The Next Evolution of Rhetorical Peaks: How to Structure a Rhetoric Video Game
Tekla Schell and Scott Nelson
RSA 2010
Because of its unique ability to both mimic and fragment personality, rhetoric instructors
have been intrigued by the possible pedagogical implications of Second Life and the ways in
which it differs from video games. Using Roger Caillois's schema for different forms of play, we
can place Second life on the more paidic end of the spectrum, as it is less structured and more
like children's imaginary role-playing. It differs from more ludic games like World of Warcraft
and Doom, which use structure and linear plotlines to guide the players' experience. Anecdotal
responses to the platform of Second Life have been enthusiastic, with instructors viewing it as an
ideal tool for the low-stakes writing possibilities, the opportunity to literally wear the skin of
another race, gender, or species, or to design arguments for a particular community. Second Life
can be a lot of fun, and work that students can become very invested in. Nevertheless, instructors
must meet substantial challenges when trying to use the space effectively in composition
classrooms. Over the last year, our research group in the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the
University of Texas-Austin has continued development on the "Rhetorical Peaks" game in
Second Life, and performed an accompanying study of student responses to the game in an effort
to determine which aspects were most effective in teaching rhetoric and composition.
Rhetorical Peaks was first designed in the fall of 2006 in the Digital Writing and
Research Lab. According to Anthony Matteo, the project leader of the original design group, its
purpose was to quote "help teach some basic rhetorical communication skills typically taught in
undergraduate writing courses." The group's primary focus in creating the game was to "build
productively on students' literacy in media with which they may be more familiar and more
comfortable than they are with written text." In other words, the original development team saw
their task as one of translation, moving principles well established in other media to one "more
familiar" to undergraduates: video games.
In the original version of the game, the player investigates the mysterious death of a
citizen in the town of Rhetorical Peaks by visiting three distinct areas, each corresponding to one
of the classical appeals. In each area, the player encounters non-player characters (NPCs) who
give her clues about the possible cause of death. In order to gain these clues, the player must
interact with the NPCs by practicing some basic rhetorical skills. For example, in the Woods of
Ethos, the player must don an environmentally-friendly cloak to gain credibility with the NPC
Woodsy the Raven before the raven will reveal any clues. By having players enact these
rhetorical principles, Rhetorical Peaks is situating meaning multimodally, following two of
James Paul Gee's social constructivist theories for good learning. The concepts of ethos, pathos,
and logos are situated within a context (in this case persuading suspects in a murder to reveal
clues), and are represented visually, verbally, and aurally. Experiencing these classical appeals
through the player to NPC interactions provides a very different kind of learning from currenttraditional pedagogical practices.
Furthermore, the game allows players to test hypotheses in a reactive environment. To
turn to the Woods of Ethos again, the player is given a choice of cloaks to wear. Should the
player wear a cloak that portrays the visual ethos of a construction developer (who is in the
process of razing the forest), the raven will decline to answer further questions. In the game
world, the player is given more than one chance to gain the raven's trust, and thus this low-stakes
environment encourages the student to test different rhetorical hypotheses.
However, there are some limitations to presenting rhetorical principles in this kind of
single-player quest structure. For Gee, to be actively learning requires perceiving the world in
novel ways, gathering tools for future problem-solving, and potentially to becoming a member of
an affinity group who shares a semiotic domain. Rhetorical Peaks achieves these active learning
characteristics, through modeling rhetorical practices and embodying them multimodally; having
players apply what they've learned in the game to written arguments outside the game; and
asking players to think like rhetors. Nevertheless, to be active does not guarantee being critical.
In order to be critical learners, students must be able to think about the domain as an interrelated
system of parts, and construct new meaning through critique and redesign of the domain. In
short, they must be producers of knowledge in the system, rather than passive consumers of
orthodoxy.
Matt King, the lead developer of the second incarnation of Rhetorical Peaks (what we
call Rhetorical Peaks 2.0), noticed this uncritical stance in the game's original form. Referring
again to the interaction with Woodsy the Raven, King says "not all environmentally conscious
ravens are going to trust you just because your clothes are made of organic cotton. Some might
trust you less for faking it." This is an important point in designing any video game, much less
one that attempts to model human behavior: in creating simulations of complex ecologies, some
things must be sacrificed. Unfortunately, what is sacrificed from the original game is the
learner's ability to redesign the semiotic domain of rhetoric, even within the microcosm of
Rhetorical Peaks, in that the concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos are presented as static, discrete
units. According to King, Rhetorical Peaks 2.0 would answer this limitation by "presenting the
player with situations and conversations in which all of the rhetorical appeals were constantly in
play" by porting it to two different game spaces, Flash and Second Life.
The two game spaces are designed to be complimentary, in that the Flash stage
introduces players to the town of Rhetorical Peaks and sets the scene of a murder for them to
investigate. Players search the town for clues to the murder, speaking to various citizens along
the way. In the Second Life stage, players construct the identity of a citizen of Rhetorical Peaks,
using historical rhetors as a basis for character development. Their goal in this stage is to situate
themselves into the town of Rhetorical Peaks and begin constructing a community. By moving
through successive phases of the game, the players progress from learning the basics of rhetoric,
to understanding some of the relationships between identity and rhetoric, and on to performing
rhetorics from a perspective that isn't their own.
