Abstract
This article describes an interdisciplinary, partially online honors course entitled Video Game Theory and Design. The article reviews the literature surrounding video games and technical communication and then outlines the learning objectives for the course. The authors describe individual and team-produced assignments and suggest game design techniques for motivating students. We explain how we assess different projects, including oral game pitches and the complex technical Game Design Documents that are students’ final deliverables. Finally, we discuss how game design techniques provide new perspectives on writing and generate new possibilities for technical communication assignments. We close by proposing three tactics that are useful for teaching technical communication students in hybrid and fully online courses: (a) nonlinear association for creative thinking; (b) team-based assignments for writing and editing using game-based tools; and (c) iterative prototyping and playtesting for multimodal production. Each tactic is contextualized using examples drawn from the field.
Keywords
As modern universities struggle with reduced budgets coupled with continuous or increasing student enrollment, partially or fully online instruction offers an enticing strategy for dealing with resource challenges. For one thing, online pedagogy allows a university to staff and deliver courses without requiring new construction or renovations to existing facilities. For another, online courses reduce demands on existing campus infrastructure, such as parking and electricity. Online courses are appreciated by faculty members and students alike for the convenience they offer in terms of scheduling and comfort. Both completing assignments and grading them are more comfortable in one’s pajamas, it turns out. Finally, as we saw in the spring of 2020, remote courses are essential when dealing with health emergencies such as the COVID-19 virus.
Even outside of public health crises, a trend toward more online instruction is evident in the discipline of technical communication. Increasing numbers of courses in technical communication continue to be offered online, including fully online degree programs such as those at Arizona State University (BS and MS), Texas Tech University (MA), and the University of Central Florida (UCF; BA). In such programs or others where technical communication classes are offered (see Hewett & Bourelle, 2017 for a more comprehensive list), the faculty members teaching these courses are still coming to terms with best practices for online instruction. Although some stakeholders (e.g., instructors, students, parents, etc.) still stigmatize online education as inferior to face-to-face courses, there is a growing body of evidence that shows this is not the case (e.g., Nguyen, 2015), and researchers claim we now have enough empirical evidence to confidently state that “students can learn as well or better in an online format; this is no longer a matter of dispute” (Navarro, 2015, p. 261).
Nonetheless, within the discipline of technical communication, opportunities remain to refine and improve our specialized online coursework. Our collective desire to do more (e.g., broadening the types of technical communication courses offered online) and to do better (e.g., offering more useful and usable courses) in online technical communication pedagogy is evidenced by the number of papers found in special issues of academic journals focused on this topic, such as the 2007 and 2017 issues of Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ), and in edited collections, such as Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers (Cook & Grant-Davie, 2005) and the update to that volume Online Education 2.0 (Cook & Grant-Davie, 2017). In one article within the 2017 TCQ special issue, authors Rodrigo and Ramírez (2017) note that “As educators settle into 21st-century pedagogical expectations, the process for strategically designing and delivering online and technical professional communication (TPC) courses are still in flux” (p. 314). Indeed, taking an online course in technical communication may vary significantly from one instructor to the next, with one faculty member essentially using the online platform as a file repository to host written notes and PowerPoint lectures while another offers students more ambitious assignments that embrace the networked and multimodal possibilities of online learning spaces. Central to effective instruction in online contexts is the philosophy that online students should have “access to the same learning opportunities as onsite students” (Hewett & Bourelle, 2017, p. 2017). We suggest taking this a step further, asking the question: How can online students be given learning opportunities even better than those for students in face-to-face classes?
One way of engaging this question is to consider how advancements in technology provide new learning opportunities in online environments. For instance, alongside the growth in online communications technology, such as applications like Discord, FaceTime, Skype, and Zoom, hardware and software in consumer entertainment have also continued to evolve. We now have sophisticated technologies for virtual reality, social networking, and video gaming in computer-based (e.g., PCs or Macs), console (e.g., Xboxes or PlayStations), and handheld or hybrid formats (e.g., Nintendo Switches). Each of these classes of consumer technologies, and the digital software that these hardware systems run, offers intriguing possibilities for use in the online technical communication classroom.
It is one of these technologies, video gaming, that is the focus of this article. Over the past decade, technical communication researchers and teachers have acknowledged the importance of video games to our discipline. Scholars note that video games are interactive and engaging environments layered with rich textual and visual artifacts: instructions, dialogue, user interfaces, narratives, and more. These games are comprised of “richly multimodal spaces” that blend graphics, sound, interactive gameplay, text, and space in compelling ways that “offer unique affordances, grammars, and logics” (Colby, 2017, p. 56). As deWinter and Vie (2016) argue in their introduction to a special issue of TCQ focused on video games, “… technical communication is well positioned to interrogate these systems and create new texts because the field already works at the intersection of the technical and the symbolic—and games are both” (p. 151). deWinter and Moeller (2016) agree that games are both technical and symbolic—squarely in the domain of technical communicators’ expertise—and that they are also complex systems of communication “relying on written, verbal, visual, algorithmic, audio, and kinesthetic procedures to convey information” (p. 3). Whether directing a player’s decisions and behaviors through simple on-screen text presented as dialogue or through user interface decisions that require players to move their bodies in certain ways during gameplay, games offer rich environments for studying the experience of play as a communicative activity.
