DA Final Draft

Nicole Dreste

Research in Language and Lit, DA Essay

Dr. Chandler

1 November 2011

Gaming Literacy Analysis

What is the difference between talking to close friend and, perhaps, a police officer? How does one greet a young girl celebrating her third birthday as opposed to a mourning widow? What does one tell their sister about an altercation as opposed to what one would say in court before a jury?

There are many factors that come into play when discourse is involved. In general, we have been socialized to honor what has come before us and celebrate what we presently are as the optimal state of being. More often than that, we unconsciously mandate ourselves to respect overarching powers and to establish under-arching powers beneath ourselves as well as raise awareness to powers equal to our own.

In the analysis of the Gaming Literacy transcript, several traits rise to notice. It sounds like a pretty one-sided conversation—because in all actuality, it really is. Ch's questions are met with short, to the point answers and her comments are replied to by B with acquiescent reflections, merely regurgitating to clarify the truth of her assumptions. In the end, Ch's questioning style seems made to become aggressive—putting a bias on his answers, but at least then he's taking a position in the conversation.

Why was the discourse between Ch and B so slanted? There are—at the very least—two parallel underlying relationships to explore here. With the reader knowledge beforehand that Ch is a teacher, we can assume that B is a student or at the very least within a student mindset solely based on how he manages discourse in the conversation. Also, we are led to assume through the dialogue that not only is B a member of the Internet generation, but he himself assumes Ch to be of the Print generation—although Ch never implies one way or another which generation she belongs to. B is responding the way students are socialized to respond to figures of academic authority as well as articulating himself in such a way that he could relate to someone of that authority who happens to be of the Print generation, implying that students often assume that teachers in this generation are not Internet culture-savvy.

Ch I wanted to talk a little, you talk about your self as a hardware expert, you said software novice, although I bullied you into being competent, what software do you know how to use?

B you know, what everyone else knows how to use, word, frontpage, powerpoint, excell, spreadsheet things

Ch so it's interesting, games aren't really considered software are they?

B they are -

Ch so you know lots of software

B yeah, but it's just games (laughing)

We already gather the assumption that previous to the interview she's already 'bullied' him into taking more credit for his skills than he has let on—expressing an authoritative role over him. When she asks him what software he knows how to use, he responds in a list style the majority of Microsoft Office products—staples in the academic environment—without listing any others.

Ch confronts B with the question of games not being software and he rises to agree, saying that they are indeed considered software. Therefore, Ch concludes that he must know lots of software. To a friend or other Internet generation non-academic authority, he might have recalled several software formats for games that he's familiar with, because there are many—XBOX360, Playstation console software and PC gaming just being a handful. Instead, he responds in a way that understates his experience as a hardware expert—that they are ''just games”, drawing an invisible boundary in the conversation that he doesn't seem to want to cross—beyond which lies an area of expertise he may feel Ch might not deem academically noteworthy or might be confused by.

Ch so what kind of crossover did you find between learning the games and learning the software everyone needs to know? Obviously it wasn't real hard for you to learn, frontpage

B I think it's because I had ah, background exposure

Ch what background?

B Well, just in learning how to learn a program, I just see buttons, tool tips and ah I make a go at it, the scissors mean I can cut in here, and I can just cut and drag and drop - these a simple things everyone knows, I guess the only reason I can pick up learning a program is that I just have that knack, no other way to explain it.

Ch that's literacy - you have the basic tools, the right basic set of assumptions for how to read, understand, interpret a program.

Something interesting happens here relating to the student/teacher power relationship and it leads into the next dialogue set.

She asks him about the “crossover” between learning games and learning software “everyone needs to know”—she's set up a bias for his answer to lean into describing in detail the workings of Microsoft Office functions as opposed to describing learning from game software because it's already been established by the academic authority that such things are “needed” to be known, perhaps implying accidentally that game software knowledge is secondary.

His background exposure is never really explained in this set. Once again, he leans towards the academic and simplistic descriptions of these programs, as though she is a teacher authority of the Print generation.

Then, when he expresses that he cannot find the words to explain something, Ch once again steps out of the interviewer role and takes an authority role and explains to him what it is he is trying to say. Unconsciously, she seems to be participating in his assumption of her academic authority as a teacher.

