How?

The main consideration I want to offer here is that a game-integrated pedagogy arises naturally from considerations of the curriculum, of the course outcomes, and of reflection on games and gaming. My Five Levels framework offers a starting point for reflecting about how to integrate games, but it certainly isn't the only way to see this.

As an illustration, I want to turn to my course design. At my institution, our Introduction to College Composition Course is focused on a few concepts: namely, discourse communities, rhetoric, analysis, argumentation, and metacognition. Our course outcomes focus on these ideas, on ways that students can use them in their drive towards becoming better writers and communicators. As instructors, we are allowed leeway in exactly how we integrate these ideas into our courses, with the exception that we must have a argumentative reflection tied to a portfolio at the end.

Course Design

I considered these ideas as well as what I knew of game-integrated pedagogy and came up with the following course design to handle all the departmental requirements while also trying to stay true to the pedagogy I believe in. I've included full assignment descriptions

Unit 1: Rhetorical Analysis of a Serious Game

In this unit, I treated games as an object of study, replacing more traditional texts of rhetorical analysis like commercials or articles. I also used this unit as a means of introducing students to rhetorical and game studies theory that would help them to consider the history of thought behind the work that they were conducting. This may seem like a lot of work at first, but I found that it just tended to replace more general texts that I've used in previous classes with gaming-centered ones. For example, I usually include a small reading sub-unit during the first unit in order to make sure that students are approaching academic texts in a productive manner. In the past, I've used composition or rhetoric texts as a theory of general interest that could be of use to my students. I also use some texts that bridge the gap between composition and gaming, such as Gee's work, Bogost's article on the Rhetoric of Games, and even an excerpt from Rhetoric/Composition/Play. I have to think that as the bridges between these fields continue to grow, so does the ease of working games into our composition courses.

Unit 2: Discourse Community Analysis and Genre Critique/Revision Packet

In this unit, I ask students to explore how discourse conventions grow out of social interaction. In the first implementation of this unit, I asked students to focus on discourse communities built around a single game or series of games. In the second iteration, I will be altering this to have them look at communities that have formed around larger sections of the gaming community such as developers, reviews, player of particular styles of games. As a precursor to the real work of the unit, I ask students to make an argument that their chosen group fits the definition of a discourse community. This requires the students to investigate the community some in order to better understand how they function. In my next iteration, I will also be focusing on the option of writing an ethnography on the scene of discourse. This leads into a more prolonged study of the genres of writing used by the community to meet their objectives. I ask the students to choose one particular genre of writing and to critique it, which ultimately results in a revision of the genre to improve on its shortcomings. Overall, this unit focuses on the way that discourse is built and the way that conventions can be interrogated and even changed. Its goal is to help students feel agency in how they write and to help them find effective strategies for approaching unfamiliar communities in the future.

Unit 3: Academic Argument

I would be remiss if I didn't ask my students to at least attempt detailed researched position paper. On the other hand, like most composition instructors, I abhor the traditional theme paper. This unit resembles the argument unit I've always taught in many ways. And this is one of the things that we need to remember when integrating games into our pedagogy: it is best to let the connections arise naturally rather than forcing them. I still haven't found the perfect way to tie this unit to the previous ones. My best means at this point has been to encourage students to write about concerns related to gaming that have arisen in the class already (including how games influence culture, how games are used medically, whether games are art, and how games have been used for charitable ends. However, I also allow students the room to choose another field of study if they so desire. My main goal here is to have them investigate the concerns of a field in some depth and to create a paper that arises out of that community's concerns.

Unit 4: Multimodal Revision and Reflective Argument

As I mentioned earlier, our department requires a reflective argument component in every first year composition course. As a means to tie this last part back into our previous work, I have students develop an interactive revision of the argument they made during our third unit concurrently with their work on the reflection. I use this as a reflective prompt in and of itself, as a means to get students to think about the different mediations of messages and to also think back to our starting point with rhetoric.

Outside of Assignments

The other element of truly integrating a gaming mentality into our courses is to acknowledge that our very design sometimes has to change. I'm far from mastering this element myself, but I have been striving to move towards customizable assignments by querying students about alternative ideas and by using student-created rubrics. I also consistently encourage an interactive exploration of ideas in the classroom rather than focusing on instructor-focused lectures or discussions. I feel like some of this is just describing pedagogies that have been popular for some time, but another element specifically arises from my desire to move towards Gee's principles. That, ultimately, is the key: not that we achieve everything in our first implementations, but that we keep our goals in mind in creating and revising this pedagogy.