Beneath the surface layers of video games lie procedural texts comprised of computer code that specify the rules of play and operation. These processes and the algorithms that form them are rhetorical (deWinter & Moeller, 2016) because they effectively and persuasively communicate ideas in a procedural fashion, an argument outlined by Bogost (2007) in his book Persuasive Games. The code that enables these procedures has been likened to “a collection of rhetorical decisions about how to engage those machinic processes” (Brock & Mehlenbacher, 2018, p. 383) that exist behind the user interface of software. McAllister (2004) further notes a rhetorical dimension of games due to the tensions that are found not only in the conflict between players and rule-based systems but also in the social, economic, and political conditions that surround games. He notes that “computer games are a site of struggle, a point in the dialectic where rhetorical forces are exerted in an effort to gain dominance over competitors, technologies, players, concerned citizens, and the media” (p. 25). Ultimately, video games must persuade players that the activities they offer are worth engaging in and that their players’ time is well spent in navigating through these virtual experiences.
While the rhetorical complexity of games makes them appealing objects of study, we argue that it is the playability of games that ultimately defines them as a worthwhile medium for our field to consider. In this essay, we argue that building oral and written communication assignments catalyzed by play can improve student engagement in the technical communication classroom and better prepare students for future industry careers. This builds upon prior research looking at commercial video games more generally, such as Vie’s (2008) work where she argues that using games in the classroom has benefits such as “the possibility of increased student engagement and learning; the ability to move beyond mere modes or genre-based writing to richer, rhetorically informed composing pedagogy; and the incorporation of multimodal literacies that may benefit twenty-first century student learners in particular” (p. 161). While Vie focused on the use of commercial video games in her own pedagogy, we maintain that allowing students to compose their own original video game ideas can lend even more excitement to games-based assignments.
Our approach in this article is to first briefly summarize the literature surrounding games and technical communication and then describe our interdisciplinary course that approaches games as vehicles for teaching technical communication principles in a partially online format. Complex technical documents created by our students, such as their game design documents, are crucial to this approach and foster and rely upon the effective use of online collaborative tools. By reviewing this literature and discussing an extended example based on our own experiences, we will provide technical communication instructors who are interested in teaching online with several game-based references and strategies.
Games and Technical Communication
Video games are exceedingly popular in our culture. The Entertainment Software Association’s annual gaming survey reveals that nearly all children in the U.S. play video games (McGonigal, 2011). Perhaps surprisingly, almost half of adults identify as gamers, too (Colby, 2017), and one out of four gamers is over the age of 50 (McGonigal, 2011). Given these statistics and the broad popularity of video games, it makes good sense for our discipline to study this medium, particularly because both technical communication and game design are focused on understanding audiences and communication through different textual and multimodal strategies.
Fortunately, a growing amount of research in the prior two decades has yielded insights about the intersection of games and technical communication. Mason (2013) reminds us that games are “rich sites of inquiry into learning and literacy development” (p. 225). Building upon the prior work of Gee (2003) and Hawisher and Selfe (2007), she explains how video games influence our understandings about learning and literacy. She describes how the medium has gradually become legitimized through its recognition for eligibility in major federal grants, through the inclusion of games in institutional curricula at universities, and through the presence of games in major reading lists (where they may sit aside classic texts from Aristotle and John Donne). This work also benefits from a rich vein of scholarship in computers and writing, rhetoric, and composition which has collectively explored the connections between video games and writing over the prior two decades (e.g., Alberti, 2008; Colby & Colby, 2008; McAllister, 2004; Robison, 2008).
DeAnda and Kocurek (2016) go even further than some scholars, arguing that game design is a subset or subfield of technical communication. After examining and analyzing three of the most common textbooks used in game design, they ultimately make this claim not because [game design] relies on computer code as a central technology (although sometimes it can), but because the fundamental processes and practices of game design are technical practices such as iterative design, testing, and even the production of algorithmic rule systems that structure player experience. (p. 203)
In terms of games and teaching writing, Robison (2008) argues that there are many parallels between the design process of game developers and the design process of writing instructors. She reminds us that game design can also be conceptualized as curriculum design, as both practices involve building systems for experience, problem-solving, and “interpretive play” (p. 368). This parallel focus and purpose means that instructors are already often and necessarily building in some freedom and playfulness into their course activities to make the learning content more personal and less dry.
Some scholarship has also explored the connection between games and the technical communication classroom. For example, Vie (2008) argues for the inclusion of games in technical communication pedagogy, noting that games offer one possibility to “excite students about the fundamentals of technical writing, while also introducing students to the rhetorical notion of revision for a particular audience” (p. 158). Drawing from her experiences playing PC and console games such as Half-Life, Tomb Raider, and Metal Gear Solid, Vie explains how she created assignments such as group game walk-throughs and analyses focused on usability and revision.
