slow progress is still progress

I'm a Humanities Scholar with specializations in Speculative Fiction, Queer Theory, and Critical Disability Theory. I have a background in Biology in addition to English and enjoy finding unexpected connections between the two.

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There is an interesting example of mangle of play behavior modeled in an incident known as “The Corrupted Blood Incident” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident in which a bug created a fictional plague within World of Warcraft that has now been used as a case study in quite a few scholarly papers to understand the COVID-19 pandemic. By analyzing player behavior during this well-documented virtual plague, researchers have attempted to better understand human behavior and psychology during the pandemic and refine statistical models for infection predictions.

Play theory is partially built upon a response to the trivialization of the concept of play itself. As Huizinga writes of early play theorists “they all start from the assumption that play must serve something which is not play, that it must have some kind of biological purpose” (2). This sentiment mirrors arguments that writing is most beneficial in service to other disciplines revealing the first level of reductive reasoning that doesn’t view play/writing as having value in and of itself. And this may be the crux of the matter: the devaluation of certain types of media is an extension of the idea that writing in and of itself is meaningless.

So continuing to address video games is part and parcel of continuing to justify the value of the humanities and is a conversation that I think will continue to be with us for some time. Honestly, the opening statistics from CH1 with the high level of video game engagement show just how important defending this connection could be to regaining public understanding and value for the humanities.

I love playing Codenames that is an awesome blend of recall and creative thinking skills that works by how well you know your discourse community. It involves word association but to an even greater extent relies on how well you know how your teammates think as the goal is not only to have them pick the words you need for your team but also avoid words for the other team and the assassin card that will end the game for everyone.

I’ve been thinking again about the links between Play and academic Risk-Taking with the added elements of how a “sense of belonging” that explores the interplay of community and identity are so related to what we’ve been reading about play. Here is a snippet of what I’ve written about it

Play involves elements of risk and the ability to imagine possible outcomes (a key point in Dr. Mando’s talk and article). The biggest idea play can contribute to further the theory of academic risk-taking is that play tells us to try again. The scholarship of risk-taking recognizes that there isn’t always an opportunity in our education for students to try again so sometimes, they don’t try at all as the risk of a poor grade or worse is too heavy. So, building the link between failure in play that sees “success (and failure) is a collective interdependent achievement” and as an iterative learning process can help situate the bond between play and grad learning with the recognition that building a sense of belonging is not only a metric of individual success, but also of the community and culture of grad learning (Steinkuehler and Tsaasan 187).

CH7 and 20 both emphasize the importance of community (and collaboration) in shaping feedback systems and in turn, building expertise. I think this may be a component that has been missing in other discussions of failure/risk-taking (ie community empathy). CH 20 in particular has made me rethink some of my attitudes towards instruction/play that encourages vulnerability as something that isn’t handed down from the top but is built through mutual gameplay. This seems like a (necessary) complication to theories of failure that is harder to translate to a classroom setting – any thoughts/tips?

Here is my opening paragraph and a brief plan for my essay - let me know what you think!!

Graduate writing takes place in a liminal space. It’s liminality is derived from the synchronous act of existing in the past, present, and future of the writer. While this may be true of all writing, graduate writing seeks an acute awareness of this temporal coexistence through discussions of pedagogy and skills that look at metacognition. This paper delves into the three levels of temporal existence in graduate writing and what they mean as a synchronous whole to create a definition of graduate writing that centers the experiential nature of graduate writing. As such, this graduate writing can be seen as an expanding horizon of disciplinary knowledge that recognizes and applies diverse methods and frameworks on multiple levels of audience familiarity with a distinct awareness of the processes and ideologies that go into this work.

To more fully understand this definition of graduate writing, here is my basis for a definition of writing itself. Writing is an iterative process of organizing, construction, and assessing knowledge utilizing representational symbols with distinct forms that are built upon cultural and social traditions.

Brief Plan:

Past

               Reflection/Metacognition, Portfolio

Present

               New and exciting work, texts, media, forms, experiences (conferences, events,              speakers)

Future

               Professional development

               Conscious multiplicity of production

Temporal Integration/Conclusion

               Making peace with the knowledge that there is so much more to know

               Building and maintaining webs of knowledge and connection

I really liked the Writing Transfer piece and it reminds me a lot of Naming What We Know (themes versus threshold concepts) are these two groups talking to each other? Their conclusions seem too similar to not know about each other, but it’d be cool if they evolved independently too. With how useful these two pieces are—I’m wondering if there is something similar for play that can be distilled into a table like in the Transfer piece (maybe such a think already exists). Sutton-Smith got close-ish with the lists but translating from a list of activities into concepts could be really beneficial.

These chapters and particularly Benson's bring up the role of positive/negative reward pathways in playing that I think is an interesting connection back to Stuart's Ethics as well as creating new links to biology (these terms are frequently used in neurobehavioral studies). With these player-centric theories that focus on play as biological--are we giving something up for this definition? I also notice the focus on the individual was key in the writing outcomes as well though all of these theories in one way or another acknowledge the social aspects of learning and play. I feel like in some ways we are gaining a more refined definition of play in these recent chapters but I'm trying to make it make sense with some of Huizinga's claims and even Stenros' own "spirit of play." I guess both can exist simultaneously (as is common in play characteristics) I just think it is interesting that there seems to be a return to the aspects of play (and writing) that are physical/biological. Is this a tension that is just central to play? We've encountered about 60+ years of theories and all of them seem to share some of this tension.