A Room to Play: The Infrastructure of Game Pedagogy

Abstract

This article argues that the work of teaching writing with video games starts before the syllabus, the assignment, and the lesson plan: First, there must be an infrastructure for game pedagogy. Drawing on our experiences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, we explain that various material considerations – from consoles to classroom furniture, and from grant-funding to graduate students – were necessary to build our game-based classroom, the Greenlaw Gameroom, and the Critical Game Studies Program it facilitates. Our primary aim has been to foster what we call collaborative close play, which is a method of game analysis that resolves the oft-cited tension between playful immersion and critical distance by turning close play into a group activity whereby students cycle between the roles of player, advisor, researcher, and notetaker. A three-day module that pairs Super Mario Bros. with the Iñupiaq platformer Never Alone demonstrates how such structured play, scaffolded by flexible furniture, digital data management, and trained instructors, enables students to analyze procedural rhetorics, cultural logics, and design ethics at scale. Virginia Woolf observed that certain material circumstances, like a room of one’s own, are necessary to write; by the same token, this article deals with some of the material obstacles a writing program must face in the process of securing “money and a room” for teaching games.