Shawn: 

It was so great to finally meet you in person and to talk about all these things. I really enjoyed your paper and admire the way you're actively using this stuff in the classroom - and willing to talk about both when it does and doesn't work. Hope these comments are helpful - keep in touch and by all means let me know if I can clarify or amplify anything here. Congratulations again on the new job; Carleton is very lucky!

Rob
rob.macdougall@gmail.com

Comments on Shawn Graham's "Rolling Your Own: On Modding Commercial Games for Educational Goals"
Shawn describes process of creating a mod to Civilization about the year of 4 emperors, with goal of using in a Roman history class. Shows us that making modifications to existing commercial games is a strong and vibrant sub-culture in modern video gaming. 

Shawn calls the classroom exercise "a flop" – not because it didn’t work, not because it wasn’t fun, but didn’t get buy-in, didn’t engage students the way he hoped. Given choice, his students chose to write a traditional paper rather than “play for credit.”

BUT, Shawn describes positive reaction of modding community to the game. In this group, had some of the kinds of historical discussions he might have hoped to have with his students. Paper includes some anthropological description of the modding community and its discussions, EVT vs ENVT, maps the dynamics of its conversations.

Paper analyzes the relative failure of the game. “Creepy treehouse effect” – marvelous term, but is it relevant?

Shawn: "In online learning, the 'creepy treehouse' plays out as a use of some aspect of social media that does not emerge naturally from the class dynamic, but rather is imposed from on top and thus feels artificial to the participants – an instructor who requires every student to post 3 times a week to the class blog, for instance. …There was no buy-in, because it was a 'creepy treehouse'. I selected the period to model; I had made it; it was my representation. Of course there could be no buy-in."

But aren’t all classroom activities coercive, planned and imposed by the teacher, and therefore creepy treehouses? To me, the term highlights the creepiness of new media spaces where boundaries and norms are not yet clear - if a professor makes students friend him on Facebook, for instance. 

The relative failure of the mod exercise (I'm not sure it was really the flop Shawn says it was) might be due to other factors: games are hard, and not everybody is a simulation gamer; classrooms are different, and it changes the nature of an activity if you get evaluated on it / do it for marks; modding communities are a self-selected affinity group.

My suggestions for revision: I know this is a rough draft, and that’s fine. I won’t drill down too much into specifics here as I assume this will be reworked some. 

I would want to articulate the relationship between this paper and Shawn & Kevin’s other co-authored paper. Some material that is there might belong here, or vice versa. Maybe combine the anthropological study of modder community discussions, etc in one paper? Or put all the classroom stuff in one paper? 

The paper changes direction rather abruptly when it switches from the classroom activity to understanding the modder community. Some of the opening material is sort of abandoned, and some of the later stuff (mapping the modder community discussion) seems to come out of nowhere. Consider centering the paper on one or the other, OR (my preference), making the difference between them (and the question of why the activity worked much better in one setting than the other) central to the paper. 

Highlight that the "classroom" in this case is online too! You may say that in the paper, but I (and many others) didn't catch it - I would have forgotten if I did not know that you were an online instructor. That complicates but also makes more interesting any discussion of how the modder community and the "classroom" differ.

Maybe look into literature on classrooms vs. "affinity groups or spaces - I'm thinking here of James Paul Gee - see for instance his essay "Affinity Spaces" in the collection "Good Video Games + Good Learning" and also his book "Situated Language And Learning." When we find a fun/productive activity out there in the world, can/should we transport it into the classroom? What is gained when we do so, what is lost? 

[Note similar stories, where students are not as appreciative/enthusiastic about game-based learning as one might hope, in Jeremiah’s paper, in Stephane Levesque’s, in Ruth & John’s – we shouldn’t think that because our students are young they are all "natural gamers" OR that they will immediately take to games as learning.]

Analyzing affinity communities –  maybe we need a Sam Wineberg style historical thinking study of modders? They debate "authenticity" and "realism" of various simulations – but what do they mean when they use these terms? Can we as academic historians (or archaeologists) respect and learn from alternate scaffolds of historical thinking?

[This is not really directed at Shawn, but something I think should be somewhere in the book is a little history of games in education. Ours is not the first cycle of enthusiasm. “Serious games” movement in late 1950s-70s – found a place in classrooms, but didn’t have the impact their supporters hoped for them. Story of how that happened and why is relevant.]

[I do have some deep, almost philosophical questions about Civilization and other simulations, and whether what they teach is really "history" or a specific kind of systems thinking that I think has much more to do with the historical origins of the computer than anything to do with, say, Ancient Rome – but I aired those concerns informally at our symposium and they did not seem to be shared. Still, I would urge anyone teaching with Civ and similar games to at least read the chapter "Allegories of Control" in Alexander Galloway's smart little book "Gaming".]