a little longer, a little more frequently; but it will also encourage the Type-A students to stop when they have reached the magic number. That can kill the dynamic of a weblog, which feeds off of the feverish productivity of the A-listers. I might also ask students to write a short response to the assigned text, but give them the option of blogging it (if they have a lot to say and want to make it public) or just hand it to me on paper. Even if only or two students blogs a reaction essay, those will probably be at least mildly interesting.

Blog During Class. Not all the time? but whenever the site is sagging a bit, asking all students to blog for 15 minutes can help perk things up. Sometimes I suggest that they post only comments that contain questions for their peers, rather than create new entries. Responding to the 'Forced Blogging' Paradigm: Good Practices for Weblogs in the ClassroomCCCC 04)

While my suggested prompts regarding John Donne's Holy Sonnets and The Secret Life of Bees sit ignored, during the time I was giving my presentation on blogging at the 4Cs, and while I show the audience the SHU blog, I see that debate is currently raging on the subject of athletics at Seton Hill University.

Blogging puts students in the driver's seat. There's a great community of bloggers at SHU. The ride can be bumpy -- particularly if some students feel left out or attacked. But sometimes, the best thing an instructor can do is sit back and trust the students. They'll work this out, and they'll do it through writing.. what more can a writing instuctor ask?

"Mixed in with the usual stuff about CIA mind-control beams, talking dogs, and monkey-people, I heard him mention beta decay, instantons, density matrix, and subspaces of n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds," Willard said. "I'm not sure where he got it, but he definitely seems to have had extensive schooling in theoretical physics. Man, what could've happened to him?"

Stanford theoretical physicist Carl Lundergaard seconded Willard's theory on the loonball.

"He's definitely had some advanced training, though I'm not surprised that it went unnoticed for so long," Lundergaard said. "It's hard for the layperson to differentiate schizophrenic ramblings like 'Modernity chunk where the sink goes flying on the ping-pang' from legitimate terminology like 'Unstable equilibria lie on the nodal points of a separatrix in phase space.'" --Raving Lunatic Obviously Took Some Advanced Physics (Onion -- Will Expire)

Foreign Dispatches has archived a longer snippet.

You've probably seen, heard or even used the term "spamming" to refer to the act of sending unsolicited commercial email (UCE), or "spam" to refer to the UCE itself. Following is our position on the relationship between UCE and our trademark SPAM.... Let's face it. Today's teens and young adults are more computer savvy than ever, and the next generations will be even more so. Children will be exposed to the slang term "spam" to describe UCE well before being exposed to our famous product SPAM. Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, "Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail?" --Spam and the Internet (Spam.com)

I can't say I'm alarmed by the notion that children will be exposed to e-spam before they taste SPAM, but this article is remarkably free of the administrative and legalistic bluster that one usually associates with companies offended by misuse of their trademarks. A tip of the hat to Hormel -- this article makes me more sympathetic to a different victim of the spam onslaught. (But the lounge-lizard music on the SPAM home page has got to go.) (Found via KairosNews.)

The conference provided a compressed picture of some of the intellectual activity going on in video game studies today. In a short summary, it was clear that early attempts to define the discipline or ague against a sort of "academic colonization" were hopeless. The ideas flowing into the area of video game studies from all quarters hold great promise to energize the notion of studying something as banal as video games. The literary critics were not going to leave our beloved game world, I discovered. Then again, neither were the musicians, lawyers, cultural studies folk, computer science departments or anyone else.

The fact I gathered over and over again at the conference, and one I think that has been missed in the past, is that the variety of people studying games'even those who don't happen to call themselves "ludologists"'still share a common passion and pioneering spirit that all gamers have. Yes, even those literary critics care about games. --David Thomas
-- Princeton Video Game Conference (Buzzcut.com)

The Critical Study of Computer Games: A Brief IntroductionJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections.

While I mostly wrote those conference reflections for the benefit of game theorists who weren't able to attend the conference, if you're new to the subject, you might appreciate a general introduction.

Over the past few years, a very exciting movement in Europe (and particulary in Scandinavia) has been carving out a new field of game studies; it looks like the name "ludology" is going to stick (ludus being Latin for "game").

The mainstream press has covered this trend with bemusement ("Off to College to Study... Videogames?"), but the general thrust of the article is usually something along the lines that computer games are now too deeply embedded in our culture to ignore.

The ludologists reject the idea that games are primarily a kind of variable storytelling, a kind of interactive movie, a kind of educational role-playing, an occasion for pathology, etc. Instead, games are games -- objects in their own right, with an aesthetics, a rhetoric, a cultural history, and a discourse of their own (so far as it has been shaped right now).

