I've been meaning to ask the wonderful community here (and my fellow editors, of course) whether there is a desire here for more blogs concerning new media. I had been keeping a blog at another website about developments in videogames and development tools, but since that has fizzled, I've been trying to find ways I could make what I was doing there more pertinent and useful for the Kairosnews community. I'd also very much like to combine five areas of inquiry that mean a lot to me: New Media (including videogames), Rhetoric (particulary the history of rhetoric), Literary Theory, Composition, and Philosophy.
So, basically what I'd like to throw out is a question to you all about what might be interesting or useful before I start throwing up blogs. The last thing I want to do is alienate Kairosnews members that aren't interested in videogames (theory, history, or development). On the other hand, I am so strongly drawn to that field of inquiry that it's almost painful for me to not to be blogging about it. I will admit, though, that it's not always easy for me to draw a clear connection between some item of interest to a videogame theorist and what might serve useful or enlightening to a compositionist (particularly if one limits the term "composition" to a print-based paradigm). If, for instance, I find an article about free software game development, how can I make that interesting or useful to this community? To what extent must I self-censor such materials? Can or should I assume that a discussion of how alternative copyright schemes like CC might apply to videogame development is somehow relevant to what we're doing here at Kairosnews? You see my problem.
This is something that has been bothering me for a few weeks now. I long to write about this stuff. For some inexplicable reason, I want to write about it here. It's truly bizarre, but I keep having this vision that if I could somehow demonstrate that the field of videogame studies does have dimensions that only a rhetorician or literary theorist could appreciate, then suddenly I'd be opening up minds. It's a tough sell, I admit, but I'd really enjoy reading your responses...
'New Media' is broader than videogames...
I'd be happy blogging with you about the rhetorical, technological and pedagogical aspects of new media here, and that would of course include videogames. Slashdot added a separate Gaming sub-blog, where people can go if they want more than those gaming topics deemed worthy of top-level entry, but I don't know that such a thing is necessary here.
Dennis G. Jerz
Jerz's Literacy Weblog
Blog away!
I can't imagine that you'd alienate anyone by blogging about videogame theory and development, as long as you at least sometimes connect it to rhetoric & composition. In fact, I think it would be cool to read the posts and see how your thinking develops, you know, see the ideas and connections as they form.
CultureCat
I say go for it
If you got out of hand, we could always unpublish you from the front page. ;)
I say go for it! I may even j
I say go for it! I may even join in the conversation!!
Dr. B.'s Blog
Blog
Social interaction in microcosm.
I think there are a lot of ties between rhetoric, communication and gaming. Some of the newer MMORPG's (specifically, the Sims and There) don't even have an object per se. It's more a model of life than a fantasy world, and the interactions there are presumably based on the same sort of cognitive functions as the real world.
There are economic and social theory ties to the online gaming world as well - see Ed Castronova's work on the Economics of Everquest:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=277893
So, I'd say go for it. Then again, I've been a member for 42 minutes. :)
PS - also the hero's journey, right? Since Adventure came out on the Atari 2600, the mythopoetics of the heroic quest have been integral.
It's the Audience issue
Matt,
I hear ya. It's a tricky thing to be doing games studies in comp/rhet. As one of a handful of folks doing it, I can say that I've thought a lot about your question of audience: what can we assume our audience knows? What do they need to know in order to see the connections we're trying to make? At 4Cs last week, I was terrified (but prepared to deal with it) that no one in the audience would know what I was talking about! I didn't have a clue whether I could expect a shared vocabulary and whether they'd see and follow the connections I was making between games and literacy learning & teaching. Interestingly, though, I simply asked the audience whether they were gamers. By a show of hands, nearly everyone there admitted to being a gamer! It was great! So I was able to move through my presentation much more smoothly and just be free to talk about all the stuff that's been stewing in my head (and in my dissertation), and I figure it'll all come out eventually in my writing.
So I guess what I'm saying is that yeah you'd want to be careful when talking about games as new media--that means something very specific within the field of games studies that would need to be "translated" to comp-rhetors. But doing the work of connecting it to comp-rhet is fun, I think, and showing the comp-rhet community what we can learn from games is an exciting project. I'd love to blog with you about that in this space.
Videogames in Comp/Rhet
Hi there, Alice. It sounds like you are fully aware of the sorts of "That's cool what you're doing, but shouldn't you be in some other department?" Thankfully, there are guys like Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin who are really making some good connections to videogames as new media--I'm sure you've seen Remediation. The games are a bit dated (and a weirdo selection; but oh well!) but the points are valid.
I've actually joined a new blogging community at Academic Gamers. There is a comp/rhet guy there named Scott Reed who wrote a fabulous article about videogames through a Lacanian framework. We're putting together a 4Cs SIG for gamers; why don't you contact him and get on the program?
At C&W 2005, I'm going a step further and doing a presentation on euro-demos. Now, nobody knows what the heck those are!! :-)
Disciplinary perspectives
Yeah I've seen Academic Gamers a few times--mostly English folks at Florida/USF, right? I couldn't find Scott Reed's name on there, actually.
But this brings up an interesting thing about game studies, which I'm sure you're aware of. It seems as if the majority of folks doing this kind of work in English departments and in comp-rhet are coming at it from a critical theory/narratology/"new media" perspective. Since I'm so embedded in the learning sciences perspective here at Wisconsin (because I work with Jim Gee and Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler) I've not really gone the critical theory/new media route (Bolter, Janet Murray, GrandTextAuto, etc.) but instead look at games potential for learning/teaching/schools. So I sometimes feel even further away from English when I talk about games because most people are surprised that we'd be talking about games as good sites for teaching & learning.
Anyway I'm rambling...let me know what else you turn up!
Alice J. Robison
PhD Candidate, Rhetoric & Composition Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
http://labweb.education.wisc.edu/room130