Microworld Writing

Clemson University TigerPrints All Dissertations Dissertations 8-2018 Microworld Writing: Making Spaces for Collaboration, Construction, Creativity, and Community in the Composition Classroom Daniel Frank Clemson University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations Recommended Citation Frank, Daniel, "Microworld Writing: Making Spaces for Collaboration, Construction, Creativity, and Community in the Composition Classroom" (2018). All Dissertations. 2220. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/2220 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MICROWORLD WRITING: MAKING SPACES FOR COLLABORATION, CONSTRUCTION, CREATVITY, AND COMMUNITY IN THE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design by Daniel Frank August 2018 Accepted by: Cynthia Haynes, Committee Chair Jan Holmevik Danielle Herro Brian Malloy Abstract In order to create a 21st century pedagogy of learning experiences that inspire the engaged, constructive, dynamic, and empowering modes of work we see in online creative communities, we need to focus on the platforms, the environments, the microworlds that host, hold, and constitute the work. A good platform can build connections between users, allowing for the creation of a community, giving creative work an engaged and active audience. These platforms will work together to build networks of rhetorical/creative possibilities, wherein students can learn to cultivate their voices, skills, and knowledge bases as they engage across platforms and genres. I call on others to make, mod, or hack other new platforms. In applying this argument to my subject, teaching writing in a college composition class, I describe “Microworld Writing” as a genre that combines literary language practice with creativity, performativity, play, game mechanics, and coding. The MOO can be an example of one of these platforms and of microworld writing, in that it allows for creativity, user agency, and programmability, if it can be updated to have the needed features (virtual world, community, accessibility, narrativity, compatibility and exportability). I offer the concept of this “MOO-IF” as inspiration for a collaborative, community-oriented Interactive Fiction platform, and encourage people to extend, find, and build their own platforms. Until then and in addition, students can be brought into Microworld Writing in the composition classroom through interactive-fiction platforms, as part of an ecology of genre experimentation and platform exercise. ii Acknowledgements My love, admiration, and thanks: To Cynthia Haynes, who was always there, always supportive, who made the impossible possible. To my committee, Jan Holmevik, Dani Herro, and Brian Malloy, who knew when to guide, and when to push. To my cohort, Nathan Riggs, Eda Özyeşilpınar, Sam Fuller, Josh Woods, and Firasat Jabeen, who fascinated me, who grew alongside me, who challenged and questioned and shared, who made me think critically about the things I always knew I wanted to say. To my dear friends in RCID, to those of them who saw me, who would be at my side, who I knew would catch me if I fell, always, without hesitation: Victoria Houser, Mari Ramler, April O’Brien, Chris Stuart, Eric Stephens, and Stephen Quigley. And to my family, who believed in me with the kind of certainty you reserve only for the sun rising in the East. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER ONE: ANSWERING THE CALL .............................................................................. 1 Writing through History ................................................................................................. 1 A Learning Story, Part One ............................................................................................. 6 The Call for 21st Century Literacies and the failure of current-traditionalism ............. 14 A Microworld Pedagogy ............................................................................................... 22 CHAPTER 2: COMPOSITION PEDAGOGY ........................................................................... 47 CHAPTER 3: NETWORKS AND FANDOM ........................................................................... 86 Networks: The Utopian Ideal ........................................................................................ 86 Bursting the Bubble ...................................................................................................... 97 Passion-Driven Spaces: New Paradigms ..................................................................... 113 A Turn to Games as Spaces ........................................................................................ 128 CHAPTER FOUR: LEARNING IN GAMEWORLDS .............................................................. 135 3D Constructible Worlds ............................................................................................ 163 Games that can be Read as Texts ............................................................................... 173 Text that Can Be Played as Games ............................................................................. 176 The Argument for Textual Worldbuilding in the Classroom ...................................... 189 CHAPTER FIVE: VIRTUAL TEXTUALITY ............................................................................. 195 iv Table of Contents (Continued) Page A Learning Story: Part Two ......................................................................................... 195 The Text as a World .................................................................................................... 197 Contemporary Textual Virtuality: Interactive Fiction ................................................. 198 MOOs and MUDs ........................................................................................................ 209 Constructing THE IF-MOO .......................................................................................... 220 Limitations and Future Work...................................................................................... 231 In the classroom ......................................................................................................... 232 APPENDIX: Student Reflections on Text-Based Worldbuilding Projects ........................ 240 Student A: “Arromanches-les-Bains” ......................................................................... 240 Student B: “Digital Zombies” ...................................................................................... 242 Student C: “Under the Stars” ..................................................................................... 244 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................. 247 v List of Figures Page Fig. 1. Shifting Paradigms. Arroyo. Participatory Composition 8 ..................................... 72 Fig. 2. "Speedy Thing Goes In, Speedy Thing Comes Out." . .......................................... 144 Fig. 3. "Second Life.". ...................................................................................................... 165 Fig. 4. "Minecraft.". ........................................................................................................ 170 Fig. 5. The EnCore Window. The “enCore v.4 User's Guide."......................................... 224 Fig. 6. EnCore Integrated Client. ..................................................................................... 227 Fig. 7. EnCore Incorporated Images. .............................................................................. 228 Fig. 8. EnCore Image Expansion. ..................................................................................... 229 vi CHAPTER ONE: ANSWERING THE CALL WRITING THROUGH HISTORY This work is about writing. I talk about many other things, here: I tease out threads from a span of conversations; I dip from timelines and conversations of compositional theory, cognitive and learning theories, hypertext, connected learning, and games studies, but at the beginning and end, this is all about writing. I’m going to show how all of these conversations can help us approach writing in the classroom in a pedagogy built to engage our students as they create environments of playful, reflexive, responsive text. Put another way, I take conversations we are having right now about technology and pedagogy and, turning back to experiments and theories about digital writing that flourished in the ‘90s, I argue that these current ideas can still be informed by the conversations of old, especially when we think of it this way: If we want to teach our students writing, we have to have our students write. Text-based digital environments, then, come to mind as a way to combine these discourses, to promote creativity, virtuality, digitality, and, yes, writing. But is writing even still necessary to teach in an increasingly multimodal, digital environment? The answer, of course, is yes: As new technologies, genres, and modalities rise and bring about new paradigms of literacy, as they open up new ways to think rhetorically, the importance of writing

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