At the start of last academic year, the Digital Writing and Research Lab assigned two research imperatives: data visualization and wearable technology. While data visualization is ubiquitous in most forms of media, and serves an already established and crucial role in empirical research and its dissemination, the affective affordances of wearable technology are emergent, and the cultural narratives that surround this category of technology is contingent upon the continuous emergence and advancement of new devices. Recently, the DWRL has obtained …
Speaker Event Recap: Professor Patrick Jagoda
The Digital Writing and Research Lab’s speaker series consistently brings talented scholars working at the intersections of rhetoric, technology studies, and digital humanities, to the University of Texas to present their research. In February of 2017, The DWRL hosted Patrick Jagoda, associate professor at the University of Chicago. Dr. Jagoda works in the fields of new media studies and twenty-first century American literature and culture. More specifically, his research deals with electronic literature, video games, virtual words and the cultural …
Play
Throughout the long history of the lab, play has been one of our central recurring areas of interest. In the lab’s current manifestation our focus has turned specifically toward digital games. Digital games are always laden with values: they make assumptions about players’ bodies and beliefs as well as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability. Games invite their players to identify with these assumptions in order to succeed. But players can also resist a game’s procedural rhetorics, sometimes learning more …
Questing for Choice(s)
There is a fundamental issue with how we (as academics, players, and creators) view game narratives. This particular art form leaves room for player intervention, for changes and transformations, however, such interactivity has done little to push the boundaries of storytelling beyond alternate endings and perpetual quests. Is this as far as stories can go? Linear progressions momentarily disrupted by the novelty of easter eggs and yet-to-be unlocked zones? Mark Danielewski’s The Familiar book series – delivered through a traditional …
Cool Tools: The Rhetorical Methods Twine Game
Following the success of last year’s Twine research group, we in the DWRL wanted to take a step toward making Twine an integral part of the classroom. So during the break I set myself a goal: I wanted to write a completely new kind of Twine game. The resulting text, a Rhetorical Methods game, helps students to take a page and a half of notes regarding the issue, event, or other controversy that they choose to write about in the Rhetoric …
Twine: The Meta Game
Team Twine was busy in the spring. Kendall, Lily, and I have been hard at work making some wonderful stuff for the DWRL. To help us along, we’ve read books and articles, held meetings and brainstorming sessions, developed our own materials and shared them with each other, facilitated Game Jams for others, and even made our own games. But since the busy semester is coming to a close, I want this post to be simple. For this post, I just …
The New View-Master Takes on Augmented Reality; Should We Take it Into the Classroom?
We are, as others have pointed out, in the age of augmented reality. Whereas the twentieth century saw virtual reality develop in leaps and bounds, it is augmented reality that reigns supreme in the 2000s. Case in point: the View-Master.
Digital Pedagogy Showcase: Twine Games in the Writing Classroom
At the Spring Digital Pedagogy Showcase, the DWRL’s Twine Game Research Group shared resources and ideas for incorporating Twine—a textual, nonlinear, game-making program—into a basic writing curriculum.
The Useful Art of Coding
By the time I finished writing this blog post, I had come to a realization that wasn’t even on my mind at the start: The active function (in as utilitarian a sense as possible) of an object is just as important in creative production as its affective and aesthetic potential.
The Twine Apocalypse
If you’re wondering what Twine is, check out my post Twine Games 101. Or, continue on… The 2015 anthology Videogames for Humans solved a problem unique to anthologizing digital games: if every playthrough of a game might be different, how can a collection represent those possible differences? The answer was, as the text’s subtitle says, to put “Twine authors in conversation.” Each game is presented as a singular playthrough by someone other than the game’s maker. The player makes and …
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