The Minority Vote

I have to admit that I was fairly disappointed with Alexander's piece. Gaming and writing sounds really cool, and I'm rather fond of Gee, but having recovered from the "WoW addiction" after a three-year bender, I really don't see how this could be any more than a specialized pedagogy.

First, I'd like to declaim a few assumptions that Alexander makes:

1) 50% of college students play video games (36). This is probably true. However, Alexander focuses in on WoW as the basis for his article, and I would say that the number of college students who have played WoW is about 25% of the 50% of gaming college students; in fact, I'd say only about 5% of college students are the type of serious WoW players that "Mike and Matt" are. Really.

2) People who play WoW or other MMORPGs utilize five different literacies--literacy reflectivity, trans-literacies, collaborative writing, multicultural literacies, and critical literacies (45).  Not IMHO--that's netspeek for no fucking way. Having been a player like Mike and Matt, I recognize all five of these literacies and admit that some players do use most or all of them. However, Mike and Matt use all of these literacies because they are the leaders of a guild; most members of a guild do not, or at least do not use many of them. Furthermore, very few players are actually members of guilds that utilize these literacies; most players are not active guild raiders like Mike and Matt.

3) People who play WoW are collaborative (41-2). This one's kinda implied, but it's there nonetheless, and is only true to a limited extent. Again, Mike and Matt are not typical; by now the process of "levelling up" to 80 (maximum level, where all the content that Mike and Matt engage in is located) is largely done through "solo play." The process of levelling up involves repetition of quests that are themselves quite repetitive (kill 8 monsters, turn in quest, repeat for three months), and there are very few rewards for collaborative play--unfortunately, until very high levels, collaborative play is too time-consuming (and requires too much organizaiton or coordination) to be practical for most players. This is ironic, considering that most people join with the intent of playing with other people; however, in my experience, friends who buy the game together often find that they cannot play at the same time, or one player levels-up too far ahead for the other player to catch up, or one of any other myriad of barriers crops up to prevent collaborative play. True collaborative play does occur at max level, if the player commits to a raiding guild, and if that guild makes a serious committment in time, energy, and patience to actually killing the big bosses.

I could make many more points, but this is enough for the sake of some semblance of brevity. Anyway, my point is that Alexander spills a great deal of ink to outline the literacies that Mike and Matt demonstrate--which are great--but are unrealistic when applied to most student gamers, or even most WoW players.

Of course, I missed Alexander's most basic assumption--my bad: "incorporating a strong consideration of gaming into composition courses may not only enliven writing instruction for many of our students, but also transform our approach to literacy" (37). I'll agree to the last point--Alexander wrings a great deal out of Mike and Matt's interactions--but due to my comments on assumption #1, I don't believe that working gaming/MMOs into our syllabi is going to help most students; there's just too few students who play MMOs or WoW, fewer that play at Mike and Matt's level, and a plethora of students who will actively resist such activities. Also, again in my experience, most players are loathe to admit to their classmates that they're gamers--there's too much of a social stigma associated with game-playing (yeah, I know that we love to challenge those types of cultural taboos, but promoting acceptance of gamers is down the list on the causes I care about--there's bigger issues to tackle). Furthermore, it'd be too problematic to try to arrange; I know Shawn LameBull likes to hold the occasional class session in Mulgore, but many students simply don't have access to gaming computers or accounts, and some students are always excluded.

So, I guess I'm probably the black sheep in that I just don't see the value of using video games, especially WoW, in FYC. I could see Alexander's approach as being a great proposal for a new course (Engl 4XX/5XX--Video Games and Composition), which would consist of students who are very interested in studying gaming, literacy, and writing, but I stand firm that it would be an absolute disaster for a FYC course.