Find a relatively large empty space. Take your backpack, messenger bag, or whatever sort of bag you carry around with you regularly, empty all the contents out, and arrange them carefully so that they represent a visual snapshot of the stuff you tote around with you on a normal day. Then take a clear photo showing your bag and the stuff and upload it to your site.
Note that like the avatar or the literacy narrative, this too is a type of autobiographical composition. If you have something in your bag that is private, embarrassing, or for some other reason you don’t want it in the picture then make the editorial decision not to include it. Or vice versa: if you would like to assume a certain kind of persona then you might consider including items in your catalog that might be less than fully true.
Add some text to your post listing the items represented in your photo, preferably adding in a bit of explanatory and/or funny commentary along the way. This can be a paragraph of text or a list or whatever format seems most appropriate for you. When these sorts of posts are done by publications, like say The Verge or Timbuk2, they are often not so subtle efforts at product placement but for our purposes there is no reason for you to engage in such advertising games.
Along with the photo and your description of the items, include a paragraph reflecting on what it was like to craft a self-portrait through this photograph. How actually representative is this image of you as a person? What sorts of choices did you make in order to create the image? What was challenging about this assignment? Is representing yourself in a catalog of the stuff in your bag a type of writing? Why or why not?
As you play through Gone Home 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 on the front porch, with a brief puzzle to get in the front door, and 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 you’re 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 “sq3,” “gone home” 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 and audio style; emotional reactions; how the game establishes setting, time, and character. Perhaps 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? You might make predictions or note expectations for where this game will head.
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 you’re ready, go back to the game and play on. When you find a scene that seems particularly cool or beautiful or interesting, take a screenshot and/or write up a brief note about it on your liveblogging post — either leave a comment on your own post or edit the post and add a timestamp plus a few lines of commentary on the end of your post.
Check in periodically with your peers’ responses to the game and pay attention to whether you have similar or different reactions. Leave comments on your peers’ posts too, responding to their observations.
Let's play a game with photo editing this week! For this week, you'll make a combophoto, which combines two different photos to create a new image.
Stephen Mcmennamy is an Atlanta artist and Creative Director at the advertising firm BBDO. He first came to my attention when I saw his series of “combophotos” that splice together two different images to form a surreal new creation.
Here are a few examples from him:
Cauliflower + Poodle
Spaghetti + Paintbrush
Guitar + Bridge
Take a few moments to look through the images he’s posted on his site linked above or on his Tumblr or his Instagram. Then create your own square combophoto and publish it to your site. You can take your own photos, but probably you’ll want to use CC_licensed images you find on Flickr — make sure you give credit to the originals that you modify to create your combophoto.
The level of technical aptitude for this assignment is actually relatively small, just simple cropping and resizing. The greater part of the challenge is thinking creatively and finding images that you can work with. That said, note that Mcmennamy comes up with ideas and then specifically stages photos to combine, and he seems to often spend significant amounts of time shooting and selecting his images. You won’t have lots of time, models you can hire, or expensive photo equipment to work with, so I don’t necessarily expect your final images to be as polished and perfectly aligned as his are. More important is for you to be playful and come up with images that combine to create something funny or witty or striking.
To edit the two photos together, you can use whatever photo editing software you’d like. Pixlr is a good free web app. (Pixlr X is a freemium service so it's free to use but they might make it look like you need to pay for something -- you only need to pay for more "advanced" options, which you won't need for this assignment.) Adobe Photoshop is also available for you to use on the computers in the Media Library on the 4th floor of the Woodruff Library, if you're on campus.
Once you have your image, publish it in a post on your class site. Don't forget to give it a funny or witty title! Tag your post "sq4"
Write a paragraph about how you went about choosing the two images you combined and why. What challenges did you face as you created your combophoto? What do you think your final image conveys?
Welcome to the class. I am really looking forward to working with each of you this semester.
Please check out the class welcome module on our Canvas site.
Your homework before we meet synchronously in person via Zoom on Tuesday:
Read over this website very carefully as it constitutes the syllabus for this course. Note that the syllabus page contains a number of subpages. There’s a list of the texts and services you’ll need this semester, our learning outcomes, the course policies (note that you can click on headers to expand each section), and how grading will work this semester. You can also find the schedule for the semester and a list of the side quests and major quests you’ll complete over the course of the semester. There is also a page of resources that should be helpful to you.Once students begin publishing posts to their own sites, those posts will syndicate here. My posts are published here. And eventually there will be a category page added to the menu bar where we’ll host the podcast series that you’ll each have a hand in creating.