In a more recent study, Colby (2017) interviewed 24 teachers of writing, rhetoric, and technical communication about their use of video games in their pedagogy. These instructors used games in a variety of ways, sometimes incorporating multiple strategies across different types of assignments. In her research, Colby found that 11 teachers asked students to rhetorically analyze specific games. Eight instructors asked students to design their own games to teach an audience something about writing or literacy. Three teachers focused on procedurality “by examining not only how procedurality worked within games to shape player experience but also how those procedures could be broken, thereby critically interrogating player positioning and experience within the game” (Colby, 2017, p. 61). Six other teachers used games to help students engage with theories from game studies and new media, and other instructors asked students to revise written arguments by redesigning them into games. Colby’s research reveals that there are numerous ways in which games can be incorporated into writing-based courses, and many of these ideas will translate well into technical communication pedagogy in both theoretical and practical assignments.
More broadly beyond the field of technical and professional communication, video games have also shown to be a positive influence on academic achievement for specialized populations, such as nontraditional learners (Turner et al., 2018). We know that student populations in online technical communication courses continue to diversify (Cook & Grant-Davie, 2017). Given the ubiquity and economic impact of games and gamification and the diversity of audiences seeking learning opportunities in higher education, we only expect this trend to continue.
As this brief literature review suggests, games are becoming increasingly prevalent in technical communication courses and progressively more important to the discipline. In the next portion of the article, we draw from our own experiences as online instructors using games as subject matter and large-scale documentation requirements as major projects. Specifically, we describe our approach to designing and teaching a mixed-mode, partially online course focused on video games. Although our course relies on video games—and their societal implications—for course content, the assignments and strategies we review are useful even outside games-specific courses. To reinforce this argument, we ultimately propose three different tactics drawn from our course experiences and argue that such tactics are broadly useful to the discipline. We will first briefly describe our course, its history, its primary learning objectives, and several of its major and minor assignments.
Designing a Partially Online Course Around Games
Our home institution, the University of Central Florida (UCF), is a public institution located in Orlando, FL with a student headcount of more than 68,000 students, making it one of the largest universities in the country by undergraduate enrollment (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). UCF’s mission of access sometimes competes with a scarcity of physical resources for classrooms and labs. As a result, targeted institutional programs incentivize new paradigms for teaching, particularly online and hybrid instructional formats. For example, within the larger institution of UCF exists the much smaller Burnett Honors College (BHC). The BHC sponsors special programs to support their mission of innovative teaching. One of them is their unique model for team-taught interdisciplinary courses. The BHC interdisciplinary seminar allows two instructors from two different academic areas to teach a course together.
A decade ago, we submitted a proposal to the BHC interdisciplinary seminar program focused on video game literacy and theory. McDaniel’s disciplinary background is technical communication and digital media, and Telep’s is creative writing, so it seemed a natural opportunity for us to create a course blending the design-based and narrative aspects of video games. Drawing from an emerging body of work that explores games through various theoretical and applied perspectives, we created a course we hoped would allow students to retain their enthusiasm and enjoyment of games while also encouraging them to think and write more critically and carefully about how games are made and consumed by society. We wanted our students to play games as part of the course, so we created the course in a mixed-mode, partially online format that allowed for some reduced seat time to ensure students would have time to spend playing games and recording their observations. We supplemented in-class lectures and assignments with online resources and virtual work designed to improve students’ collaborative skills and advance their project work.
Learning Objectives
The current iteration of our course, Video Game Theory and Design, is 16 weeks long and offered every spring semester at UCF. According to our syllabus, the course “introduces students to theoretical and applied concepts in video game design and explores the literary impact of video games on our culture.” We further note that students will “critically evaluate video games as rhetorical devices and will learn techniques for dealing with particular game design strategies such as artificial intelligence, storytelling, cueing, and establishing/maintaining immersion.” We stress the theoretical and applied dimensions of the course immediately so students will recognize they will be both critiquing and designing in their classwork throughout the semester with the ultimate objective of creating their team-based Game Design Documents (GDDs). These documents could then be delivered to a design team of producers, programmers, and artists who would create the real game. Although students do not write every part of their games, they provide a single detailed level and summaries of other levels as part of this applied design process.
Our primary learning objectives for the course are twofold. First, we wish for students to understand video games as literary and rhetorical devices, as media constructed of layered and interconnected multimodal texts that are (potentially) deeply engaging and immersive but that are also capable of making and sustaining arguments. This approach is described by Bogost (2007) where he explains that games are unique and powerful persuasive devices because of the role interactivity (player action) can play in the process of rhetoric. Second, we want our students to learn how to communicate effectively using these complex media forms—to build and describe original concepts that are bound by rules, supported by interesting narrative scaffolds, and engaging to play. The significance of gameplay as an experience with meaning for its players is at the heart of good game design (Robison, 2008; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004).
