Category: Language Arts

Finding meaning in video games

If we can use music videos as a shorter proxy for introducing literature responses, then what about other types of media. On The Media had an interesting interview with the Tom Bissell, the author of “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter“. Bissell argues that there is art worthy of criticism in video games, but there is not nearly as much as there should be.

I tend to like violent games, the same reason that I’ve worked as a war correspondent, the same reason I wrote a book about a war. I’m interested in violence.

That said, there are some games that have interesting stuff to say about violence and some games that just treat it mindlessly. And, you know both can be fun. But the ones that really affect me are the ones that actually try to address the subject. – Tom Bissell on On The Media.

In particular, he highlights “Far Cry 2”:

There’s a game called Far Cry 2 that takes place in a contemporary African civil war. It’s extremely beautiful.

And yet, it is just the most unrelentingly savage game I think I’ve ever played.

Most games that are violent give you the gun, push you in the direction of the bad guys and say hey, go kill all those guys, they’re bad. You’ll be rewarded. Good job.

Far Cry 2 does something really confounding. Going through the game, quote, “getting better at killing,” the game kind of introduces slowly that you’re actually not helping things, that, in fact, you’re kind of the problem.

Everything you’re doing is just making this conflict worse. So by the end of the game you’re just a wreck. You’re progressing through the game because that’s what the game’s asked you to do, but it’s also throwing all of this stuff back at you that’s actually shaming you a little bit for being participant in this virtual slaughter. And I love that about it. – Tom Bissell on On The Media.

Is he reading too much into violent video games trying to justify his own habits? Perhaps, but he does have a point.

When my students were telling me about Call Of Duty:Modern Warfare 2, one of the first things we talked about was the infamous airport mission. The player is an undercover agent with a terrorist organization and has to participate in shooting civilians in an attack on an airport. Jesse Stern, the scriptwriter for the video game says the mission was intended to be provocative:

People want to know. As terrifying as it is, you want to know. And there’s a part of you that wants to know what it’s like to be there because this is a human experience. These are human beings who perpetrate these acts, so you don’t really want to turn a blind eye to it. You want to take it apart and figure out how that happened and what, if anything, can be done to prevent it. Ultimately, our intention was to put you as close as possible to atrocity. As for the effect it has on you, that’s not for us to determine. Hopefully, it does have an emotional impact and it seems to have riled up a lot of people in interesting ways. Some of them good. Some of them bad.
– Jesse Stern in Gaudiosi, 2009.

There is a difference between vicariously becoming a participant in violence when a novelist lets us see the world through the eyes of a killer, and actually having to pull the virtual trigger yourself, but it seems as much one of degree as anything else. While I’ve seen some initial evidence that violent video games are bad, I’m not familiar at all with the evidence that violent novels are also bad.

Perhaps, however, when we start treating video games, particularly violent ones, in as pedantic a way as literature is sometimes treated, maybe they’ll lose some of their appeal. Or maybe, they’ll just become more educational experiences. Stern again:

When we tested the level, it was interesting. …people would get angry or sad or disgusted and immediately wonder what the Hell was going on here. And then after a few moments of having that experience, they would remember that they were in a video game and they would let go. Every single person in testing opened fire on the crowd, which is human nature. It feels so real but at the same time it’s a video game and the response to it has been fascinating. I never really knew you could elicit such a deep feeling from a video game, but it has.

Extrapolating meaning

The group Bright Eyes has a wonderful video for their song First Day of My Life. It consists of a series of vignettes of people sitting on a couch listening to and responding to the song. It’s fascinating to think about the stories behind the couples and individuals (and one dog) sitting on the couch. The people in the video are obviously not actors, and you get a glimpse of their character as they respond to the same thing you are hearing. It’s interesting to see how their response differs from your own.

In reading literature we try to get students to think beyond the book, while in creative writing we try to build and get to know our own interesting characters. In the video you get perhaps a five second glimpse of the characters so there is much room for questioning and exploring. What brought these people to this place and this time, what history do they have that makes them act the way they do?

In a video and song like this one, you can ask many of the same questions that you ask when you read a story. There may be no story arc with regards to individuals, but there is a broader pattern embedded within the lyrics and the sequencing of the video. I would like to use this to introduce different types of reading responses, such as writing a letter to a character, or assessing the issues raised by the video.

Alternatively, the video could be used as a writing prompt. Choose one set of characters in the video and tell me their story. The format of this video is nice for this type of assignment because you have the parallel experience of hearing the same words and music that the people in the video are responding to.

Stories on Stage: Audio of short stories online

Chicago Public Radio has its series of short stories read by actors, Stories on Stage, available online. It’s quite an impressive list of stories and includes some of Camella C.’s favorites:

The series does not seem to extend beyond 2007 but there are quite a number of stories going all the way back to 2001. It’s great to hear these stories well read, and to recognize that the rules for reading prose out loud are very similar to those for poetry.

Hat tip to Anna C. for pointing this out to me.

Spell check

I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

– From “Spellchecker Poem” Zar (1994)

Do grammar and spell check actually help students learn? While it is Montessori-like in principle, making writing more like a self-correcting work, it removes much of the burden of correcting mistakes from the student because they are not forced to identify errors as the software makes suggestions for them.

In addition, grammar and spell checkers in particular, are not especially sensitive to context. The “Spellchecker Poem” (Zar, 1994; Hensel, 2008) passes through a spell checker without comment despite the obvious errors. While grammar checkers are getting better, accurately assessing context is a difficult challenge and fail when a person is trying to intentionally break the rules of grammar, which distracts the writer from their true intentions. Auto-correct functions can also be an incredible pain.

Spell and grammar check functions might work better if they just identified errors but not give students suggestions for corrections.

Of course, in writing this I am using spell check for almost every other word. They are an essential part of electronic writing and inseparable from computer use today. They are ubiquitous in academia and the workplace. Indeed it can be argued that their proper usage is a necessary skill to learn, although to most effectively use checkers you may very well need to know the rules of grammar that the checkers prevent students from learning.

I need to do a bit more research on the subject since I’m pretty sure I’m not the first to address this dilemma. I would really appreciate any suggestions about where to find publications about the topic (my Google-fu is weak with respect to this topic for some reason).

It would also probably be useful to create a lesson specifically dealing with the use of grammar and spell checking, probably using the “Spellchecker Poem“. My students do most of their writing electronically, either on the wiki or using word processing software so this is a topic I need to clarify my own thoughts on soon.

I, too, sing America

We’ve had quite a number of Langston Hughes‘ poems recited in the mornings. This morning it was “I, too, sing America” and I ran into the above YouTube video, narrated by the author (the narration can be found at The Poetry Archive).

“I, too, sing America” was written in response to Walt Whitman’s “I, Hear America Singing” (Gonzales, date unknown), which ties into the story of advancing civil rights in the United States.