Add this site to your bookmarks. Make certain that you can find your way back here, because you’ll be spending a lot of time visiting these pages over the course of this semester.
Respond to this survey so I can get to know you a little bit better.
Sign up for a basic, free WordPress site. (See further information below about choosing a name for your site.) Note: If you already own a domain and server space, come talk to me to determine whether you can use that instead of creating a site on WordPress.com. Make sure you get to the point where your website is published and you can see the site itself, not just a blank page indicating that the URL has been reserved.
Leave a comment on this post asking a question about the syllabus. Put the URL for the WordPress site you created in the “website” line on the comment form. If you want to receive an email every time a new post goes up on this site, check the “Subscribe to site” box before you submit your comment.
You can choose a URL based on some version of your name (i.e., janestudent.wordpress.com or johndoe.wordpress.com) if you’d like. Using a version of your name has the advantage that you will be building a digital identity on the web based on your name, which can be really helpful. On the other hand, it also means that this site that you’re building will likely come up near the top of web searches for your name, so consider whether that is something you would like.
If you don’t want to publish your coursework on a site with a version of your name, you can also use some sort of pseudonym for your domain name.
It is also perfectly acceptable for your domain name to be a short word or phrase that is easy to remember and spell, and which speaks to some interest of yours or an aspect of your character (for example: my friend Audrey Watters, a noted educational technology scholar and researcher, publishes a site called hackeducation.com; Tanine Allison, a professor of Media Studies here at Emory who published her first book entitled Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Media recently, uses destructivesublime.com as her domain name; or one of my favorite art and design blogs is called thisiscolossal.com). If you’re going to choose a title or phrase as your domain name, make sure you think about it very carefully so you don’t show up on one of those lists of the most unfortunate domain names ever, like the design firm called Speed of Art that ended up with a domain name that sounds like it’s about flatulence in a swimsuit. Note that in the case of your site, you’ll be publishing a page that’s a subdomain of WordPress.com, so if Audrey Watters were in this class her site might be called hackeducation.wordpress.com.
This is a pre-writing exercise that is designed to help you prepare to complete your first quest, writing the literacy narrative. I’ve adapted this exercise from the Lynda Barry’s “x-page” warmup exercise in the book Syllabus. It should take you 45 minutes to an hour to complete this exercise.
I’m going to describe the steps in text below and I will also include an audio recording of me reading these instructions out loud and pausing for you to write in response. You might find it helpful to play the audio and simply write in a notebook or type on your laptop as you listen instead of having to come back and read text as we go — if nothing else, it might stop you from spending longer on the steps than you need to, so I suggest you try it. If the audio is not helpful for you, for any reason, then you can read the same instructions below.
Audio Prompt for this assignment
Ten Memories
Think back over the course of your life so far and make a list of ten memories that you associate with reading and/or writing. Just take about 3 minutes and make a numbered list of ten memories that come to mind.
Pick One
Then, read over your list and pick the one memory that seems the most vivid to you. Circle it. Then on a new page, write that memory at the top of the page as if it were the title of a story and draw a big X across the page. (If you’re typing on a laptop, the big X is optional)
Twenty Questions
Picture yourself in the memory that you are exploring and then write the answers to the following questions anywhere on the page. Pretend we are having a conversation, so you can see the image but I can’t, so I’m going to be asking you these questions to help me “see” the image too. Read a question and then immediately start jotting down phrases and brief answers to the question. Keep writing for about thirty seconds before moving on to the next question — no detail is too small or unimportant.
Where are you?
What time of day or night does it seem to be?
What season does it seem to be?
Where is the light coming from?
What kind of light is it?
What’s the temperature like?
What does the air smell like?
What are you doing?
Is there anyone else in that place with you?
What are they doing?
Why are you there?
What are some of the sounds you can hear?
What are some of the things you can see?
What’s directly in front of you?
If you turn your head to your right, what’s there?
If you turn your head to the left, what do you see?
What is behind you?
What’s below you and around your feet?
What’s above your head?
What emotions are you feeling in this space?
Once you have jotted answers to those 20 questions on your x-page turn to a new page and freewrite for 10 minutes about that memory. There are no wrong or right things to write about or ways to write about the memory. Just start by elaborating further about any of the details you jotted down on the x-page and then keep writing without stopping about whatever thoughts are coming to your head about that memory. Try not to censor yourself or worry about the quality of what you’re writing. At this stage, all you are doing is generating ideas — you will think about structure and wording later.
