I have to admit that when I look at the list of learning tasks associated with an MMORPG starter environment (included at right) and then compare it with my own class I am suitably chastened. Many of us could probably point to a few of these things that we feel are implemented successfully in our individual classes. But here is the sobering reality: in an MMORPG design it isn't enough for two or three or four of these to be implemented successfully. The game needs to realize all of them if it is to succeed in providing a supportive structure for new players that will help them to learn the game and desire to continue learning it. I notice several of these expectations that I am not meeting well, or at all in my own classes. In no way therefore am I criticizing the mass of writing teachers while claiming to have seen the light at the end of the tunnel. I do, however, feel as if I might finally have located my zippo.
In essence, the overarching tasks of the writing class are very similar to those embodied in the design of MMORPGs:
- Help students learn what they need to in order to participate effectively
- Encourage student engagement with the material
- Develop students' ability to go on learning for themselves beyond the boundaries of the class.
There is, naturally, considerable debate about how effectively these are being achieved in our writing classes. Such a debate is a necessary and healthy component of the self-scrutiny that is attached to our discipline; it becomes a lot less healthy when the discussion takes place on our local campuses and proceeds at the tiresome "Johnny can't write" level (and those of us who study games and game design are equally gainfully occupied defending against the "Janey got a gun" charge). The difficulty in determining whether or not these goals have been met is often twofold. First, the outcomes are defined broadly and in terms that describe what someone would expect to see demonstrated (a piece of writing that looks like this, that, or the other) rather than the central issue of what students should have learned. Second, various constituencies within and beyond the college often expect the writing class to perform vastly different (and sometimes incompatible) kinds of work. For some it is a remedial class whose task is to repair broken students and fix gaps in knowledge(s) they should already possess before coming to college. For others the class should serve as an introduction to some of the specific skills necessary for college life. First-year writing should prepare students to write adequate papers in other classes. It should prepare them to write adequately in their chosen profession. The class should be preparation for citizenship. The class should prepare them to undertake further study of writing itself. The class should help them find their voice.
The individual writing class, then, is often saddled with tasks that should more properly be spread across three organizational structures: the specific writing class, the writing program as a whole, and the General Curriculum or Core requirements. Therefore when considering the design grammar of the starter components of an MMORPG to see if there are ways these concepts can be translated into the language of pedagogy we need to be mindful that the translation may look very different depending on what function the writing class is being understood to perform. I don't intend this overview to be exhaustive as much as thought-provoking, so I will only focus on those elements of the grammar where writing classes tend to suffer.
Familiarize the player with the interface. I believe that this is one area where writing teachers as a whole score a resounding "could do better." Much better, in fact. What exactly the interface is will vary depending on whether it is understood as the means to be able to operate the "writing and research" system, or the "function in college" system. For the latter, for example, students typically don't understand how to take useful notes in class (and particularly in a class that involves a lot of discussion), or to read closely. With regard to the writing class, I'm often struck with how much difficulty my students have reading and understanding my assignments. I've found, in particular, that the fact that I describe the goals of the assignment or attempt to provide a context for that we're doing appears completely alien to them, with their previous experience of directive, decontextualized high school writing assignments. But more generally I've often noticed that with any assignment they seem at a loss how to parse it for the necessary information. When it comes to real library research students have a lot of difficulty with annotating and organizing information (even little tricks like telling them to write the citation information on the first page of any photocopy can be a revelation). A colleague of mine has had a lot of success with a class exercise that teaches students how to find information they are looking for very quickly by using the table of contents and index in a book; what we might well consider to be a patronizing assumption about students' abilities in fact turned out to be developing a skill that even our affluent and well-schooled (in one sense) students lacked. Remember that in a game design context the interface is not the higher order game activities that the player will be using; it is rather the means that the player will use to access those higher order functions and most games consider this step absolutely critical to an effective gaming experience. A student in a writing class is going to have a hard time playing the game if she can't understand the assignment, or organizes her research as supporting evidence rather than material for analysis and reflection. Sadly, teachers typically devote little time to this aspect of learning, expect students to figure it out on their own, and then get angry and frustrated when they don't.
