The Digital World in English Ed Conference…Seminar…Thing

This one was actually pretty good.  The things they had there were basically these sort of games where you can enter the world of some work of literature (they had ones from Things Fall Apart and A Midsummer’s Night Dream), sort of like what professor Rozema is I guess envisioning with his Thoughcrime thing for Second Life.  There was one guy there, too, who had a presentation on Angels in America, that play, but his deal basically seemed like an extensive website more than a “digital world”.  Later in the conference, the same guy said he didn’t like the role-playing/gaming aspects of the whole affair, I think because he thought it would lead the students away from the text and into something else.  We he said this, I wanted to say, “Snob.”  I didn’t, of course, but I wanted to.

Actually, it’s quite remarkable to me that there is this openness to something that is even vaguely like gaming, because the guy I just mentioned is quite typical of most many English profs.  This might border on invective, but the snobbery of most intellectuals against videogames is deeply entrenched.  I think a certain prof might have even said that most videogame plots are usually very thin, and although he is partially right, I think this might be based more on stereotypes of games than on actual experience.  Most games are very plot thin, but then again, so are most books if you consider how many novels Harlequin puts out.  Games, unlike books, are always judged by their worst examples, but such is the fate of a young medium of expression.

 Not that what they had here could be called a “videogame”, but it does have the bare bones of the gaming experience.  But it seems to me that they really do have a very good idea here…but they are a little lacking in ambition.  I think what they are aiming at is making these sorts of rudimentary game things more widely known, so that any schmuck will be able to slap one together.  And that is a great goal.  But if it were me, because I’m of a different mindset, I would want, instead of a thousand amature versions, for their to be one really pollished version.  Of course, I understand that Enlgish profs are not programmers and it would be ridiculous to ask them to be.  But there are, in fact, programmers out there who are interrested in literature, and would probably be really interested in what they’re doing.  And whats more, real games, not Halo quality but still good, can be made relatively cheaply using Flash—I mentioned at the talk about this student from the University of Southern California who made the addictive game flOw which now has a version on the PS3.  But it’s all a very exciting, and hopefully, one day, these can be used as a hugely affective hook for getting kids interested in literature.