Now look back at your original list of ten memories. Are there any other memories that you’d really like to explore further? You don’t need to repeat the entire process described above for the memory (though you can, if it seems like it would be useful) but do jot down some thoughts about any of the other memories on your list that seem worth thinking more about right now.
Building from Memories, Asking Questions
Now that you’ve taken the time to write about one or more of those memories, pause to consider the following questions about your history with reading and writing. They may or may not directly connect with the freewriting you just completed. Jot down brief responses to these questions:
How did you feel about reading and writing as an adolescent — say, during middle and high school? What sorts of experiences did you have as a reader and writing in school?
What are your experiences with social networking sites like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or others? What do you remember about your first experiences with such sites? Do you text on a smartphone? What sorts of experiences have you had writing to/for people with those sorts of technologies?
What are some of the biggest struggles you have had as a reader and/or writer?
Look back over the writing you’ve encountered and produced this semester, and then draft a cover letter for your portfolio that explains how you have met the learning outcomes for this course. This letter is an opportunity to think about your writing and clarify — for yourself and portfolio readers — how your skills and awareness of your writing processes have grown this semester. Think of each piece of writing included in your portfolio as an “exhibit” that you are analyzing and reflecting on in this letter.
What should your letter do?
Explicitly address the course outcomes and how you encountered them throughout the reading and writing for the course.
Guide your readers through the exhibits, discussing your writing while looking for larger patterns. What do you see about yourself as a writer when you step back and look at the work you’ve produced this semester?
Discuss at least one piece of writing in depth, considering the stages of the writing process as it developed. How did you think about audience, purpose, or genre while you wrote this piece?
Explain how you have applied (or will apply in the future) insights from this course in your other classes or other rhetorical situations. Use specific examples, if possible.
Employ evidence to support your claims. Just like in the other writing assignments you’ve completed this semester, you will need evidence to support of your argument; however, in this case, the evidence you will use is your own writing.
Remember that you need to incorporate quotes into your own writing with clear framing language.
Also remember that you always need your own interpretation and analysis of any quote you use in order for it work as evidence.
Forms of evidence from your writing exhibits could include, but are not limited to: quotes from your own finished writing (embedded in sentences or longer quotes in blocks); quotes from early drafts of your writing or notes; reported or quoted feedback from others; illustrations or quotations that show how a particular exhibit evolved; or screenshots or images from your work.
Publishing your cover letter
The reflection essay should become the new home (or index) page for your course site and should begin with a note indicating that the site is an archive of the work that you completed as part of ENG101 at Emory University during spring semester 2020. You should link to the course site, so that a reader who is going through your work can easily find out more information about the course you were in.
You should organize the work on your course site into a finished portfolio showing all the work you have done this semester. Make certain that your entire course subdomain looks complete, coherent, and like you’ve given some thought to its overall design and aesthetics.
Just like with any assignment you’ve completed this semester, your reflection letter should include at least one image (though you can certainly include more than one. You might consider using your Assemblies image as the primary or feature image for your letter — hopefully constructing that chart will help you to think about how the work you have completed this semester fits together, and hopefully it will help to communicate that understanding to your readers.
For this project, you will work in groups to develop a Twine game that focuses on a social issue related to this course. It might be a personal story, such as the one in Depression Quest, or it might be more process-oriented, such as a game which walks players through structuring a college curriculum. It might be a resource management game that explores, for instance, the economic realities of being a student during the coronavirus pandemic. The possibilities for types of games and themes to explore are practically limitless.
Twine
Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. You can develop browser-based text games -- and, with a bit of coding, you can add images, variables, conditional logic, and/or CSS -- that walk the player through a series of decisions that lead to multiple different outcomes.
You can download the software from The Twinery at the link above. It's a relatively easy program to use, though you should expect it to take some probing and exploring to figure out how to make it do what you want it to. There is lots of help available on the Twine Wiki.
Role and Responsibilities
All members of the team will share responsibilities for the project and all of you should work in each of these areas; however, it is useful to have one or two persons designated with primary responsibility for an area so that the group functions in a healthy manner.
Asset Manager: This person is responsible for gathering game text, images, and other game assets from the entire team, organizing it, ensuring that it's all fair to use, and that each asset has proper attribution information. Later in the process this person probably serves as a bit of a project manager, keeping everyone aware of agreed upon deadlines.
Game Compiler: This person is responsible for compiling the assets into the finished game and play-testing it to be certain that it works.