Major Assignments
The students who enroll in Video Game Theory and Design develop skills in technical and theoretical analysis and oral and written communication. They build and improve upon these competencies by completing several different types of course assignments. We design these assignments to capitalize on students’ interest in and enthusiasm for games, but we also hope to deepen their understandings of video games as multimodal texts that can be analyzed and created. In this section, we briefly review the specific assignments we use in the course.
Video Game Analysis
One of our students’ first learning tasks is to analyze a video game. We expect students to have access to a game console, handheld gaming system, or desktop gaming environment. Students play video games for at least 1 hour each week and are prepared to discuss the experience in class, during Zoom meetings, or in online discussion postings. We encourage them to take notes or keep a gameplay journal during this time. We ask them to relate course readings directly to their game and attempt to recognize concepts described in the text coming alive before their eyes. Students may play a single game or a variety of games to fulfill the requirement. Student contributions to class discussions are based on this gameplay and tie into the overall participation grade. In sum, this assignment is a low stakes critical analysis of students’ favorite games that allows them to recognize theories in the text being put into practice. The gameplay assignment becomes a more fun and active approach to reading and analyzing a textbook because the analysis is combined with media many students already consume for pleasure.
The GDD
In addition to playing video games as homework, students work in small teams of five on a semester-long, collaboratively authored document of approximately 30 to 60 pages. As noted throughout this article, this GDD is a creative yet highly technical blueprint for a video game that, in the real world, would be delivered to (a) an executive or executive team to solicit authorization and budget to proceed with production and/or (b) a development team to build the game. The GDD includes a razor statement (a one-sentence summary of the game that is similar to a movie log line) as well “tone words” that help establish the game’s mood and atmosphere. Other sections include descriptions of the game mechanics and the game’s artificial intelligence (if applicable), along with sections on storytelling, multiplayer considerations (optional, if a team chooses a multiplayer game), and a gameplay progression. The gameplay progression should include at least one fully developed level. Other supporting materials must also be added including feasibility research, a competition analysis, character art, music/sound, and so forth. The GDD is worth 20% of each student’s grade in the course. While teams receive an overall grade as a baseline, individual grades are adjusted based upon the feedback received at the end of the semester from teammate evaluation forms submitted by each group member. These evaluations serve as another means of reflection to emphasize the learning that took place in the course.
There are four primary learning objectives for the GDD assignment. Students should (a) gain proficiency working in small groups on a multiauthored document, (b) integrate digital media forms to produce compelling and interactive narratives, (c) use historical trends, design conventions, and applied game design techniques to produce a well-designed document, and (d) incorporate narrative, art, and sound to create a fully engaging and interactive experience for the player.
To meet these objectives, students must establish effective communication practices. In our mixed-mode course, nearly all students communicate through the private group messaging in our Learning Management System (LMS), Canvas (Instructure, 2019). Or, as is becoming increasingly more common in recent years, they download Discord, a free application designed for video game communities. Discord allows students to share text, images, video, and audio communications through chat channels. Our teams create a chat channel for themselves and then they divide that channel into different subchannels for the assignment such as story, game mechanics, and so on. In each of these subchannels, they can post their work in progress—including images and links. Voice channels allow them to have team meetings as effectively as they would face-to-face. Voice conferencing on Discord is similar to Zoom, Skype, or Google Hangouts, but students indicate it is easier to use, and they prefer voice chatting to full video conferencing to retain more privacy. Much of their brainstorming and research on the GDD is shared through the Discord subchannels and then, once approved by the group, is incorporated into their Google document. Students indicate that brainstorming together online via the Canvas LMS or Discord prior to adding material to the document saves them revision time and expedites the process of collating ideas, links, images, and text for group approval. As a result, the GDD is conceived, composed, edited, and polished entirely online by our students.
Team Pitch Presentations
Because the GDD is our major course assignment and a semester-long project, we require students to make four pitch presentations to the class that are collectively worth 30% of their overall grade. These team pitches serve as both progress reports and demonstrations of students engaging with the course theory. They also allow for ongoing critique and revision, as their peers (comprised of members from the other teams) fill out a detailed critique sheet to provide feedback to them on every pitch. The first pitch is the team’s rough concept idea. The second pitch is more polished and demonstrates revisions the team has made based upon instructor and classmate feedback. Here is where we begin to introduce the iterative design nature of video games, a topic we discuss more thoroughly in the second half of this article. The third pitch requires the team to playtest their game by (a) developing a prototype (such as a card game or dice game or even a digital prototype), (b) recruiting playtesters, and (c) documenting the experience. Students also do a final presentation of their fully revised and completed document that allows them to share their success with the class and gain bragging rights for their hard work (similar to the bragging rights they earn while playing their own video games). Thus, the final pitch is generally more celebratory in nature.
