Matt King
University of Texas at Austin
“Welcome to Rhetorical Peaks, a Video Game for First-Year Writing”
Over the last few years, the Computer Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin has been developing Rhetorical Peaks, a video game designed for use in introductory rhetoric and writing courses. Today, I hope to give you an overview of Rhetorical Peaks, both where it has been and where it is headed, as well as a sense for some of the challenges and benefits surrounding the use of video games in a rhetoric and writing classroom.
To the extent that video games are ludological – that is, to the extent that they are described by formal rules that require players to enact specific courses of action to achieve specific results – they pose an interesting challenge to rhetoricians and teachers of writing. In a discipline that stresses the significance of context, of kairos, of adapting to the rhetorical situation, what use can we make of a tool that tends to rely on formal rules, that has embedded within it the “right” answer, a pre-existing set of correct actions one has to take in order to “win”? How exactly does one “win” in the game of rhetoric?
We found ourselves confronting these questions in the first incarnation of Rhetorical Peaks. We originally set out to make a game that could help students with introductory rhetorical concepts, focusing particularly on the rhetorical triangle. The prototype we developed was a module of the Bioware game Neverwinter Nights using the Aurora toolset packaged with the game. In other words, we took their characters and settings and inserted our own story. Our story was a murder mystery set in the fictional town of Rhetorical Peaks, and it was the job of the player to accumulate evidence and eventually make an argument as to whodunit. In order to gather evidence, the player had to complete three quests, each structured around one of the classical rhetorical appeals: logos, ethos, and pathos. For example, in the “Forest of Ethos,” in order to get valuable evidence from Woodsy the Raven, the player had to prove her trustworthiness by wearing eco-friendly clothing that appealed to Woodsy’s environmentalist sensibilities.
In this example, you can begin to see the limitations of a ludological approach to rhetoric. To complete this quest, the player had to figure out the formal requirements of the situation, in this case donning a suitable outfit. The player’s success depended on an understanding of ethos; they had to establish themselves as trustworthy in the eyes of Woodsy. But this quest did not do justice to the nuances of the concept of ethos. It suggested to students that authority could be established through some sort of one-to-one correspondence of appearances: when trying to persuade environmentalists, don’t wear a suit. Of course, most real world environmentalists (or anyone else for that matter) would not trust you simply based on your clothes – establishing ethos is a much more complicated process, one that involves a number of factors and shifts in different contexts.
To address these limitations, limitations inherent in the attempt to construct a set of formal procedures that would give students a rich understanding of persuasion and identification, we decided to take a new approach to Rhetorical Peaks with a few specific goals in mind. First, we wanted to move away from the medievally-themed role-player model of Neverwinter Nights both in terms of appearance and game play; next, and most importantly, we wanted to create a gaming experience that would help students develop rhetorical skills and knowledge while doing justice to the complexity of the rhetorical concepts underlying the game. In order to achieve the latter, we imagined an approach in which the formal rules of the game would not exist in the game itself but would rather be created in the classroom. In other words, a gaming experience where the meaning would ultimately be determined by the players themselves and would thus change in different contexts, from classroom to classroom.
As we worked toward both of these goals – changing the appearance and atmosphere of the game and also the rules of the game themselves – we drew inspiration from a somewhat surprising model: David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks. Having already inspired the title of Rhetorical Peaks, the TV show began to influence our conception of the game more concretely. Set among the mountains and the Douglas Firs of the Pacific Northwest, Twin Peaks had a sense of timelessness to the extent that it privileged natural settings and dream worlds over any specific historical landscape. Indeed, one of the most memorable settings from Twin Peaks – the Black Lodge – exists only in a quasi-supernatural space. As we reconceptualized Rhetorical Peaks, we took the timeless and dreamlike settings of Twin Peaks and coupled them with Kenneth Burke’s “parlor” metaphor. Burke uses this metaphor to describe a sort of trans-historicalconversation:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before…the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
In taking the parlor metaphor and the Black Lodge as inspirations for the world of Rhetorical Peaks, we hoped to create an environment that could accommodate the rich range of perspectives in the long conversation of history. If we could create a timeless atmosphere, then students could bring their own contexts to the game and see themselves as participating in a larger historical dialogue; similarly, instructors could ask students to consider perspectives different from their own.
With these models and goals in mind, we populated Rhetorical Peaks – now set among forests and mountains with an assortment of eerie structures filled with strange furniture and mysterious drapes – with the doppelgangers of significant figures in rhetoric. In the game, Gorgias becomes the rhetoric instructor for the town, Aristotle becomes the teenage boyfriend of Lisa Sophist, the game’s victim and formerly the best speaker in Rhetorical Peaks, and Kenneth Burke becomes Kendall Burke, the town’s best writer and Lisa’s best friend. As the player moves through Rhetorical Peaks, she has an opportunity to enact a dialogue with the townspeople to learn more about their relationships with Lisa, their sense of what happened to her, and their understanding of the town generally. As we wrote this dialogue, we specifically tried to embed within it a range of attitudes, values, and theoretical perspectives. In this sense, as the player conversed with one of the characters in the game, they would get an understanding of Lisa Sophist and of the town of Rhetorical Peaks generally as viewed through a particular rhetorical tradition.
