The Need for Cardboard and Clay: Digital Modifications to Collaborative Game Design in a Professional & Technical Writing Course
Trevor C. Meyer
Trevor C. Meyer is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric & Composition in the Department of Language, Literature, and Writing at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville (MO), where he teaches composition, rhetorical theory, and professional & technical writing. He also serves as Internship Coordinator, professional writing specialist, and faculty advisor for Scribblers, the undergraduate writing club, and Magic the Gathering Club. His scholarship focuses broadly on rhetorical theory, with special interest in the ancient and comparative rhetorical and pedagogical theory, as well as questions of conflict, violence, and death throughout many discourses. However, he is also interested in expanding and complicating approaches to teaching professional and technical writing, as his courses focus on specific product-based assignments. He is currently developing a co-authored proposal on the intersection of genre transfer and multimodality in professional and technical writing.
While effective collaboration is central to effective professional and technical writing, many students’ previous, negative experiences with “group projects,” and the course’s focus on extra-academic, achieving a sufficiently realistic yet pedagogically sound collaborative learning experience is challenging at best. To address these challenges, my professional and technical writing course centers on a collaborative project in which students research, design, test, and document a tabletop board game, a project which provides thorough practice in collaborative work that they will need in the future. By collaboratively designing a collaborative experience based in research, focused on fun, and created from imagination, students develop a sense of responsibility for their game, valuing it not simply as a class project, or even as a potentially profitable product, but as a form of collective creative self-expression aimed at producing the most engaging and enjoyable experience for their players.
However, with the loss of in-person meetings, the project was modified to be “print-and-play,” with only digital objects and instructions. I hoped to provide students the opportunity to learn how to work under difficult circumstances, gain an appreciation for collaboration outside class, and focus their learning on producing something that brings joy to others. I was, perhaps, a bit too hopeful.
As shown in the Assignment Overview, this project is a series of assignments as the teams work to create a feasible, playable prototype, test it, and present their findings. Each project also includes a Collaborative Team Evaluation, in which they evaluate their peers’ contributions to the specific project, which is averaged with the team’s grade. I do this to provide a means of self-regulation for teams and combat the negative aspects of collaboration: social loafing, inequitable workload, and conflict.
For the first project, after students self-identify with particular Skill Sets, teams are assembled to provide a balance of experience, skills, and personalities: Red, Blue, Green, and Gold. Once assembled, the teams create a logo and name, establish their team’s formatting guidelines, and outline the standards for their Team Evaluations. Creating a collective ethos fosters engagement with the project from the onset.
For the second project, teams write a proposal for their own game, including a budget and timeline, based on research on tabletop games, including play-testing, interviews, and secondary research on game design. Fortunately, I had developed a partnership with the local Board Game Café, with hundreds of games onsite, in which students received a discount to use their game library for research purposes. Unfortunately, we were right in the middle of this project when we migrated courses online and closed the campus for the semester, and the café closed as well. Luckily, with some additional time, students were able to complete the Proposal successfully, but I had work to do. I was fortunate that the modifications to the assignments would happen behind the scenes because I hadn’t finished adapting them from the previous semester.
Originally, the latter projects would be a Prototype and Instructions, which would be played by other teams to help each conduct Usability Testing, and teams would present their findings at the end of the term (see Project Overview). With the loss of in-person time and space, I knew Usability Testing would be unfeasible.
In response, I modified their Prototype and Instructions to be digital artifacts that could be printed and played at a distance. This helped to ease the logistical concerns about designing a physical artifact, which I hoped would help the students focus on the writing itself since the “arts and crafts” elements of their proposed game would be moot.
However, only one of the four groups ended up producing playable digital prototypes. Of the other three, one group collapsed entirely when half the team stopped working or communicating, and the other groups included the elements, but because of formatting, they weren’t playable as they were submitted. Without the metric of material reality, it seems students more easily moved away from the expectations of the assignment, regardless of my own efforts to explain, communicate, and answer questions. The image of the board and the actual board are drastically different texts.
Having cut Usability Testing, I had students produce a promotional video, rather than an in-person “pitch” Presentation. This allowed students to combine their skills and showcase what they had produced, even if the actual prototypes were not as strong as they might have been. Of the three remaining teams, all the videos were adequate, even well done, and the remaining two members of the team that collapsed coordinated with me to produce a reflection video about their experience as an alternative. As with most of us at the end of Spring 2020, we did what we had to do.
In sum, while I would do several things differently, like keep Usability Testing, I feel justified in my initial premise. Making the game a digital version of an analog seemed to lead it toward the disconnection and disinvestment in the project; since it was just images in a file, rather than cardboard and clay, it felt and was treated as “less real” than otherwise, and in the case of the collapsed team, it made some students see their peers as “less real” and therefore less important.
For me, this reemphasized a vital element in teaching professional and technical writing: at the end of the day, even the most standardized, sanitized, and mechanical document is designed to help a human person learn information, make decisions, and solve problems without additional help, even if the information, decisions, and problems all involve a board game. In the Fall, I strive to do more and better to maintain this ethical emphasis on the human at the core of my course and the exigence for my collaborative game design project: “In an increasingly digital and dehumanized world, these off-line, in-person games offer a chance for people to connect with one another in real-time, face-to-face, creating lasting memories and stronger bonds.”
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