The COVID-19 pandemic required us to teach the latter portion of our class fully online, so we were able to directly test a fully virtual format for class presentations. For example, our student teams delivered their final pitches online and walked us through their design decisions and writing processes by screen sharing their presentations within Zoom. Another technique fully online instructors can use is to create a writer’s workshop section in their discussion forums where student design teams post their written pitches. Peer design teams read those pitches and complete detailed critique sheets that are then returned to the teams for revision before the next pitch. Instructors can also require students to make videos of their pitches and post those for critique. The logistics of a process like this can be more difficult, especially for a group, but if one person on each team has video editing skills, then each teammate can record his or her part, and the videos can be combined by the team’s video editor to represent the collective work of the team. Critiques can remain written or, perhaps, one member from each responding team can create a video reply with summative comments from all his or her group members. Other video conferencing tools can also be implemented to replicate team pitch presentations either asynchronously or in real time.
Icebreakers and Online Assignments
One notable assignment we do during the first week of class involves student groups creating an original game from household objects (such as a can of beets, a roll of toilet paper, and a broken margarita glass, all objects we gather from our own homes). This assignment allows us to begin discussing the foundations of game design by considering aspects such as rules, quantifiable goals, and conflict. Rather than just telling the students about these components, they learn them procedurally as they work to create their game (we only allow them 15 minutes to do this). Our objective here is not only to break the ice but also to immediately present our students with a game-based problem and encourage them to develop strategies to solve it.
We know from the literature that such problem-solving activities with clearly stated goals are critical for building engaging online courses (Hew, 2016). Although our icebreaker is generally done in the face-to-face portion of our hybrid course, an exercise like this can be accomplished virtually. Students can do this individually and post a summative report of the game they created, while peers can consult a critique sheet and post feedback on their forum post. Students can also work in small virtual teams and collectively build a game based on common items on their desks or in their rooms (e.g., paperclips, a banana, some sticky notes, etc.). The objects chosen are less important than the thinking done around them; what we desire is for students to shake off their apprehensions about playing and taking risks when both tendencies may seem unfamiliar in formal academic contexts. Both individuals and small groups can also create video presentations or photographs of the game they created and address prompts regarding game design provided by the instructor.
Other online class activities we have used have included creating a Wiki page where students record game terms, definitions, images, and observations from the class. Online group debates, structured as forum post assignments, can also tackle subjects such as why video games often translate into terrible films and more serious issues such as video game violence and addiction.
Extra Credit Design Analysis
Unsurprisingly, our honors students are grade-focused and always seeking opportunities to improve their scores. To this end, we developed an extra-credit online assignment that instructs them to create a short video in which they analyze a specific design aspect of a game. These 2- to 4-minute discussions allow students to apply design theory to their favorite games. For example, one student analyzed how designers of the game Doom use colors both overtly and more subtly to cue players and keep them focused on what they are supposed to do in the game. This assignment is completed entirely online, and student feedback regarding these videos has been extremely positive.
Evaluation and Assessment
As we previously noted, our syllabus outlines the skills students will acquire and practice throughout the course. We justify in our lectures and assignment sheets why we are asking them to write the GDDs and present pitches to the class. We provide critique sheets and rubrics so that students understand the criteria for assessment in advance of the assignment. With our major GDD, we provide the following criteria as part of a three-page detailed assignment sheet:
Fun: Is your game fun? Does this document communicate its enjoyableness? Completeness: Does your document include all required information? Organization and formatting: Is your GDD clearly organized and professionally formatted? Specificity: Is each section specific enough to give readers enough information to visualize that portion of your game? Viability: How likely would your project be in terms of being implemented in a semester? Creativity and immersion: Are your characters complex and believable? Is your overall idea unique? Do your worlds encourage exploration? Multimedia considerations: Do you effectively use audio and graphics to help contextualize the tone for your game? Narrative cohesion and impact: Do you know how to tell a story suitable for use in a video game? Is your story dramatic (e.g., exciting and motivating, with ample conflict)? Interactivity: Are there possibilities for compelling interactions between computational agents (virtual characters and nonplayable characters, or NPCs) and human agents (players)? Presentation skills: How well do you present and explain the features of your GDD to an audience composed of your peers, your instructor, and any possible outside guests?
To help our students see the possibilities for their GDDs, we post many samples of documents written by previous students (used with permission). We discuss these student samples at length so that our current group understands how the assessment criteria will apply to their work. Consequently, students better understand the breakdown of scoring and know what we value for each assignment. Further, we provide detailed notes on pitches and on the overall GDD. These notes often exceed 1,000 words or more and explicitly reference the evaluation criteria. Being as transparent as possible in our assessment allows students to better understand what we expect from them.
Three Game-Based Tactics for Teaching Technical Communication
While these assignments work very well for our specific course, many of them are thematically linked to games in concrete ways. The issue of narrative translation between film and games, for example, may not be ideal for a course on technical editing or software documentation (although a creative instructor might find a way to make it work). However, some of the broader strategies are useful even when separated from content rooted in games and interactive media. In the second half of this article, we propose three different tactics, drawn from our experiences teaching this course in both hybrid and fully online formats, that we feel are broadly useful to virtual technical communication pedagogy. These tactics are nonlinear association, team-based writing using game-based tools, and iterative prototyping and playtesting. We discuss each tactic using specific examples from our course and then conclude each section with research more directly connecting these pedagogical interventions to typical challenges in online technical communication courses.