So, the unique atmosphere and combination of characters makes the game experience multi-contextual, and this allows us to address one of the main challenges in the rhetoric classroom: teaching students the importance of context. It is often difficult for students to appreciate the importance of context when they experience all contexts as the same, when every text appears to have been written for everyone and all times. In the world of Rhetorical Peaks – a town dedicated to rhetoric, populated by characters dressed alternately in togas and hipster jeans, where you can sit in a Greek amphitheater and have a view of giant conifers and snowy mountains – it is much more difficult for students to feel familiar. This strange digital town foregrounds its context and encourages students to be aware of the way the game’s rhetorical situation affects their understanding of Rhetorical Peaks and its citizens.
In addition to informing the game’s appearance and atmosphere, Twin Peaks also influenced our sense of how the game would function ludologically. In David Lynch’s and Mark Frost’s original conception of the TV series, the central murder mystery would never be solved. Instead, the show was to have become about the town of Twin Peaks and the different stories of its inhabitants. It was to be more about a community struggling to go on after a tragedy than finding a killer. This struck us as a particularly rhetorical situation, one that was about people communicating and getting along with one another rather than trying to come to one definite conclusion or truth, and it thus offered an interesting model for the sort of formal structure that might guide the game, one that is actually quite informal and unrestricted. So, in Rhetorical Peaks, there is no solution built into the game; there is no one explanation for Lisa’s death. At best, the player can make an argument as to what happened, and it is up to the class to determine the validity of various arguments. Ultimately, we even hope to create a gaming experience that is less about making arguments and more about finding ways to help the community. As stated, this goal is quite vague, but in a few minutes I hope to give a clearer sense of how it might be achieved. First, I would like to show you how the new conception of Rhetorical Peaks materialized.
A year ago, we applied for a grant within the University of Texas that would give us the technological support necessary to bring our ideas to life. Last summer, we began working with the Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment at UT on four different versions of Rhetorical Peaks using four different platforms: Powerpoint, Flash, Unity, and Second Life. This year, we have had the most success incorporating the Flash version into classrooms, and I will take a second to let you see how it works.
As you can see, visually, this version of Rhetorical Peaks does not completely fit with the earlier projection of a mysterious union of the Black Lodge and Burke’s Parlor. The Unity version of the game should give you a better sense for what we have in mind.
When we implemented the Flash version into first-year rhetoric and writing classrooms, we found it to be fairly successful. At UT, our first-year curriculum is based on a controversy model: students are first asked to map the various positions within a controversy, summarizing and comparing the main arguments; students are then asked to rhetorically analyze one position within the controversy in order to see how multiple authors making the same argument use different rhetorical strategies to achieve similar ends; finally, students are asked to construct their own argument within the controversy. The Flash version of Rhetorical Peaks works particularly well with the first two stages of this controversy model. In the game, students can discuss the town, Lisa, and the events surrounding her death with three different characters, and each of these characters hints at a possible explanation of Lisa’s death. Students can use the information they gather from the game to “map the controversy” surrounding her death, summarizing the arguments made by each character. They can also do a rhetorical analysis of their experience in the game with reference to each character’s various appeals to logic, values, and authority. This analysis can happen with reference to at least two audiences: the students themselves and the imagined community of Rhetorical Peaks. While students might find certain characters or explanations difficult to identify with, the game offers them enough information to appreciate why these perspectives might make more sense in the context of the town itself. In other words, students are asked to adopt a new perspective and to appreciate an unfamiliar context in order to do justice to the evidence they accumulate in their gaming experience.
The Flash version of Rhetorical Peaks thus offers an effective one or two day in-class activity that can help students think through the process of fairly summarizing and analyzing different perspectives and arguments while avoiding the pitfall of reducing complex rhetorical concepts to a limited set of formal procedures. Nonetheless, this version has limitations of its own: with no answer built into the game, we found that many students felt unsatisfied with the outcome. We were not able to offer up the one true culprit, nor were we able to give them a satisfactory way of making the game truly meaningful as a community-building activity. Indeed, in this version, Rhetorical Peaks became just another sort of text; the game experience itself makes no unusual cognitive demands on students – the rules of the game are nothing more than the rhetorical concepts we would ask them to bring to any text. In this sense, the Flash version does not take full advantage of the possibilities made available by the digital space of video games. To do so, the gaming experience would need to achieve a few things: it would need to be much more immersive, lasting longer than one class period and giving students greater access to the world of Rhetorical Peaks; it would also need to be more interactive, demanding of students more sophisticated cognitive responses than simply clicking their way through a conversation.
While our further hopes and expectations are largely speculative at this point, we do plan to continue to develop the Unity and Second Life versions and incorporate them into classrooms more thoroughly next year in hopes that they can provide a more immersive and interactive experience for students. Ideally, we would like to offer students an opportunity to construct their own personas in Rhetorical Peaks, avatars that blend the fictional world of the game with the real world. In this way, Rhetorical Peaks could serve as a filter of sorts through which students could process course materials and life experiences. It would provide a space to ask how different rhetorical theories encourage us to approach the problems confronting the citizens of Rhetorical Peaks and how different technologies allow us to understand and respond to these problems. With these sorts of questions in mind, the world of Rhetorical Peaks can offer a platform for negotiating rhetoric and technology.