I Made It Through the First Day

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:00:23 -0500

and I didn't pass out. Lisa tagged along to the SIG last night to keep an eye on me. Ask her how she enjoyed her first conference experience :-)

The 1Up.com SIG was pretty interesting.

Alice J. Robinson from UW-Madison talked about her empirical research and what game designers can teach us about teaching writing (as much as she could in 10 minutes). I find Alice's work really interesting and it makes me happy that there are a number of us out there working with games and doing different aspects of the theory. My work may one day focus on game developers if things work out the way that I think that they will. I won't talk about it on the blog, but you can ask me in person :-)

Mark Mullen from GWU talked about a UW20 course that he taught where students were asked to conceptualize a game and write documentation for it. He had FYC students doing tech writing assignments and they produced 50 page documents in groups of 3. This is like the student who recently sent me a draft of a story that he has written based on the game that he played in my 304C class last term. The story was over 100 pages double spaced! Games can actually get students to write! And if the aforementioned student is reading this, I am still reading the story :-)

Matthew S. S. Johnson from IU- Bloomington talked about competition as an invention strategy and video games. I was kind of fading at this point. Not because of Matthew, but because I still wasn't on solid food. I would like to hear more about this from Matthew and I may hunt him down because I'd like to think through what happens with students who are naturally (or culturally) just not competitive.

Matt Barton brought it all home by making folks talk about why they were there and what they wanted. Some folks were just trying to figure out best practices for using games in the classroom, some are already doing research in the field, and some may have just been a bit intrigued.

Dennis Jerz suggested that folsk Google New Games Journalism and read the now (in)famous Bow, Nigger piece. I read this piece a while back and just wasn't impressed by it. It just left me wondering "What was the point?" We know that there are folks in MMORPGs who are racist, sexist, and homophobic. Is it significant that the author gave up one kind of honor for another? If he were actually IC would he have dishonored himself by bowing before an epithet? If he were OOC would he have just let it go? To me Bow, Nigger and the "legendary status" that it seems to have garnered is a pretty good example of the limitations on NGJ.

On to more fun things. After the SIG we went to Miller's Pub where we were joined by 10 or so more knitters (I knit, Lisa doesn't) for our 2nd Annual 4Cs Stitch n Bitch! There are pictures, but I'll upload them later. For now I need to work on my paper and prepare to meet with my group this afternoon.

Notes from Feminisms and Rhetorics

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 10:12:17 -0400

I just noticed that I forgot to post them. I'll be sure to post them later today along with the slideshow that I used for my presentation on the rhetorical representation of women in video games. Riveting stuff I tell ya!!!

Edited: The slideshow is here . And my decontextualized and sometimes nonsensical notes are here.

Dr. B.'s Blog - Feminisms and Rhetorics

I Made It Through the First Day

Notes from Feminisms and Rhetorics