Part of my establishing a new identity as a scholar is shoring up the explanation of what I do. One of those things, for me, is teaching writing for games. Writing is a complicated thing to teach, but writing for games is particularly challenging, and particularly suited for a person like me, because it combines four things: 1) the storytelling of a fiction writer, 2) the precision of a technical communicator/professional writer, 3) the readability of a good journalist (or a really, truly gifted storyteller) and 4) the design thinking of a games designer.
I’ve been teaching a course called “Writing for Games” for two years now. The learning goals and the academic home of the class have changed and transformed over those two years, but the basic underlying premise has always been the same. I built the course to be a fusion of games writing courses I’d seen elsewhere and books I’d read with a professional writing and game design sensibility.
On paper, the original plan should have worked, if pedagogy was just theory. But in practice, my choice to use Dungeons & Dragons as a game engine to teach the initial part of class caused a few students to go into full-on rebellion. I was explaining why it was important, but they’d stopped listening to me.
The next time, I went all-in on the Dungeons & Dragons thing, making it super-transparent why it was a key to the early part of the class. That worked better, but I realized most of the way through that class that I needed to invert the pyramid and scaffold the class in a different way, treating the analog and not the digital deliverable as the most important one.
We had a guest lecturer that ate three weeks out of the core of the third time I taught the class. I am glad my students got to attend those lectures, but there’s no way to mend losing three meetings and then going into spring break. I did see that the new concepts I had in mind were working on a micro scale, though.
This semester, I rebuilt the order of the class and the weight of some of the assignments. One of the sticky-wickets had always been my choice to use Dungeons & Dragons. I stand behind the belief that if you want to write games and you don’t know how D&D works you’re going to have a rough early career, but I was running into a three-way split: students who knew the system and felt it was too easy to work with D&D, students who were doing exactly what I was expecting them to do and working with the rule set as a tool, and people who were letting the stereotypes that surround D&D influence them such that they wouldn’t try.
So this time around I chose to use a different game, something that works with a genre that I know well enough to teach intimately, but something no one in the class knew already: World Wide Wrestling. I assigned the PDF of the base rules and told students to come to class with a character, ready to play. I told them to prep even harder than usual if they wanted to be the “Creative” (the game master).
World Wide Wrestling is a great game– check it out if you like role-playing and/or wrestling. It’s simple enough to grasp by reading just the start of the book, but the rule-set allows for lots of variation and all but begs for house rules.
My students arrived to class. I gave them a quick overview of wrestling games and then a quick overview of a few existing professional wrestlers to give a sense of how wrestling gimmicks and characters work. I won’t claim my presentation was stellar, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know I got my point across.
When the students split to play the game… chaos.
And not the good chaos. I’m a huge fan of the overzealous, high energy chaos of playing a new game. This was the chaos that arises when a class full of students didn’t do the homework and for some reason didn’t even feel like putting on a brave fake face. They just sat there and stared at each other, some of them looking at the PDF, some of them just chatting.
I gave them some time to prep– ten minutes. I figured they might need to get their bearings. Sure, no problem.
But that turned into fifteen minutes, into twenty. My TA and myself had to force the students to start playing. When they did, none of them seemed to take it seriously at all. They expressed confusion, but they didn’t illustrate the instinct to ask me, ask my TA, or maybe read the material to get their answers. All of them had computers and phones, but none of them thought to Google the game.
This activity was a test, and sadly my entire class failed.
To write a game, you have to be able to look at a written game and play it. If you can’t understand a well-designed, award winning game, you will never, ever be able to write your own. And this isn’t a difficult game to figure out. My TA, who is overworked, figured it out in about five minutes of reading the first few pages. It’s designed to be simple, to be a collaborative story telling system.
Now I realize part of it could be that my students don’t care about wrestling. And that’s fine, really. I didn’t care about Romeo and Juliet or Moby Dick. I still did my work with those pieces and knew why they were good and how they worked. I don’t like math to this day, but I do it when I need to do it.
I’m going to have to look out at that class on Tuesday and say the thing I hate saying as a teacher. I’m going to have to tell them they’re not doing well, and I’m going to have to ask them if they’re going to be willing to try or if this is just where they’ll be. I hate being that guy. I’m a person who wants to nurture. I want to help these students be better writers and designers.
But the only help I can give them right now is to tell them that they’ve underwhelmed me and haven’t illustrated that they are ready for the more advanced assignments.
It’s going to be a sad day.
But sometimes that’s how it goes.