I don't intend the following to be definitive, or limiting. I'm just doing my best to describe what I see, in a framework that my humanities colleagues and students will be able to understand.

Of course, I wouldn't say ludology necessarily denies that the storyline or cinematic elements of a game might be part of its value. A great story or great visuals is not enough to make a game successful; in fact, plenty of games with no narrative content, blocky graphics and horrid bleepy sound, and which seem to have no point, are nonetheless fun (at least, to the people who play them). In order to get at that core -- what makes a game worth playing -- a theory of computer games has to get really geeky, drawing on the mathematic principles of what might be called classical game theory , which basically atomizes games into abstract principles such as risk, payoff, strategy, objectives, agency, and equilibrium. Gonzalo Frasca boils all this down to one concept: rules. These are foreign concepts to narratologists (who want to think in terms of stories, or potential storeis), film theorists (who concentrate on the visual grammar that is used to represent the game state), psychologists and sociologists (who are concerned with what games do to us when we play them), though they are probably very familiar to business people (who want to know the secret formula for an addictive game, so they can make it just hard enough to be a challenge, but not hard enough that people don't think it's worth the money).

Whew.

While my literary background and my chosen subfield within games (interactive fiction) would seem to naturally predispose me towards narrative, I think my work with text games shows me just how poorly the vocabulary of fiction applies to other types of games (such as simulations or game-like social spaces, where the narrative content, such as it is, is mostly improvised by players interacting a shared virtual space).

Is There a Ludologist in the House?Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections.

The absence of European videogame theorists turned the Princeton Video Game Criticism Conference, at first simply by default, into a polite but noticeable anti-ludologist festival. I don't want to give the impression that we were overrun by knee-jerk narratologists, of course, but the program was arranged so that it ended with those speakers who made it a point to disagree with the Scandinavian model.

Here at the Princeton English department, the narratologists had the home team advantage, especially when the last few speakers drew on the discourse of literary criticism.

Eric Hayot, Edward Wesp (who co-authored two presentations), and Barry Atkins, author of More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form, deliberately positioned themselves in opposition to the Scandinavian ludologists -- notably Gonzalo Frasca (who is, of course, not actually Scandinavian, but I digress).

Atkins began with the stereotypical image of the insanely focused gamer, hunched over and madly pounding on keys. Like the character Jack Nicholson plays in The Shining (who types endless variations of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."), the person in question is not having any fun. (Of course, neither is he accomplishing much work... )

Atkins recalled Aarseth's observation that a cybertext requires "labor," and notes that anything that you have to work at ceases to be fun. Note to self: Google for Tom Sawyer's line about work, which consists if everything a body doesn't want to do, and fun.

Atkins cleverly extended his "work" trope by examining the relationship between games and the workplace, noting that in an effort to control employee actions, employers are removing solitaire and other standard games normally installed as part of Windows. I don't believe he explicitly mentioned the "boss button" (which interrupts a game by popping up a fake spreadsheet or text file in case your boss walks by), but he did note that each level of an action game is typically geared towards a fight with the level "boss."

"Labor" and "work" are both reasonable interpretations of what Aarseth called the "non-trivial effort, required by readers if the "ergodic" texts such as videogames, interactive fiction, and literary hypertext. Such a text begins to reveal its contents only in response to actions of the user; this is an entirely different kind of effort from the effort one invests in interpreting those texts.

But there are plenty of kinds of effort that don't qualify as "work." Perhaps more to the point, as Tom Sawyer teaches us, in the right context, effort can be both work and fun.

I'm forgetting now how much of this comes from his talk and how much comes from the conversations we had in taverns and in cabs in and around Princeton, but Atkins feels that the European model of games scholarship is too serious -- that is, the theory of videogames currently being formulated in ivy-covered halls pays far too little attention to the fact that we play games because we expect them to give us pleasure and we stop playing them when they cease to be fun. Without a theory of fun, scholarship is too dry, and risks becoming irrelevant to the common experience of gamers.

Note: Regarding the alleged lack of attention to "fun," Jesper Juul writes:

That is so strange considering how much time I've spent on discussing fun.
Even my 1998 MA work discusses it: http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/DAC%20Paper%201998.html
And here: http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/WCGCACD.html And in relation to the experience of time: http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/timetoplay/
At the 2002 Manchester conference I also presented a paper on gameplay and fun.
And a general essay about theorizing fun and the issue of focusing too much on games as being challenges: http://www.igda.org/columns/ivorytower/ivory_Apr03.php
I don't really understand how this idea came to be, it's just so patently untrue.