Highlight the core progress mechanic. For students the only relevant measure of progress is grades. Of course, we are up against the fact that we are part of a larger system of scoring and evaluation and whatever alternatives we adopt will receive little affirmation beyond the walls of our class. But it is not as if MMORPGs lack a scoring system either. Within a game, players have different ways of measuring for themselves their development. These can range from the nakedly capitalist (to gain the most money or loot) to the more individual and affective (develop the character's story in a particular direction). But the most common measure of progress in a game is that the player acquires and is able to deploy new skills. This is certainly part of many of our writing classes, but I wonder how often we provide an evaluative framework for our classes that defines skill-acquisition as a progress mechanic? For example, "You will be making progress when you know that you can do X?" I think this may be what many of us think we are doing when we use a grade to certify that they have passed an assignment, but I doubt that it appears that way to students.
Make the player feel as if they are part of a world. Many writing teachers go to great lengths to establish their classes as writing communities. But students don't inhabit a world that consists of a single-class, or even single-classes. Their lifeworld, as Gee would have it, is complex. And if the core gameplay of our writing game is "writing in the world" then in-class community-building may work against us to the degree that it makes it look as if the only place writing matters is in small, tightly-bound, face-to-face communities. I think many writing teachers do a very good job of helping students see that writing matters in a world that consists of small classroom communities of writers. I'm not convinced that we are as successful in demonstrating that it matters in a world community (and in fact much of the superficial evidence they will see around them suggests that it doesn't matter).
Allow players immediate and consequential participation in the world. This is probably the most widespread challenge facing writing classes (and other college classes also, but that is another story). It is the biggest difference between a traditional college education and the kind of learning environment supported by an MMORPG. Within the game world players are given tasks that while they may differ in degree from the kind of thing they will be expected to do later on in the game, don't differ in kind. Very often, however, we assign students writing tasks that have little to do with writing in any real sense: the tasks themselves don't have any real-world analog, nor do the processes and the frameworks (writing for the approbation of a single individual). In this respect writing class design largely replicates the infantilizing assumptions at work in the larger college curriculum which mandates that a student cannot possibly make any real contribution to anything until they graduate.
Allow players to achieve a level sufficient to tackle the more complex
tasks in the game. If the "consequential participation"
issue is the most widespread challenge, the issue of how to ensure students
are ready to tackle more complex writing tasks on their own remains the
most vexed and intractable challenge. The difficulty of determining how
to ensure that the skills we teach are not just relevant to writing tasks
beyond the classroom boundaries but are recognized by students
as relevant in a way that will enable them to be consciously deployed
and modified as necessary. . .this often seems to be more art than science
(and a dark art at that). Part of the problem is our ongoing uncertainty
concerning the precise definition of that world beyond the classroom.
The writing skills necessary for effective citizenship, for example, may
well not be those required to be a successful business professional—and
these may well not be the skills that are needed to respond to the writing
expectations in a political science class.
Indicate how the game will support a variety of play styles. This
again is an area to which writing teachers typically pay a lot of attention.
If we are lucky enough to teach classes that are relatively small, then
we are able to be attentive to students as individual writers with their
own set of needs and preferences. But freshman students especially are
coming from a highly rule-bound context (and indeed this context receives
continual reinforcement in other settings throughout at least their early
years in college). However much I try to counteract the sense my students
have of writing having defined rules, however much I try to replace the
"rules" they have learned (never use the first person, every
paragraph must include at least two quotations, etc.) with the idea of
context-specific strategies, the idea that I am simply giving them a new
set of rules (always introduce your sources, you must always include a
counter-argument) seems to take hold. In the context of MMORPGs, by contrast,
players are accustomed to thinking in terms of strategies; most game objectives
can be achieved through many different means and a diverse array of skills,
and not every strategy is guaranteed to work every time.
