Week ahead: 3

As of writing this on Sunday afternoon, 8 of you have already published your avatars on your sites and I’ve gotten them added to the Students Sites page. The syndication of students posts is still not fully automated because I’m waiting for three more students to let me know the URL for their sites. Once I get those and have finished setting up syndication, I’ll make the process fully automated so that when you publish a blog post to your site it will show up on the Student Posts page almost immediately. Until then, I need to run a manual update to pull posts in, so don’t worry if you publish your avatar post and it doesn’t show up until tomorrow.

Before class on Tuesday, play Depression Quest. It’s a browser based game where you play as someone living with depression. You are given a series of everyday life events and have to attempt to manage your illness, relationships, job, and possible treatment. You do not necessarily need to play to a conclusion, but play for at least an hour or so because we’ll use Depression Quest as our primary text for discussion on Tuesday, where we will be paying most attention to these two issues:

• You’ll have read a couple different essays by Jane McGonigal (“What is a Game?” last week and the introduction to Superbetter this week) plus listened to the podcast analyzing Monopoly last week so we’ll spend some time thinking about the definitions she forwards for games and how they apply to Depression Quest (and Monopoly).
• Last week, you also read Andrea Lunsford’s description of the terms we need to consider when we think about the rhetorical situation of a text or an author. Rhetorical situation is a really important term for any first year writing class, so we will spend a bit of time discussing those terms and then I will ask you to think about the rhetorical situation of Depression Quest.

After our synchronous class session, you’ll play the browser-based game Tangaroa Deep and read Steven Johnson’s essay in which he argues, amongst other things, that our increasingly complex games are making all of us smarter. And I’ll publish a discussion thread on Canvas where I’ll ask you to think about how Johnson’s article pertains to that game. We will also definitely spend some time in class next week discussing the Johnson article.

All of these discussions working out definitions of games and what kinds of things games can do to and for us will be really important in the coming weeks when we start playing some games that I have selected for you in greater depth and as you start choosing games you want to analyze in podcast episodes that we’ll publish as a class. We are laying the theoretical framework for future discussions, so please read carefully and come to class ready to ask questions about the texts’ arguments.

Also, your second side quest is another photography assignment that should be fun. You’ll be combining two different photos to create a new powerful image.