Tactic 1: Nonlinear Association for Creative Thinking
As we have noted, one major goal for our student teams is to produce and write exciting and original material for a new game idea. But how do you teach students to be creative? Do they even know what a creative idea is, or how it might be evaluated? What’s more, without creative, original ideas, the design concepts we have taught them all semester can be crushed under the weight of clichés, stereotypes, and predictable plots that leave players bored and searching for other games.
During the early years of the class, we wrestled with this issue. One semester we received multiple games focusing on pirates versus ninjas, a well-worn trope in media. The documents describing the idea were clear and nicely organized, but the games were awful because the ideas were so unoriginal. We forbid future students from using pirates or ninjas! Another semester we received a full GDD describing an Ace Ventura game (even after we asked the team not to use a licensed property). The game was not funny—certainly the kiss of death for a story set in the Ace Ventura universe. Students would pitch ideas, and we had to shoot them down as being too clichéd, but it was sometimes difficult for us to articulate how to improve those ideas. And then the work of a colleague led us to an epiphany.
In one of his course handouts, “Remote Associations - The Roots of Creativity” (Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy [FIEA], 2019), Rick Hall, a game designer for over 30 years and current faculty member at the FIEA, teaches his students a method for arriving at creative ideas. Hall begins by noting the difficulties of trying to define what is creative. He argues that a creative idea can be one that is useful, interesting, and positive. Students often counter that a creative idea is one that is “different,” but Hall notes that simply being different does not make an idea creative. He offers a definition of the creative thinking process from USC Professor Sarnoff Mednick. Mednick (1962) writes, “The creative thinking process is the forming of associative elements into new combinations which are in some way useful. The more mutually remote the elements of the new combination, the more creative the idea is” (p. 221).
Hall embraces this idea of remote associations by challenging students to brainstorm associative elements on a subject. For example, a group of students are asked to create a game about spiders. Students begin the creative process by recording all the ideas they associate with spiders: webs, Halloween, venom, Spider-Man, the itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the waterspout, and so on. Hall then urges students to take one or more of those associations and repeat the process (not unlike a traditional bubbling exercise with lines drawn between the bubbles).
In one of our classes, students tackled that same subject by creating a game about spiders who are firefighters trying to save their forest home. You play as one of the spiders and must enlist the aid of other bugs and animals. You may customize your spider team with high-tech firefighting gear that you collect and upgrade by doing missions. Students said the spider nursery rhyme got them thinking about water, then the forest, and then forest fires. These associative elements were then linked back to the original idea. Fighting fires is a remote association with spiders, but when you combine the two ideas, the concept becomes more creative and engaging.
Here is another example of this remote association technique as described by Hall: Say we start with a priest. We often think of religious leaders as being people who are extremely moral and righteous. Highly moral people are seen as very trustworthy. Ironically, the most successful serial killers are also able to gain people’s trust. Thus, a bizarre-but-perfect “cover occupation” for a serial killer, then, is to be a priest. (FIEA, 2019)
In terms of broader implications for online pedagogy, creativity remains critical for many types of online writing and development tasks. It is especially relevant in contexts where attention is key, as we have seen in examples such as social media wars between fast food corporations or airlines. In these contexts, creative approaches with wordplay or juxtapositions between unexpected cultural references are often what allow these posts to “go viral.” Restaurants and other service-based businesses were forced to be creative to stay afloat during COVID-19. In addition, there is research that speaks to the importance of good figurative language—such as compelling metaphors, and vivid imagery—that make scientific and engineering writing more accessible and engaging (e.g., Bump, 1985). This is critical in online spaces where there are many distractions competing for readers’ attention. However, contemporary research also suggests that creativity in technical communication has moved beyond the mere use of figurative language in writing. Creativity for technical communication now encompasses more challenging and complex goals such as developing “skills to invent original solutions that address complex communication problems” (Zhang & Kitalong, 2015, p. 199). By providing students with a collaborative online community to experiment with unorthodox ideas and learn how to use generative techniques such as remote association, we will be better equipping them to be successful in an increasingly connected digital world where soliciting and maintaining audience attention is critical.
Tactic 2: Team-Based Assignments for Writing and Editing Using Game-Based Tools
A second important finding we extracted from this course that we find broadly relevant to the field of technical communication is a focus on team-based writing and editing. Team-based assignments are not unusual in online technical communication courses; in fact, there is a good deal of literature explaining how team-based projects and writing assignments can be successfully used in online coursework (e.g., Staggers et al., 2008; Tillery & Nagelhout, 2017). However, there is less research available that focuses on building teams comprised of interdisciplinary majors and balancing internal and external resources to allow these teams to complete game-based or other procedurally intensive types of writing assignments. Over time, we have refined our process for creating and managing teams using online and game-based tools. In the early years, we focused on building what we considered to be the perfect teams using the “groups” feature of our Canvas LMS. These teams were balanced equally among different majors and with different disciplinary knowledge and expertise built into the groups. Presently, we still follow this general idea but also allow teammates to self-select their groups and preferred working partners. Still, creating and working with teams can be a significant challenge (Hodges, 2017).
