Week 12 - Video Games, Narrative, Modality, and Literacy

I'm one of those people who doesn't play video games, as I confessed in class. However, I found Gee's support of games as active learning, problem solving and even good for the soul believable and comforting. I do want to play video games, I do.

I really liked the whole layout, design and use of color in the game lab. It was inviting and fun. I liked the way there were separate corners where players could be isolated from other parts of the room.

Being a complete novice as a player, yet knowledgeable because my son was so into video games until he left for the Navy, I wanted to first observe how a game was played before deciding to try it. I played the Wii cooking game. This would have been a fun game to play with my 3-year-old granddaughter. I watched while Melissa and Ricci played the game with the bongos and gorillas. Afterwards Ricci exclaimed, "That was fun!" I also watched while others played Guitar Hero.

Finally I tried the Sim tutorial. My character got really tired of waiting for me to learn to use the controls and he sighed endlessly - poor thing. He had the same name as my son who likes the games so much. I kept imagining it was him dying of boredom while I got orientated. So enough of Sim, I moved on.

Finally, I went back to the separate room on the east side of the game room where I had observed earlier. I watched while Moushumi was winning BoomBox (I think that's the name). I was offered a controller, so I played the next round with Moushumi and Janice. Moushumi was ahead when I managed to knock down a whole bunch of blocks, putting me in the lead. After that they couldn't catch up and I won. That felt really great. We moved on to the next level. Moushumi, who played with such steely determination, got ahead in score and won. I really wanted a rematch but we were out of time.

I think that most of the 36 game principles applied to role playing games or games of strategy. But I didn't see anything there about competitiveness. That was the one thing that finally hooked me into actually really wanting to play a video game. The desire to win!

While I've never been hooked on video games, I did enjoy other games, especially board games and card games as a kid and a grown-up. And it was a desire to win that always made me competitive. I think there's still a streak of that in me! But next time, I do want to try a strategy or role playing game.

Final Research Paper Brainstorming

This is really initial brainstorming. I don't know what I want to write about. However, I can talk about which things I especially connected to.

Like Susan I really liked Cynthia Selfe's article The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning however I am not really interested in classroom application so much as I'm interested in ... I don't know "real world application" ... but not work or school. In one of the instructor comments on my audio project reflection another Selfe article was suggested. I went and looked at Self's pages at the Ohio State University website. She's very interesting and has done a lot of research on digital composition.

In the rhetoric class I'm taking my research paper will use The Political Brain by Drew Westen as its center. The message of this book is about creating rhetorical narratives that resonate with voters emotionally. It's not specifically about multimodal but he often describes all the modes of persuasion used in political ads.

This train of thought leads to current events: candidate Barak Obama's use of text messages, the Internet and other digital means to create an army of supporters who created the largest campaign funds chest ever and helped to get him elected. This seems like a rich area of multimedia that when combined with a good understanding of political rhetoric that resonates could be the basis of a research paper.

Hmmmm .... so what would my theme or my question be? How did Obama use multimedia to win an election? I started the video games reading and I think the readings that have to do with storytelling may connect here. Storytelling, political narrative and how the use of multimedia influences viewers, listeners, reader, etc.

Okay, so this was only supposed to be one paragraph and brainstorming. I think I've got a good start.