During the first ten minutes of class, write your summary memos on today’s reading from Jones and Hafner on “Games, Learning, and Literacy.” We will discuss it after you have had a chance to post your responses.
4 thoughts on “Beginning of Class Writing: Jones and Hafner, Understanding Digital Literacies, Chapter 9”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
To: Jason W. Ellis
From: George Gordon
Date: April 12th, 2016
Subject: Chapter 9 Summary
This chapter discusses video games and focuses on the complexities that come with playing now. Games are no longer simple mindless affairs, at least, not all of them. Games take place in a virtual world, tell a story, have players solve problems, bring people together online or locally, or allow players to customize or mod the game. They have even spawned online affinity spaces dedicated to games, with Machinima being highlighted.
Within games, players tend to have an objective and must progress through the story and this isn’t always represented through text, it can be through icons, colors, or the environment. Players are given information directly from the virtual world or through an interface with text that gives them valuable information. Outside of games, there exists game manuals that explain how one can play and walkthroughs that are detailed documents which are created by someone who already has played the game and can help others progress through them. Then there is modding, which allows players to do new things with the tools provided in game and Machinima where people can create videos based on games.
Games can also allow players to role play as anything they want or be any gender they desire if the game allows it or role play as a set character usually with abilities the average person will not have or being super-powered. This allows players become someone else for the time spent playing the game. Games are also allowing people to learn the mechanics of the games through problem solving or learn about things in the real world through the game.
To: Professor Ellis
From: Rownak Choudhury
Date: April 12, 2016
Subject: Chapter 9 Summary, Understanding Digital Literacies
Chapter 9 of the textbook discusses the benefits of video games in new media. There are three different identities we associate ourselves with when we play video games. There is the real identity, virtual identity, and the projective identity. The real identity is our physical self outside of the gaming world, the virtual identity is the one assigned to us in a game, and the projective identity is how we make a connection between our real identity and the virtual identity through the incorporation of our own values and ideals into the gaming world.
I am personally a fan of online RPG game. A lot of the things that were discussed in this chapter are things that I have had in the back of my mind as well. I am an advocate for virtual reality games helping to prepare people in an unorthodox way for the real world. (The price, however, can be poor eyesight.) Given a moderation of all things, I think that video games can help people in giving them a bird’s eye point of view of a world and helping to integrate them into a culture and community.
To: Professor Ellis
From: Christopher Navarrete
Date: 4/12/16
Subject: Chapter 9 Summary
In this chapter, the author discusses the affordances and constraints of video games, what makes them so compelling, and the kinds of literacy practices that have grown up around them. Video games tell stories through a wide variety of modes, including visual, verbal, aural, and textual. These are all combined in complex ways to both “represent the action in the world of the game, and provide an interface through which the player can interact with that world.” This in turn encourages new forms of reading and writing as video games can be seen as a kind of complex text.
Video games can also be played and enjoyed without understanding text most of the time. People can, for example, see signs such as a yellow alert icon to to understand what is going on. The same applies to sound and color as well, being safe is understood by a certain sound effect and color (green). This means that video games are highly multimodal due to the vast amount of ways it can be understood.
To: Jason W. Ellis
From: Ashley A. Dunlap
Date: April 12, 2016
Subject: Chapter 9 Summary
Chapter nine explores the complex realm f video games and how it engages with users. Video games, although not instantly relatable to new media, allows a new form of reading and writing and engages user identity in different ways.
Video games come with pre-written stories that are central to the purpose of the game and intertwine with the multimodality of the program. Games rely heavily on visual, aural, verbal, and textual modes. When looking at identity in video games, there are three different identities involved. These are the real identity, virtual identity, and “projective identity”. All of these help users to understand different cultural values and frame the experience.