English 2070: Writing Inspired by Video Games
Course Description: Welcome to Writing Inspired by Video Games, the theme for our English 2070 course! This course has been designed to facilitate your writing abilities and rhetorical knowledge by understanding, discussing, and responding to the medium of digital games. In pairing both writing and video games, my goal is to ultimately help encourage you to understand how to transfer writing skills across the disciplines and contexts.
Positioned in a key role of the entertainment industry, video games are omnipresent, helping develop and diversify our cultural identity. Despite this popularity, many of us have yet to cultivate a response to this central question: how do we analyze and write about video games? More importantly, as we’ll discover during this course, we hesitate on how to answer, how can video games improve and develop our writing, specifically our rhetorical and genre knowledges?
There are no correct answers to the above questions. We interact with digital mediums differently, bringing prior knowledge and values to each interaction. Those experiences shape us, shape our writing, but this course will enable you to tie those considerations with new rhetorical theories and concepts of writing.
Personal Reflection: ENG 2070 is an intermediate writing course at Bowling Green State University and was taught for an audience of sophomores, juniors, and seniors. I designed the course in hopes students’ prior interest in video games or digital technologies (if applicable) would facilitate the transfer of rhetoric and genre awareness across contexts.
- Rhetoric in Review: Students were tasked with selecting a publication that reviews video games (Youtube Channels, New York Times and traditional news publications, gaming focused sites, etc.) and perform a rhetorical analysis of the website. Upon completing the rhetorical analysis, students were required to write brief reviews of a game (real or not) in the style of the website, acknowledging a few of the ways context and constraints of the site shaped their writing. This project was designed to develop awareness of the rhetorical situation in students.
- The Game of Genre Conventions: Students compared and contrasted two genres in a newly defunct type of writing: video game manuals. Selecting out of dozens of sub-genres, students argued how both visual and textual designs enabled genre and how, despite differences, each sub-genre fit into the generic requirements of a gaming manual. Additionally, students were required to give brief presentations on their findings. In creating this project, I wanted to challenge students to look at what, for many, are old or unfamiliar pieces of writing. Yet, by allowing them to pick sub-genres they’re aware of (horror, comedic, action, arcade, etc.) the project was accessible and engaged their interests.
- Final Project: Recognizing some prefer creative projects and others more formal, structures assignments, the final for ENG 2070 allowed students to either 1. Create their own game or 2. Write a critical essay on a topic connected to gaming. In creating a game, students were required to describe the genre of their game and what elements the game is comprised of to support their argument, detail a general plot, and propose rhetorical situation content, such as audience, context, setting, etc. Students writing more traditional essays ranged from narrative criticisms to games to close readings of topical issues or documenting poor practices within the gaming industry.
Renee Ann Drouin 