Author: David

Liveblogging Firewatch

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As you play through Firewatch for class on Tuesday, I want you to liveblog your experience playing. Liveblogging is an informal  sort of freewriting — while you are in the midst of playing the game, just notice whatever seems interesting to you and pause periodically to note those observations in your blog post.

The game begins with a fairly long opening sequence that sets up a little background for the main character and serves as a simple tutorial for basic game mechanics, so launch the game and play through that opening section, then pause the game and open your dashboard. Write a new blog post which starts by announcing that your’e beginning to play through the game and links back to this post (not just the course site, but this specific post). Tag your post with “Firewatch” and “liveblog” plus whatever other tags you’d like. (You can add tags in the post editor page, in the section labeled Tags, which should be in the sidebar just beneath categories and just above the featured image area.)

Write a paragraph (or a few sentences) responding to that opening sequence. Again, whatever is interesting to you about it — visual style, emotional reactions, comparison with the opening of Gone Home or Dear Esther, making predictions or noting expectations for where this game will head, whether and how this game operates as “art” in the way Bogost defines art games, whatever seems worth noting. Publish the post. Once you’ve published your post, you might check out the other students’ posts and see how they responded to the opening sequence — please leave comments on their liveblog posts responding to observations they made!

When your’e ready, go back to the game and play on. When you find a scene that seems particularly cool or beautiful or interesting, screenshot it. Be on the lookout for moments that seem worth commenting on. Check in periodically with your peers’ responses to the game and pay attention to whether you have similar or different reactions. Periodically leave comments on your own post updating your progress through the game and recording those observations. Leave comments on your peers’ posts too, responding to their observations.

Dear Esther Freewrite

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In “Family History: Source Analysis in Gone Home” Richard Bell compares the two games we have played so far this semester: “Where Dear Esther invites the kind of textual analysis at which students of literature excel, Gone Home demands something more akin to source comparison.” What distinction is Bell drawing between these two games — between literature and history — and do you agree with his distinction? What similarities do you see between the two games?

Just take 10 minutes and freewrite a response to those questions as a post on your blog. Just sketch out your ideas as quickly as you can, following to whatever is interesting for you and getting your ideas down into a post. Add the tag “freewrite” to the post, as a signal to readers that it’s an unpolished and perhaps unfinished piece of writing.

Podcast Discussion Recap

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First of all, note that next week on Thursday (9/15) we have a workshop day scheduled. Half of that class session will be devoted to the podcast, when you can meet with your partner and I’ll bring in a couple of microphones and maybe do a very quick 5-minute overview of Audacity.

I’ll revise the main podcast assignment page soon, but in the meantime just want to get some of the basic understandings from class today up here.

Title

We brainstormed some potential titles for the podcast episodes but didn’t reach a final decision. We all agreed to continue to think about potential titles and to drop any that we think of in the Google doc for class notes from today. We can vote on a title next week.

Co-Producers

We agreed that instead of serving as a producer for one episode and then as an assistant producer for a second episode, each episode will be co-produced by 2 students. Each pair will be responsible for publishing 2 podcast episodes (one between 9/30 and 10/21 and the second between 10/28 and 11/18).

Structure

  • Episodes will be about 10 minutes in length.
  • There was some discussion of agreeing to a shared 3-part structure — some analysis, some “ambient audio” of people playing the game and talking about it at the same time, and some sort of a question/answer section — but I think we did not resolve whether that structure would be a requirement.
  • We talked about, but did not decide, whether podcast episodes must be about videogames only, or whether other games are open to coverage.

Did I miss anything central? If you’ve got additional thoughts, or if I’m leaving stuff out from our discussion today, please drop a comment on this post with your thoughts.

New Feature: Subscribe via email

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I had intended to turn on a subscription feature from the beginning but somewhere along the line I forgot to activate it. I’ve now rectified that oversight. From now on, when you comment on one of my posts, there will be two checkboxes beneath the text window, one to receive an email if someone responds to your comment directly and another to notify you whenever a new post is published to this site. If you want to receive an email reminder every time a post goes up, just check that box before you post your comment.

Week_Ahead__3_–_Read___Write___Play

 

Week Ahead: 3

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3 9/6 Play through Gone Home to completion.
9/8 Richard Bell, “Family History: Source Analysis in Gone Home.”

Begin to discuss podcast assignment.

Check your email for a message from me about the games we’re playing over the next few weeks.

It should take you about 2 hours to play through Gone Home to the end. Publish a post to your course site with 2-3 paragraphs of observations you make during game play, or liveblog your experience playing if you want to try that.

Thursday we’ll continue our discussion of Gone Home by looking at Bell’s analysis of the game, and we’ll also spend some time making decisions about our podcast for this semester. I’ll ask you to listen to a couple of the podcasts from last semester before class on Thursday.

Edited to add:

If you have not managed to create your site yet, don’t panic but do send me a quick email or leave a comment here to let me know you’re working on it. And then play Gone Home and write your observations up in a simple document, which you can put in our shared Google folder. Even if you have not created your site, still play the game for tomorrow!

Gone Home Observations

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As you play through Gone Home for class on Tuesday, please try to pay attention to your own thinking and emotional reaction as you play and take notes as you go. If we were a little later in the semester and you were more comfortable with publishing to your sites, I might have asked you to liveblog your game play — feel free to try that if you’re willing (see note below). Probably most of you will choose instead to play through the game, taking notes of the things you notice, and then when you’re finished write a blog post with 2-3 paragraphs worth of reflection on the experiences.