Ch (cont'd) –And so what I'm looking for is the connection between all the gaming experience you have and your ability to do that with the applications - the academic applications

B well like a lot of games, in the beginning, there's menus. You don't just start playing. There's menus, you get to customize your decal your spray, clothes,

laughing

It's not all playing the game it's a lot of process to prepare for it, there's like box, scripts, you practice it, and you're not playing with other people, you're just like fooling around.

Ch OK so all those things - same kinds of processes, same kinds of moves - so navigating menus is something you learned from games that can carry over - anything else?

B I think that is the main thing, I can't connect a First person shooter with Microsoft word, that would be a real stretch

Ch how about file systems and gaming spaces?

B you know, you're right, because the game, the games are still software, and they're still files, so there are certain organization of a game that is different from regular files

Ch then takes a more aggressive interviewing approach to getting specific information out of him beginning with “And so what I'm looking for—“ as though this entire conversation were leading up to this moment. It's almost an ultimatum; “and so” implies the coming of a conclusion to something, inviting him to say his peace before the interview is over. To B, it may seem she has almost given him an assignment with these words, an assignment with a due date, and this prompts him to go into further detail as he rises to assume the student role.

This is the first and only time in the interview that B utilizes 'you' into his word choice. Up until this point, he has expressly kept to himself, with “I” and “everyone”, keeping the two separate, and never taking authority over the “you” that is Ch or the general “everyone” in which Ch is included. Now that he has been implicitly assigned by Ch to represent his knowledge, he responds as per the idiom—taking the 'teaching' role students might take when they are regurgitating information in class with “You don't just start playing”/”you customize”/”your decal””your spray””It's a lot of process to prepare for it/you're not playing with other people, you're just like fooling around.”

“OK”. Ch implicitly rewards his information with a “grade”, and then further reinforces that grade by reflecting back to him what she understood. “--anything else?” offers him the bonus credit to further explain what he wants.

However, he's satisfied with her general satisfaction, and returns to identifying with “I” and commenting how something from gaming culture can't really be connected to academic technology. He is now just a little looser with his terminology, classifying a “First Person shooter,” but he doesn't go as far as to specify exactly which (for example, if he compared Bioshock with not being connected to Microsoft Office—both products, by the way, were released by the Microsoft company).

At the end of this set, after Ch presses the likenesses between files and gaming spaces, B relents that she is right and justifies why she is right—assuming his role again as a student who should be open to a teacher's experience, even if so far his opinion has been to keep the two areas of technology separate.

Ch - so what's another thing - so playing those games when you were a little kid set you up to be able to disentangle that DOS system more easily than your stepfather, so what were you doing?

B like I was navigating through menus

Ch you got used to trial and error

B I wasn't being graded - there's no - all right man, let's pass this class you've got to

Ch so you're completely comfortable with messing it up and starting over.

B Oh yeah

Ch I think the print generation has a lot of hangups with that - what's something else

B there's a song by Natasha Ben ? I hear it on the radio - it goes like, she says in her song, that we're taught not to make mistakes, we really can't live that way

Ch's questions as the interviewer at this point have evolved more into statements (“you got used to trial and error”/”so you're completely comfortable” )—feeding into him in a way that she has learned will provoke a productive response. B's answers still revolve around academic discourse (“I wasn't being graded”).

In the last two lines of the interview shown, Ch expresses what might be a concern for the print generation being unwilling to make mistakes—she still doesn't imply to which generation she belongs. B responds with a short anecdote about a song on the radio about how “we” are taught not to make mistakes, that “we” really can't live that way.

The song in question is “Unwritten” by Natasha Ben, which actually goes “I break tradition, sometimes my tries, are outside the lines/We've been conditioned to not make mistakes, but I can't live that way”. It is interesting how he takes the song where the artist is referring to her inability to live without making mistakes in a population where the “we” is conditioned not to do so and converts her inability to apply to the “we” in his dialogue. In the last few moments of the recorded interview, he seems to approach Ch differently—taking the teacher role and the student role, the print gen and the internet gen, and applying them to equal grounding when it comes to the philosophy of a lyric of music. He may be making this connection on the foundation that the radio and music, unlike software, is a universal language understood across social roles and tech generations.

Overall, the interview showed signs of bias—both because of the teacher/student power roles and the Internet/Print gen assumptions explained above, and the implied prior knowledge of each other that the reader is not informed about directly. The interview is insightful for a start, but lacks potentially useful information about gaming literacy that could have been generously supplied if both parties had not assumed these roles unconsciously.