Story Manager: This person is responsible for ensuring the voice of the game stays consistent, in spite of having multiple authors, and that all entries meet the expected level of grammatical and stylistic sophistication appropriate to the game.
Requirements
You do not need to have a finished game at the end of the project. I want you to develop enough of a game that you can show it as a prototype and explain what social issue you are engaging in, how your response is a gameful response to that situation, and why you are structuring the game in the way you are. You should be able to explain what additional elements you might add if you had the time and resources to flesh it out more fully (in other words, "if we had 2 more months to work on this and the funds to hire a dedicated programmer or illustrator, etc. during that time, here's what we would direct them to produce for the game and why").
Cathy Caruth was one of the key theorists of trauma in the 1990s. Nasrullah Hambral provides this overview of her work in the field:
"In the traditional trauma model pioneered by Cathy Caruth, trauma is viewed as an event that fragments consciousness and prevents direct linguistic representation. The model draws attention to the severity of suffering by suggesting the traumatic experience irrevocably damages the psyche. Trauma is an unassimilated event that shatters identity and remains outside normal memory and narrative representation. Fragmentation or dissociation is viewed as the direct cause of trauma, a view that helps formulate the notion of transhistorical trauma, which suggests that trauma’s essential or universal effects on consciousness and narrative recall afford the opportunity to connect individual and collective traumatic experiences."
All of the games we have played this semester have dealt with characters who are undergoing or processing trauma. Thinking about the quote above and the discussions we've had about these games, choose two of these games and analyze how they represent trauma (and/or healing).
Edited to add:
Structure
This is a comparison essay, where you are looking at two games next to each other in order to better understand what each is doing. I recommend that you write your essay in a 3-part structure:
Compare (and contrast) the two games around one theme or idea (e.g., fragmentation)
Compare (and contrast) the two games around a second theme or idea (e.g., no direct linguistic communication or how memory works in these games)
The first sentence of the final section should be your thesis sentence, which will pull together something you have learned from discussion of the previous two ideas and develop a slightly broader statement about what you have observed in these games.
Do not write a five-paragraph essay!
Audience
Assume an audience who is familiar with the games, but like you before you started working on this paper, maybe hasn't played them in a few weeks. So you do not need to summarize important information about the game for your reader unless it's important to your argument, but when you explain something that's central to your argument, you should give very brief contextual clues to remind your reader what you're talking about.
In fact, for your audience you should imagine that you're writing for your peers in this class. Assume that you are just a little bit smarter than everyone else in the class, that you understand the two games you are analyzing a little bit better than anyone else in the class, so you are helping them to understand how the two games you're analyzing portray or analyze trauma and/or recovery from trauma.
Publishing
Your essay should be published as a page. You'll need to then write a reflection post that links to the page in order to turn it in.
Following up on the literacy narrative that you have already written, now I want you to write a similar narrative essay about your experiences as a player of games.
Pre-writing
Just as you did with your literacy narrative, you should complete the x-pages prewriting assignment described here; however, this time instead of writing about experiences you’ve had with reading or writing, think about any experiences you’ve had playing games. They can be any sort of games at all — video games, board games, memory games, or games you made up on the playground as a child. Remember Mary Flanagan’s argument about hopscoth. The New York Times had a really interesting piece in December about hand-clapping games played by children around the world.
Once you’ve finished that prewriting exercise, you can begin drafting the literacy narrative itself. Spend a good 45 minutes to an hour on the prewriting exercise.
Prompt
Now that you’ve done some brainstorming, write an essay in which you analyze one or two moments from your life as a player. What sorts of skills or ways of thinking or socializing have you learned from playing games?
Take a step back and reread the freewriting you did, looking for any interesting patterns that you surfaced about your history with reading and writing. You do not need to directly address the freewrite or your answers to the questions in the pre-writing exercise, but hopefully in the process of freewriting and thinking about those questions, you’ve recognized some issues or patterns that are interesting enough for you to analyze more carefully.
Nuts and Bolts
Publish your narrative as a page (not a post) on your class website (make certain to add it to the menu, so we can all find it).
As with everything you publish for me this semester, you need more than just words for your narrative — you must have at least one image, video, or audio file with your narrative. You’ll need to provide a caption and give credit to the creator of the image (even if it’s your own). I’ll have some additional resources on Creative Commons and finding CC-licensed images with Flickr.
Reflection Post
Once you have published the page, you need to also write a separate blog post. That post should link to the page you have published and reflect on the process of writing it.
