Convergence: Theory into Practice

Designing the Characters

KW: The Peer Factor game features visual representations of virtual students. Keeping these depictions fair, balanced, and honest was one of our greatest challenges. Finding the right illustrator was key. I needed someone who was more an artist than an illustrator. Someone who could make the characters seem honest and real, not cartoonish. We looked at hundreds of portfolios before we found Elliott Golden, an illustrator whose figurative style favors average human proportions and a subtle wit that we hoped players would appreciate. His characters struck us as real people with vulnerability, complexity, depth, and heart. I fell in love with his style and thought it would be perfect for Peer Factor.

Elliott and I met to discuss the characters. I started by describing their stats: Jamal is a business student and aspiring entrepreneur, Evie writes her own songs, Sam is an English major, Liane is a pre-med student, Marissa is a returning student, Alec is a computer science student. Then we talked at length about the characters I described the backgrounds we had imagined for each of them, their personalities, their aspirations and fears. In short, all the things that we hoped would make them multidimensional and human. Then Golden delivered the first draft (see Figure 6).

Elliott had captured the vulnerability we were going for, but we worried that the students looked too young (more like high school than college students). Sam and Alec looked too similar. Evie needed to be a bit more edgy. We talked more about who each of these students were and how they might express themselves. Then Elliott delivered a second version.

This was much closer to what we wanted, but Ryan and Nick were concerned that Liane, a character in the game who displays L2 writing difficulties, appeared to be too stereotypically depicted as Asian. At the same time, Marissa, the non-traditional student in the game, appeared too frumpy and timid. Again, when I went back to Elliott the conversation was about the characters, about who they were rather than how they should look. “Marissa has been out there in the real world, working and supporting her family,” I told him. “She is confident and focused. That should come through more.” We talked about Liane in those same terms. “She is a pre-med student, very intelligent, but also interested in fashion (her paper is entitled “The Language of Fashion”). Those interests needed to be reflected in the character. When Elliott delivered the final version, see below, it was dead-on.

Designing characters for the game turned out to be a painstaking process. As a fiction writer, I was aware of the importance of character development. Ester, Laura, and I wrote extensive backstories for each character and then whittled them down to brief bios for the game. We wanted these characters to reflect real people and we hoped they would be recognizable to students across the United States. The characters in Peer Factor, are both individuals and composites. Particular gender and ethnicity had to be assigned to each character, but we recognized that the writing issues and personality traits were not unique to the gender/ethnicity we depicted. In fact, we worked very hard to make sure that the attitudes and circumstances represented by Evie, Sam, Marissa, Alec, Liane, and Jamal were not unique to any particular race, gender, or creed. When we finally arrived at the sketch above, we believed we had an engaging group of virtual students. We didn’t try to capture every kind of student or to genericize a particular demographic. Instead we hoped to avoid stereotypes by making the characters individuals who embodied circumstances, values, habits, and interests that a cross-section of the student population might be able to identify with.

Abstract

We see the computers and composition community rapidly accepting the idea that using computer games in the classroom can be a very effective way to teach writing.

Introduction

The Peer Factor game is designed to be an easy-to-use, interactive Flash game. In two separate episodes, Peer Factor introduces students to the full process of peer review:

Game Pedagogy: What is the Game Factor?

The Game Factor is the term we use to describe the educational potential of games to teach student players complicated concepts and processes.

Convergence: Theory into Practice

In this section, we would like to discuss our processes for designing the game. In software and game design terminology, what we do here could be referred to as a postmortem: we describe what went well, what went wrong, and why.

1. Convergence: Theory into Practice /
   The Idea
2. Pitching the Concept / Facing the Challenges: Budget / The Game Design Document
3. Building a Pedagogical Foundation for the Game
4. Scope Creep: How We Saved the Game from Violet Beauregarde Syndrome
5. Developing the Script: Putting the Emphasis on Pedagogy
6. Peer Reviewing the Peer Review Game
7. Designing the Characters
8. Playtesting

Rethinking the Textbook: Toward a Participatory Paradigm

Just as the word book is an inadequate term to describe the electronic media and platforms that are creating book alternatives, textbook is a less than adequate term for emerging digital learning tools.

References

This webtext draws upon these resources and experiences to discuss how we took the next critical step and designed an interactive educational text that employed game elements.