For an example of how this works, look at Coffy Wyatt, figure 1 on the handout we gave
you. She is an amalgam of activist Angela Davis, actress Pam Grier, Marvel comic hero Misty
Knight, and the male player who put them all together. The student envisioned Coffy's rhetorical
stance and technique as
constantly challeng[ing] her audience to rethink the way things are established in their
community and . . . call[ing] into question the values and principles that the citizens often
adopt without thinking about the degree of injustice they can convey. Coffy only uses
short and simple sentences to diferentiate herself from Gorgias's long, complex and
therefore ambiguous sentences. Besides, she refuses to pay deference to anyone for she
thinks everyone is equal. Consequently she calls everybody "brothers" and "sisters" and
requires to be addressed as "sister" and not "Professor Wyatt.”
Through this character development, students are consciously constructing what Gee calls the
"projective identity" in video games: the product of a player's values as seen through the
constraints of the game character. We hoped that through constructing and performing this
identity in Rhetorical Peaks, players would not only learn rhetoric, but practice what it means to
be a rhetorician within a particular domain of signs and symbols.
The earlier Flash stage defined players' task as establishing trust in the community after
this murder has occurred.Our aim in making students developers was to give them more agency
in the game world and thus a stronger connection to their virtual identities. In their class
discussions, the students decided that trust was impossible without a community connection to
the game space. In order to establish this connection, they decided to build memorials to the
murder victim (see figure 3). In this way, the students became developers as well as players of
the game, indicating that this aspect of Rhetorical Peaks was successful. The students wanted to
redesign the game space, fulfilling Gee's requirement for critical learning. However, in surveys
conducted after the course, students indicated that because the building activity did not require
them to stay in character, they did not connect it to their constructed identities or to rhetoric and
writing more generally.
This lack of connection points toward two complications in designing a rhetorical game
in a paidic space. The first complication is that the constructed identities must be constantly
maintained through interactions with other human characters or nonplayer characters. The
second is that when using non-traditional methods of instruction, like video games or paidic
spaces, instructors must make the connections between the learning and the game explicit.
Students bring their own sets of expectations to the classroom, and, like some scholars, are
skeptical that learning can be achieved through play, or that students can transfer this learning to
more serious pursuits. This latter difficulty is easily remedied through writing assignments
addressing the game activities. The maintenance of identity, however, must occur in the game
itself.
Survey responses indicate the students were curious about the creation of an identity in
Second Life, and interested in how this might impact their use of rhetoric. The logistics of
playing the game in a classroom setting, however, limited the full embodiment of players as
characters. Because the students were sitting in the same room when attempting to act out their
characters in the game space, they could not as easily discard their "real" identity for this newly
constructed, virtual one. Thus, when responding to the our survey, a majority of the participants
reported the role-playing segment of Rhetorical Peaks 2.0 was "confusing" or "frustrating," with
one student clearly stating: "Role playing was difficult because it wasn't very structured. The role
playing I'm used to in video games is usually a lot more structured." Further, nearly 60% of the
students indicated that the platform was not useful for learning about rhetoric and writing.
However, about 70% of the students said designing in SL was interesting and fun; this result,
combined with the enthusiastic and critical learning that occurred in the identity formation
portion of the game indicate that SL has great potential for teaching critical reading and writing.
However, the survey results also indicate the nearly limitless nature of Second Life is both its
strength and its weakness; because it is so paidic, it is essential that instructors build-in enough
ludic elements for the student to not only feel successful, but to connect the play involved to their
ideas of learning. A combination of structured and free-form roleplay activities, and a similar
combination of solitary and group activities seem most likely to cause the students to make the
desired connection between the game and rhetoric.
Other problems the project encountered throughout its multiple incarnations emerged
from institutional and financial constraints. While the initial idea was to render Rhetorical Peaks
in a graphically rich game engine, the project's grant required we port it to other platforms as a
proof-of-concept. The resulting shift in medium changed the nature of the game, and this shift
points toward the complex nature of digital humanities. That is, we have to negotiate not only
our disciplinary boundaries, but also the institutional boundaries that control our funding. These
complications of discipline and reputation, however, are what provide instructors in the digital
humanities with the opportunity to change conceptions of the importance of different rhetorics
and approaches to those rhetorics in the university.
Labs such as the DWRL are prime sites for a kind of empirically-based research that can
provide results useful not only for our pedagogical development, but for bridging difficulties of
institutional assessment. In melding humans and machines, we need not trade rigor for empathy,
nor qualitative data for theory. Early work in the digital humanities was almost entirely
optimistic, and later practical approaches have run the risk of turning cynical, or worse,
oppressive. Disconnecting theory from praxis benefits neither approach. If we keep an eye to
these sites of concern while developing pedagogical tools, we can see the results of such theory
put into practice, and alter our behavior next time. The research we conduct in the DWRL is
ongoing, and by definition continually renewing its sites of interest to reflect changing
technology and changing theory. We see gaming in general and video games in particular as rich
ground to develop new practice of ancient principles. Diverse approaches are not a symptom of
dysfunction, but signs of a discipline adapting to the worlds it seeks to explain.