I think there’s always been a fine balance in writing instruction on how to make writing feel immediate and worthwhile, while making sure students have the proper skills and abilities. If my classes have been an example, there’s plenty of times where students think a particular type of writing is “irrelevant” to them, even when they’re gaining useful critical reasoning skills by engaging with a particular problem.
Still, though, when I went into the rhetoric-heavy, argument-focused English class I’m teaching now, I began to ask myself how we might get them to see or feel the immediacy of their writing within the arc of my 15 weeks with them. After all, we’re working with concepts and theories that are over two millennia old. That’s kind of how I initially got to my idea to teach with a video game.
So, responding to David Flemming’s call to bring back “play” to the rhetoric and writing classroom (2016) and working within Justin Hodgson’s methodological framework for gamifying a course (2012), I decided to create a “public.” In the class, in addition to traditional writing assignments, we’re playing SimCity (2013) together. Each student becomes a mayor with a particular agenda and is networked with other students in the region. Students take on analog (I don’t like to use “real world” because I don’t think virtual spaces are less real than others) identities of cities or major corporations like Shell Co., the New York City Zoning Commission, real estate companies in the Hamptons, Tesla, Las Vegas, et al.
As each “student mayor” works toward their agenda within the gamespace, which is designed to conflict directly and indirectly with others’ in the regions, conflict arises. Then, using the skills they’ve gained in the rhetoric classroom, they write to each other, conduct rhetorical and stakeholder analysis, and use writing to resolve the conflicts that come up in the same way that institutions use writing in the analog world.
The last project for this course (and their required English track at ASU) is a public advocacy or “civic discourse” paper. For this, students will reflect on their experience in the writing classroom and in the virtual space of SimCity to identify, more or less, how writing “works” for cities and urban issues; they then compose civic discourse and present it within a local forum like a town-hall meeting or will publish a neighborhood newsletter, etc.
It’s been met with mixed responses from my students, but all of them are engaging with the ideas in the virtual gamespace and seem to understand how this is meant to reinforce civic writing. And watching them take on new identities has been incredibly rewarding!
Later this week, I’ll follow up with some anecdotes from within the game.