Once groups are formed, we build specific virtual areas within Canvas that are used by each group for their team’s project work. Breakout rooms in Zoom are also useful for teamwork. Within these virtual, compartmentalized areas, students communicate and host project files throughout the duration of the course. Also, as noted earlier, students may use Discord to organize work and consult with one another. We have found online tools and resources such as these to be critical in aiding effective teamwork and discussion. We know from the literature that the user experience is critical in online technical communication courses (Hovde, 2015), so we rely both on internal institutional resources and outside tools that many of our students have grown up using in their own education and leisure activities.
In terms of the writing process for the larger GDD and the smaller written assignments that ultimately feed into it, many students prefer to work together online using Google Docs to write collaboratively. Students are encouraged to take on group roles and responsibilities for portions of the longer document. Often one student will serve as the managing editor and help guide the entire group through the writing process. While we are not hypercritical if the document’s voice varies slightly from section to section, we do insist upon a neat and professional layout and provide detailed guidelines for section headings and the table of contents. If communication breaks down, we instruct the students to report that to us so that we might get the group back on track. While over- and underachievers can be found in most groups, we stress that every team member must make a valued contribution and that all team members will be assessed accordingly.
Due to our insistence on originality and nonlinear thinking, discussed earlier, some of the ideas are far afield from what a team member might see in a more prescriptive and traditional writing course that may not rely as heavily on collaboration. This means that teams quickly come together on a basis of trust and mutual respect or a problem emerges in team dynamics that must quickly be resolved by a team member or one of the instructors. Overall, however, these challenges were rare. The few organizational issues we mediated focused on issues such as flexibility and openness to ideas from other team members, and we counseled group members who struggled with these aspects of teamwork to be more open and accepting of alternate ideas.
Ultimately, we believe incorporating game-based team assignments that leverage virtual spaces for organization is beneficial to the broader field of online technical communication because it provides students with practice in learning how to work in a virtual team rather than just a group, two distinctly different constructs. Research that shows there is more emphasis on the individual in groups and more emphasis and support for interdependent shared objectives in teams (e.g., Barker & Franzak, 1997). A long line of research also points to the importance of teams and collaborative work in technical communication (e.g., Barker & Franzak, 1997; Bosley, 1991). Finally, we know that trust in teams is of vital importance (Coppola et al., 2004), and one of the first objectives of teamwork in online production scenarios is to establish trust through the brainstorming and subsequent discussion around ideas contributed by different group members. Group chats and audio meetings allow for these bonds of trust to form and strengthen between online students.
Tactic 3: Iterative Prototyping and Playtesting for Multimodal Production
The final tactic we discuss combines iteration, prototyping, and playtesting. Iteration is the gradual improvement of ideas and products over time, cyclically and based on feedback from peers and instructors. Iteration is a key concept in the game design industry. It allows designers and developers to take risks early in the design process without wasting excess time developing art and programming assets. This is a key skill to teach students with aspirations to join the game industry or other areas of technical communication, as it provides students with training in project management, task length estimation, and networking and communicating with different stakeholders (Pirker et al., 2016). In online contexts, the idea has been successfully applied to user-centered design projects in technical communication such as the collaborative design of websites (Andrews et al., 2012).
In our situation, teaching an interdisciplinary course comprised of many different majors, we could not assume our students would have a deep background expertise in programming, art, design, or engineering. However, given that most students had completed Composition 1 and Composition 2 courses as part of their General Education Program requirements, we could assume that they all had at least some training in writing and communication. So, we chose to have students iterate through various portions of their assignments for the course. Because students participated in so many pitches throughout the 16-week semester, we asked them to gradually refine and polish their ideas over time. They did this both orally, with their team-based presentations, and in online writing, with portions of their GDD that they worked on throughout the semester. As noted earlier, these pitches and their drafts of the GDD have also been delivered fully online through our LMS, Zoom, and/or Discord.
Prototyping is building an object, artifact, or device, initially rough and unpolished, which demonstrates a key idea or function of a game concept. Building prototypes is a complementary activity to iteration, as prototypes too can be polished and refined over time. The idea of iterative prototyping in communication courses is not new. Admittedly, in its purest form, this is nothing more than allowing students multiple opportunities to refine an essay. However, the nature of this course, which relied on both presentations to the class and intense, team-based revision, allowed for different flavors of iterative prototyping.
For example, our students typically spent time not only revising their ideas and written artifacts but also improving the procedural systems and activities that made up the gameplay of their original game ideas. These systems were then operationalized through a physical prototype, developed as a team and then presented to a subset of their games’ intended audience. For this portion of the course, students designed creative projects ranging from complex, movable Lego dioramas (for a game about military strategy) to custom-designed PVC tube marshmallow launchers (for a campfire game designed for young children in which customization of the marshmallow launchers was a major game feature).
