I’m almost done with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four, which is his second novel that features Sherlock Holmes. I had a free trial for Audible and couldn’t find anything I really wanted (sadly), and I’ve been thinking about doing some detective/noir reading. I also wanted the most bang for the buck with my free download, so I sprung for The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes, Vol I. even though there doesn’t appear to be an audio version for Vol 2. I believe the 20 hours of Holmes I downloaded includes the first two Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, as well as a series of short stories that appeared in the collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. All told, I’m guessing this one volume contains about a third or closer to half of Doyle’s stories featuring Holmes.

I’m particularly interested in this genre due to Brian McHale’s concept that modernist fiction is like a detective novel, whereas postmodern fiction is like a science fiction novel. The former is rooted in epistemology (questions of knowing) whereas the latter deal with ontology (questions of being). This table does a pretty good job parsing out other areas that tend to define modernism and postmodernism.

The Sign of the Four would be a perfect book to use for teaching. Published in 1890, it really exemplifies the shift from the Romantic era (as embodied by Watson, who is ever-emotional) to modernism (as embodied by Holmes’ unwavering faith in reason and logic). There is a ton of other great stuff to mine, including colonialism (the back story happens in India and many servants are Indian), issues of class (Holmes employs “street Arab” boys to do intelligence work; the gentlemen Holmes and Watson regularly comment on the labor class, to name just a few), and gender (Watson’s courtship and interactions with Mary Morstan). Also, I like the fact that Doyle wrote these stories for the masses, even if they only would have found their way into the hands of the literate class. I think it would be a lot of fun to read in a group and talk about all of the above.

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I’m also getting close to finishing my reading for the “digital pedagogy” area for my prelims and I’m really enjoying what I’ve read thus far. I am inclined to agree with most of what I read, but the major challenge is that to fully incorporate technology into the classroom even (especially?) at the college level, the ways we thinking about what it means to teach and learn need to radically change. And of course, radical change is always a hard sell.

My personal (and professional) goal is to make some of this theory applicable to teaching creative writing. Both rhet/comp and professional writing seem to be asking interesting questions about incorporating technology into the classroom, yet it’s difficult to find much from the field of creative writing. What I have found tends to suggest using blogs and wikis to facilitate critiques, yet many digital pedagogy scholars would say these are the kinds of baby steps merely use the tools of technology while holding on to fixed notions of learning. Basically, you’re doing the same old workshop type stuff, only you cut out the paper.

James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and Good Video Games and Good Learning lay out a strong case for how educators need to consider how we can use games and game-like strategies to teach better. Gee does not say, as some Amazon reviews suggest, that we need to be incorporating video games into our classrooms; although he isn’t against it either, since many good video games have content well worth talking about in an academic or intellectual setting.

This has started me thinking about creative writing pedagogy and whether a good video game could help teach students about the choices an author makes when writing a narrative. I’ve been playing Fallout 3 over the last day or so, and it bears many of the hallmarks of Gee’s “good” video games, and I’m impressed with how the story and its world are inseparable. Before the game starts you hear the wasteland is dangerous and so it is; because the game is a sandbox (a non-linear story taking place in a large, explorable virtual world) you find out first-hand just how deadly it is by dying over, and over, and over again. You, as the character, have a limitless number of options before you; yet in reality, the nature of the world drastically limits your options to a mere handful due to your lack of equipment and resources, and you learn very quickly that you need to adapt your behavior in order to survive.

For me, this ties back very neatly to creative writing. Many, many times I see student stories where they want to portray a world as stark and deadly as the one in Fallout 3, yet the character traipses around as s/he sees fit without any negative consequences. Likewise, characters very often look, think, and act like they were 21st-century Midwesterners rather than looking, thinking, and acting like they were the last pocket of survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Characters often tend to be without a personal history, and little thought has been given to the multitude of attributes that make a character unique and well-rounded.

Part of me wonders how much this has to do with most students not being experienced fiction readers. Another part of me wonders if students fail to fully identify with characters in print fiction. And yet a third part of me wonders if this could be a situation where one of Gee’s “good” video games could help in a classroom setting. In games like Fallout 3 (and others), players have to customize their characters from the onset, so they do certain things better than others. Part of this selection reveals value judgments; would I rather have my character be good with small guns, or medicine and healing? These early choices make a big difference as the game progresses, and players are stuck with those attributes for good or bad, at least in the short term. These attributes also shape how players have to deal with various situations, and how in-game characters treat them.

In other words, good video games immerse players in an invented world, which is of course what good fiction writers do to their readers as well. The big difference is that players experience all of those little world-building nuances for themselves, albeit through a virtual character. Still, I think Gee makes a good point that players tend to become quite invested in characters they manipulate, and even more so when they had a hand in customizing that player with certain attributes and characteristics. This investment comes more easily than, say, with a character in a film or in a story.

What I’m kicking around here is the idea that a creative writing instructor could use a good video game to teach narrative and world-building to novice fiction writers who have more experience playing games than reading. The video game could be talked about in terms common to fiction writing (plotting, tension, character development, motivation, etc.) and then you could reverse the process, and look at a short work of fiction as though it was a video game, perhaps even deconstructing a story into some video game elements (skills, attributes, coping strategies, etc.) to help students “see” fiction as a kind of game. For example, I’ve been thinking The Sign of the Four would make a terrific video game.

This is something I am thinking long and hard about. I can smell a paper coming on…

Current Mood: Pondering |