Gaming as Educational/Cultural Activity

I'll admit that I have not played many video games, not even as a child (I am one of those unfortunate few that has never played Super Mario Brothers). I wasn't really that interested. I've become a little more interested as an adult. I've seen friends play Grand Theft Auto (although people really into that game are hard pressed to hand over the controls to that, even for a moment). I've played a little dance Dance Revolution. I LOVE Guitar Hero, but have only played it a few times.

When I think of my interest in certain games as an adult, I think that it is because of the cultural context of it all. When I first heard about Grand Theft Auto, it was the game where you could kill hookers, and I thought, "Now that, I kind of gotta see." That game, Dance, Dance Revolution, and Guitar Heros were all over as cultural references; everyone knew what they were. I think especially in the case of Guitar Hero, those were all songs that I knew and loved and to be with my friends and pretend I was a rock star reminded me of being a kid. That's probably how the Rock Band game came about. When Gee writes in ch.2 that, "The learner needs to learn not only how to understand meaning sin a particular semiotic domain that is recognizable to those affiliated with the domain, but, in addition, how they think the domain at a "meta" level as a complex system of interrelated parts," I feel that almost everyone can understand the semiotic domain of Guitar Hero. Who hasn't, young or old, from any culture, been to a concert, done air guitar, or dreamed of being a rock star?

I do think it can be an education activity as well. People are strategizing in ways they haven't before, thinking in ways they haven't before. When you master a game (maybe not the entire game, but finally get the "feel" of it), it can be a very gratifying feeling. Gee says it best in ch. 1: playing games to him, " a new form of learning and thinking was both frustrating and life enhancing."

Paper Idea

The following is a brief proposal I wrote for the Computers and Writing conference. I am really interested in how multimodality has made what is really scientific and complex information more accessible for the masses and how these websites has really furthered the green movement, in a grass roots movement sort of way.  :

People use computer technologies to make their lives easier. They go online to pay bills, find recipes, check their child’s school progress. They read blogs, join discussion boards and visit websites to forge relationships with other people with similar interests. Going online often works as a strong agent of change to bring people together in forums that, Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd explain, “require a public audience and usually seek as large an audience as possible, the rhetorical aim being to influence opinion or action.” Users‘ daily online experiences broaden social and cultural dynamics and allow people to interact on a global scale, and the sites they visit provide people more accessibility to ideas and practices they otherwise would not. They are similar to a Bakhtinian chronotope, which C.F. Schryer describes as genres that reflect social beliefs in the action of individuals in space/time interactions (84). The current movement to “go green” is one such example of people coming together to learn more about and further their environmental lifestyles.

This presentation examines ways websites like Tree Hugger and Planet Green and blogs like Ideal Bite have made “going green“ more accessible to a wider audience. These sites offer people tips and provide how-to articles that will help them go green in their daily lives. These readers may not totally understand what a carbon footprint is, but they are learning to reduce their own. These multimodal sites offer various media from videos about starting a compost to podcasts featuring interviews with celebrities and their efforts to go green; blurring boundaries by continuously teaching, while entertaining users at the same time. This presentation will be a rhetorical analysis on the ways these sites use multiple media and discussion forums
to build online communities.