Point taken, Jesper, but see my clarification below.--DGJ

One reason for the disconnect is because younger scholars who don't have the benefit of working in an environment that already recognizes new media objects as worthy of critical study [Note: Added for clarity. --DGJ] are, of necessity, courting the approval of their superiors. Mary Ann Buckles, whose 1985 study of "Adventure" seems to have been the first PH.D. devoted to the study of a computer game, does not seem to have had that kind of institutional support, and the result is worth examining: What Ever Happened to Mary Ann Buckles? (Ludology.org)

Just as the theologians, priests, congregations have significantly different roles to play on the inside, and more distant observers who can place a particular religion in a greater context have a role to play on the outside, the culture of games affords plenty of room for theorists, designers and consumers on the inside, but it seems to me game studies is a bit top-heavy -- many theorists, but few who are doing the basic research that establishes cultural and technological influences on recent developments in game culture. I enjoyed the nostalgia books (such as Herz's Joystick Nation), by my own recent examination of the "Colossal Cave Adventure" source code, and two presentations on the Atari 2600 have stirred the latent geek in me... I want to know more about the instruments and palette that the early game designers had available to them. I look forward to Matt Kirschenbaum's book on the development of storage media; while he has more to talk about than just games, the creative ways early game programmers worked around severe constraints is definitely worth study. (If there are more places to look, and I just haven't found them, someone in the know please set me straight.)

Examining the '10%' MemeJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Many of my students are thinking and talking about the gay marriage issue. Johanna Dreyfuss mentioned the "10%" statistic, citing the Kinsey report, via http://www.socal-glide.org/statistics.html.

I've encountered this statistic in student papers before, so I know that Kinsey didn't actually claim that 10% of the population was gay. According to The Kinsey Institiute, "10% of males were more or less exclusively homosexual and 8% of males were exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. For females, Kinsey reported a range of 2-6% for more or less exclusively homosexual experience/response."

That's not the same thing as saying 10% of the population is gay, but it's much less quotable. Just like a student who has already written a research paper that defends his or her position, any advocacy groups looking for statistics to support their views will emphasize the evidence that supports their position best, and often completely ignore evidence that calls their convictions into question.

I haven't read any of the Kinsey reports, but I am aware of the controversy over his research methods. In one study, he measured the number of ograsms that juvenile male subjects have during a timed period -- and this study included children from age 14 to 5 months. One of Kinsey's former associates says the research included collecting information from trained volunteers who had experience. Or, to give the same statement a shocking "spin" -- that is, they worked over an extended period of time with pedophiles who used stopwatches to observe "partners" as young as 5 months.

Dr. Judith Reiseman writes,

Kinsey fathered not only the sexual revolution, as Hugh Hefner and others have said, but the homosexual revolution as well. Harry Hay gave Kinsey that credit when Hay read in 1948 that Kinsey found "10%" of the male population homosexual. Following the successful path of the Black Civil Rights movement, Hay, a long-time communist organizer, said 10% was a political force which could be melded into a "sexual minority" only seeking "minority rights." With Kinsey as the wind in his sails, Hay formed the Mattachine Society.

But 26% (1,400) of Kinsey's alleged 5,300 white male subjects were already "sex offenders."[34] As far as the data can be established, an additional 25% were incarcerated prisoners; some numbers were big city "pimps," "hold-up men," "thieves;" roughly 4% were male prostitutes as well as sundry other criminals; and some hundreds of homosexual activists at various "gay bars" and other haunts from coast to coast.[35] This group of social outcasts and deviants were then redefined by the Kinsey team as representing your average "Joe College." With adequate press and university publicity, the people believed what they were told by our respectable scientists, that mass sexual perversion was common nationwide-so our sex education and our laws must be changed to reflect Kinsey's "reality." -- Kinsey and the Homosexual Revolution

So... regardless of whether you agree that people found in gay bars are "social outcasts and deviants," the study of 5300 white males included 26% who were "sexual offenders" and 25% who were "incarcerated prisoners".

I'd have to read the study myself to determine whether Kisney would count a prisoner who is serving a jail term of three years, and who is raped by his fellow-prisoners on one occasion, would count as having sexual experiences that are "more or less exclusively homosexual" during that three-year period.

But look out -- Dr. Reiseman is a professor of communication, she is not an expert in human sexuality; her area of expertise is not human sexuality, but how selected details of the Kinsey studies have been publicized by certain advocacy groups, to the point where nowadays few people bother to question them. She is president of "The Institute for Media Education," and she writes books and gives talks on the subject of fraudulent sexuality studies; thus, she's made a career out of debunking Kinsey's research. Those details may affect how you accept the evidence she chooses to present, but you should be equally critical of the way people who support Kinsey's claims present Kinsey's research. (See www.drjudithreisman.org.)

No matter what your position on whatever issue, be skeptical of statistics that you hear someone cite on TV or that you find online. I think supporters of gay marriage should stay far away from the 10% statistic.