Provide inducement to move out of the starter zone. The challenge
here is in large part an institutional one. If students find that few
of our pedagogical methods are replicated elsewhere, if the skills which
we have introduced to them as indispensable for effective writing are
not reinforced by the writing assignments required of them in other classes,
then writing classes will be seen not so much as a starter zone from which
they have graduated successfully, as a quarantine zone from which they
have been mercifully released. If in fact the game is understood to be
all about the score, then students will fall back on what the are comfortable
with and what has worked so well in getting them to this level.
It is important to emphasize again, however, that the difficulty of applying these principles to the design of writing classes is not entirely (or even largely) the fault of writing teachers. We are faced, in fact, with the rather brutal reality that at most colleges the expectation is not that writing classes should be designed as much as "just taught." We all of us struggle with the paradoxical reality that all our faculty colleagues seem to agree simultaneously that writing is difficult to master, challenging to teach, a slippery creature when let loose in the world, a source of continuous grief when they themselves have to write—but that it can be taught simply and learned quickly. This leads to two sets of institutional realities that constrain most writing courses.
One of the most common organizational features of writing programs is the very fact which limits their ability to employ the lessons from online role-playing games. To wit, they are programs, not departments. Despite the wave of writing program reorganizations in recent years (Duke, Cornell, and my own institution, the George Washington University are just three examples) which have led to a number of new stand-alone writing programs as well as the introduction of new Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) or Writing in the Disciplines (WID) components, the vast majority of writing instruction in all college campuses (community and four-year) across America is carried out by faculty working within a sub-component of English departments. Very often, furthermore, that "program" consists of only one or two courses. It is very hard to design a developmental experience when you have students for only ten or fifteen weeks. This severely impacts our ability to help students learn to apply their knowledge outside the context of a single classroom experience, for example. It is like trying to design an MMORPG that can be mastered and then abandoned in a week.
Writing courses are also, limited by their position within the the required curriculum of most colleges. As I indicated above, many colleges take the opportunity to place expectations upon the course which may have little to do with writing, so that they function as de facto first-year experience courses. But the more common problem is that unless the college mandates a series of core requirements the writing class seems not to fit even with other required courses. If the college adopts the standard "choose from a menu" approach to allow students to fulfill their various requirements (humanities, language, etc) the writing courses usually stand out because while there may be many sections of a course to choose from, there is little choice in terms of the kind of course (whereas if I am fulfilling a humanities requirement I might be able to take a course in women's studies, or philosophy). Lastly, writing courses tend to have a qualitative function in the required curriculum. Whereas other requirements are understood in rather vague terms as "broadening" or "enriching," the writing requirement is understood as fundamental (sometimes the language requirement is also understood in these terms). Small wonder that students see our courses as an anomaly in the larger scheme of things.
The response of many writing faculty to the deformation of our task created by these pressures has been, as I have suggested, a search for greater authenticity in the classroom environment and in their writing tasks. Even if such an endeavor could be successful, however, this attempt would simply ratchet up the level of internal and external contradiction (it would even more sharply differentiate our classes from the rest of the university, for example, which shows little interest for the most part in providing students an authentic experience of the kind of fields for which they are ostensibly being prepared). Instead, we should begin to use the criteria I have outlined here to help develop our classes as more effective simulations.
Starter City
Game Design Principles
1. Familiarize the player with the interface.
2. Highlight the core progress mechanic.
3. Introduce the core gameplay systems.
4. Make the player feel as if they are part of a world.
5. Allow players immediate and consequential participation in the world.
6. Provide players with a grasp of the geographical layout of the game space.
7. Provide players with immediate affirmation.
8. Allow players to achieve a level sufficient to tackle the more complex tasks in the game.
9. Indicate how the game will support a variety of play styles.
10. Provide inducement to move out of the starter zone.
Next Mission
Playing to Learn