Initially, students found the iterative prototypes to be difficult because they required a move from the abstract domain to a physical one. However, over time, students grew more comfortable with the creative and free-form nature of their prototypes, and many student comments indicated that this was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the class. The students who were most creative with their prototypes often developed more original GDDs, too. More recently, groups with members having some programming experience have created digital prototypes in game engines such as Unity. One key feature of these prototypes is that they can be shared online with players from around the world.
Finally, playtesting was a natural companion to the iterative prototyping activities we required. Like any other text, a game has a specific audience. That audience needs to play the game to determine if it is any good. Beginning students tend to overestimate their knowledge of their target audience, even if they are part of that audience, so we require our students during their third pitch to take the physical prototype from one of their primary game mechanics and put it in front of some real people. The students must develop instructions for their playtesters and then do their best to not intrude on the play session. They take notes, deliver survey instruments, and gather data. They then spend their third pitch building a sophisticated presentation complete with charts and data summaries and a detailed outline of how they built their prototype and conducted their playtesting sessions. The purpose of this pitch is to tell us and their classmates what they learned from the playtesting process and how they plan to change their game as a result of their analysis.
Online digital tools are frequently used throughout the process of prototyping and playtesting. For example, in one semester, one of our more ambitious groups developed a fully digital prototype of a role-playing game called Swashbucklers in Space: The Race for Rum. All their prototype development work was completed online and then the link to their prototype was posted on the forums of a gaming website called Steam for playtesters to download and test. The group used Google Forms to create a survey that all 39 players completed after testing the game. Afterward, they revised their game based on the data they collected. This example demonstrates how iterative prototyping and playtesting translate well to a fully online environment. As we mentioned, playtesting and iterative design are analogous to composing, seeking beta readers, receiving feedback, and revising again, all of which are part of any effective technical communication course.
The skills learned from these exercises are also useful for future technical communicators in a wide variety of online or otherwise digitally-mediated situations outside of games and game design. We know from the literature that iteration and prototyping are being used in emerging domains such as user experience design (Laroche & Traynor, 2013; Redish & Barnum, 2011) and have long been a part of writing for software engineers (Levine et al., 1991). However, even more globally, current trends in education, business, and leisure suggest that media at large will continue to become more interactive and gamified. This means that a knowledge of playtesting, too, will likely become an essential core competency for the field. Writing professionals will need to understand how to adjust their online communication strategies based on the interactions of live audiences with their product. Personalization and customization also continue to evolve, meaning that custom-tailored, individualized experiences with media are more commonplace than they once were. For these design scenarios, gathering a wide range of impressions from as many users as possible is a worthy objective.
Conclusion
Our data for this article are admittedly anecdotal. However, the data are gathered not from a single course or two but rather from a series of 13 different courses taught yearly from the spring semester of 2007 to the spring semester of 2020 (where we taught the second half of the course fully online due to the global pandemic). So, while our approach is rooted in our own subjective (and certainly biased) perspectives, we believe the findings are valuable because they emerge from a progressive and longitudinal series of courses in which our strategies were gradually improved and refined. As we ask our students to do with their game design projects, these tactics have been prototyped, iterated, and playtested.
Based on our experience teaching this course over this period and the literature review summarized earlier, we suggest the three tactics we explore are useful for extending the types of game-based assignments pursued by other instructors who teach both face-to-face and fully or partially online courses in technical communication. In addition to the obvious increased knowledge about games, interactive story, and digital media, students will also learn hands-on practices such as effective team communication, collaborative editing in online contexts, organizational strategies using networked tools, and multimodal design for large documents. In addition, they will experience the intersection between theory and practice as they incorporate ideas from new media and procedural rhetoric, among other areas, into their practice of designing more compelling and persuasive vehicles for expressing their ideas using a game-based medium.
On the other hand, although the course we describe here has been a very positive experience overall, there are some limitations and drawbacks for instructors to consider. First, because of the team-based nature of many of the types of assignments and strategies we discuss in this article, smaller course sections work better than larger ones. We have found that a class size of 20 students is an ideal maximum, which enables four teams of five students each. This class size may be difficult to replicate for some departments, particularly if resources are limited and instructional effort must also support other areas (e.g., expository writing or composition). In these instances, it may prove useful to seek out sponsored teaching programs, as might be found in university honors programs or other specialized programs, to secure the appropriate support for small class sizes from university administration. In fully online courses, it is also important to have access to an LMS suitable for virtual teamwork; for example, an LMS that lacks the ability to subdivide a full class roster into smaller teams with their own virtual spaces will make intense group work on large documents very difficult to organize and track. Finally, because we suggest many technologically-mediated strategies for assignments, such as the use of Zoom or Discord for communication and development tasks, some degree of technological literacy will be required of instructors and faculty may need training from their institution.
Overall, we believe the approach we followed in this course has better prepared our students for their careers in technical communication, game design, or related fields. In fact, the skills they have learned in teamwork, brainstorming, iteration, multimodal presentation, playtesting, and document design will be useful in any field where effective communication is paramount to success. As we have argued in this article, such skills are broadly useful in online technical communication pedagogy even outside of game design, better preparing students for the modern workplace and the challenging communication tasks that await them.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