Pay careful attention to the start of the game. How does the game begin? How do you feel at the start? How does the game establish setting and time, both at the start of the game and then throughout? How does the game establish character? Especially think about how the game establishes character given that there is only one person present in the narrative and it’s the first person narrator — without dialog and other traditional methods of defining character, how do the game designers go about doing so? Finally, your first larger writing project will build from our discussion of Gone Home towards thinking about how games make use of objects and descriptions of those objects in order to shape narrative, so pay particular attention to all the various things that you pick up and examine and how the writing frames the meaning of those objects.

You do not need to address all of these questions. You do not even need to answer any of these questions, to be honest — if there is a different pattern that really captures your attention and you feel a burning desire to explore it in your blog post, then do that instead of answering the questions in the paragraph above.

Liveblogging

There are a number of different ways that you might liveblog game play. If you want to try it but aren’t sure how to pull it off, my suggestion is to open up your site in a tab and then launch the game. Just look around at the start point of the game for a minute or two, then write a blog post in which you announce your intention to liveblog your experience playing the game and then write a couple of sentences about the start point and publish the post. Then whenever you notice something interesting or worth commenting on as you play, leave a comment on your own post with your observation. Boom, liveblogging.

Just a quick note

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I’ve put up a bunch of posts this weekend with instructions for building and using your homesteads — you don’t need to read those posts carefully, but do at least sort of skim over them so that you have a sense of what subjects are covered, then if you are struggling with some piece that is covered in one of those posts read that section more carefully. I added the Resources page to the menu, which will work sort of like an FAQ page with links from those questions to the specific posts that I put up over the course of the semester. Hopefully that makes it easier to find information when it is useful for you.

If the Student Sites page is not yet linking to your subdomain, it’s because I don’t know the address for your subdomain. Leave a comment on this post and let me know where it is.

If you are feeling confused about any aspect of getting your class subdomain created, then check the “WordPress Basics” tab on the Resources page. More than likely any question you have is either addressed directly in the post I wrote or is answered in one of the help pages I linked to. If you’ve made an effort to figure out the answers to your questions on your own by reading through those posts but you’re still feeling confused, please email me and ask for help.

Citation Guidelines for This Class

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Because the publication you are doing for this class is both academic writing and published on the web for a broader audience, you need to be able to both fulfill the requirements of academic citation for your sources and take advantage of the affordances of the medium of web publishing. For most purposes, these dual tasks shouldn’t really be all that complicated — though if you find yourself in a quandary about how to meet them both, please do either ask me for guidance or visit the Writing Center.

MLA Style

Your writing should basically follow the MLA guidelines for citation. You can ignore most of the general stylistic guidelines about margins, fonts, headers, and so on that are really meant to address formatting of the printed sheet. When you are citing sources from print texts, you should follow the MLA in-text citation rules but when you’re citing on-line sources, use internal links instead.

Examples

For example, in the course description published on the main page of this site, I quote from the NYT review of Darnielle’s novel:

We will read John Darnielle’s novel Wolf in White Van, which is “about alienation and despair and the search for meaning, which [the protagonist] finds in a postapocalyptic role-playing game he invents, turns into a business and administers in analog fashion, by exchanging letters with its players” (Garner).

And then at the bottom of that page, I’ve got a Work Cited section:

Work Cited

Garner, Dwight. “‘Wolf in White Van,’ John Darnielle’s Novel.” The New York Times 25 Sept. 2014. NYTimes.com. Web. 29 Sept. 2015.

Or, in this post I’ve quoted from Ian Bogost:

In “Empathy,” Bogost focuses on games that operationalize weakness, noting that “Critics might argue that frail situations are not fun. Feeble characters do not wear shoes anyone wants to wear. And that may be true. But when it comes to the world we inhabit today, it is the vulnerable […] who deserve our empathy” (24).

And:

Work Cited
Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis: U Of Minnesota P, 2011. Print.

Whenever you are relying on someone else’s words or ideas, you need to indicate such internally and with a works cited list, just like you would with any other class you’re taking.

Pages and/vs Posts

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In this class, I make a clear distinction between blog posts and pages: all of your major, formal projects (“main quests“) will go onto your sites as pages. The side quest assignments and all of the other shorter, low-stakes, reflective writing that you do will go onto your sites as blog posts. Pages can be edited just as posts can be, but in general they are meant to serve as static, completed, more or less self-contained pieces of writing. Blog posts are meant to go up onto the posts page in descending chronological order, so built into the function of a blog is that you write something and publish it, then if you have more to say on the subject or want to revise what you wrote in a major way, you do so by just writing a new blog post rather than going back to the original and restructuring it.

Here’s another clear distinction between posts and pages: posts syndicate but pages do not (because syndication is predicated on the idea of a frequently updating and changing posts page–static pages don’t need to syndicate because, well, they are more or less static). We are relying on syndication to the course site as the means of collecting all of the work that you do on your sites into a central location, but if your major projects go onto pages and pages don’t syndicate then how will they be included? When you complete one of the major assignments, you will write a blog post, linking to the landing page for the assignment. I’ll generally ask you to write something reflective about the work that you’ve done in those blog posts. Sometimes I might ask that you provide a summary or abstract of the argument, perhaps framing the post as an announcement meant to entice readers to check out what you’ve done akin to a teaser in journalism.

One last point: for the purposes of this class, at least, all blog posts and all pages should be multimodal and should include multiple media. You should not publish a page or a post that is composed entirely of text.

faq

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