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Our Work

For the 2010-2011 academic year, the Immersive Environments Group in the Digital Writing & Research Lab was tasked with “building knowledge of the ways in which players act (strategically, collaboratively, creatively) and applying that knowledge to social (rhetorical, ethical, economic) situations.” For these aims, we formed valuable professional partnerships and created an educational game for use in lower-division rhetoric courses. 

Our initial meetings with Associate Director for Exhibitions and Education at the Harry Ransom Center, Cathy Henderson, secured our place in a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for the fall of 2012. We will be working closely with the Ransom Center to augment their exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America with QR codes and pedagogical content.

For the first half of the year, we found resources for introducing procedural rhetoric into the classroom. We've compiled an annotated list of serious video games and commercial video games for use in RHE 306 classes, or even for more topic-driven courses such as RHE 309K. 

For most of the year, though, we’ve been designing an alternate reality game (ARG) for use in Rhetoric 306 and 309 courses. We plan to implement this game in the spring of 2012 and conduct a study about its effectiveness as a pedagogical tool.

To learn about our game and the frame we've chosen, see the Battle Lines page. 

For further reading on alternate reality games and a list of resources on creating or participating in them, see our Resources page.

Why Use Games to Teach?

From a historical point of view, games and rhetoric are so closely intertwined that it is the rigid distinction between play and rhetorical pedagogy that appears new and incongruous – not games in rhetoric, but rhetoric without games. Take the building blocks of any budding rhetor’s education in antiquity: The progymnasmata were a series of increasingly difficult modules focused on specific rhetorical challenges that began with fables and simple narrations, leveled up to more developed practices such as the confirmation or refutation of stories or speeches, and eventually culminated in more fully developed role-playing performances such as ethopoiia and, eventually, declamation. This graduated structure epitomizes many of the educationally beneficial qualities contemporary theorists identify in games, such as “performance before competence” (Gee) and “flow” (Csíkszentmihályi) or when you are “intensely focused, highly motivated, creatively charged, and working at the very limits of [your] abilities" (McGonigal, Reality is Broken 40).

In a similar sense, the alternate reality game outlined in the following section will teach specific skills in both rhetoric and digital literacy through a series of focused, increasingly difficult modules or levels that build on each other as players progress. It will make use of another historically validated aspect of rhetorical play as well. Ancient progymnasmata and declamation exercises were, above all, performative: They required students to try out different subject positions as part of the process of crafting their own, flexible identities as skilled speakers and writers, often through explicit role-playing in fictional scenarios. While declamation was criticized even in antiquity for this distance from reality, the fictional nature of these roles and situations may have actually made them more effective learning tools.

Classics scholar Michael Winterbottom argues, for instance, that the role-playing dimension of declamation tuned out historical or political considerations that distracted from the immediate learning objectives (65), while as Ruth Webb notes, role-playing takes place within a self-contained “imaginary world” with distinct “rules of engagement” that provide “scope for imaginative engagement within set bounds” (304). These components make role-playing among the most effective mind-sets for learning. According to scholar of pedagogy James Gee, games teach players necessary skills and knowledge within what Gee calls a Situated Learning Matrix, where content “is rooted in experiences a person is having as part and parcel of taking on a specific identity (in terms of the goals and norms stemming from a social group)” (“Learning and Games” 26). By teaching through role-playing, games “distribute their knowledge and skills as a deep form of value-laden learning” (“Learning and Games” 32).

If games use role-playing to more effectively teach skills to players, this is certainly not to say that fantastical exercises in role-playing or fictional declamation themes are irrelevant to real world experience. On the contrary, rhetorical games are lenses through which students can reason about, engage, and assume authority over controversial and complex topics. As Erik Gunderson puts it, ancient declamation reveals “a zone of intellectual engagement where serious questions are elaborated in a pointedly frivolous context,” and the “otherwise unapproachable can be handled under the aegis of irrelevance, mere play, and idle fantasy” (Gunderson 6). Gee concurs that games facilitate learning by providing “experiences centered on problem solving [that] recruit learning and mastery as a form of pleasure” (“Learning and Games” 36).  Unlike many of the pedagogical techniques commonly found in the classroom setting, games get players to “exercise their learning muscles . . . without knowing it and without having to pay overt attention to the matter” (Good Video Games 29). Players do not approach games in order to learn a set of skills or a body of knowledge. Rather, skills and knowledge are gained unconsciously as one takes pleasure in mastering the problems and challenges good games offer.

By making use of a productive overlap between real and fictional controversies, our game sustains students’ engagement with real-world issues by providing a low-stakes, imaginative, and skills-oriented context that also makes the learning experience pleasurable. As players immerse themselves in a fictional world of feuding secret societies and conspiracies, they engage with the real-world issues of academic policy that 306 students will be researching and thinking about in relation to next year’s First-Year Forum text. Our endgame will require students, like ancient declaimers, to think about and actively engage these issues in a climactic, full-scale rhetorical performance – a digitally captured speech that coincides perfectly with the third essay in the 306 curriculum. Finally, our alternate reality game enables "performance before competence" by distributing information on demand, encouraging players to collaborate, and building on previously learned skills. All of these objectives allow for differential rates of learning, keep players invested in the game, and make the often frustrating experience of learning a new skill more pleasant.

Works Cited

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. Print.

Gee, James Paul. Good Video Games + Good Learning. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Print.

---. "Learning and Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Ed. Katie Salen. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. 21-40. Print.

Gunderson, Erik. Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. NewYork: Penguin, 2011. Print.

Webb, Ruth. “The Progymnasmata as Practice.” Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Ed. Yun Lee Too. Boston: Brill, 2001. Print.

Winterbottom, Michael. “Schoolroom and Courtroom.” Rhetoric Revalued: Papers from the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1982. Print.