'The Play of Classrooms' by Rob Gallagher, Chloé Germaine, and Paul Wake
Writing recently for the Post45 Contemporary Literature cluster, former MGC member Rob Gallagher, and current co-directors Paul Wake and Chloé Germaine have written about their work bringing games into university english degree programmes.
The cluster was edited by Rebecca Roach and features articles on multicultural literature, AI, BookTok, and more.
Gaming and literature are increasingly entangled, both as media and as academic disciplines. Recent years have seen an explosion of "literary-ludic" games offering inventive approaches to narration, characterisation, and the construction of "storyworlds." 1 Game designers have also reimagined and written back to canonical literary texts via works like 80 Days (Inkle, 2014) and Elsinore (Golden Glitch, 2019). There is, moreover, a rapidly growing corpus of "ludic novels," "gamer novels," videogame novelizations and gaming memoirs on the shelves.2 And it is not just at the level of subject matter that games are leaving a mark on literature: the "ludic" structure of gameworlds has been a huge influence on genres like contemporary horror print fiction.3 This traffic between literature and gaming has inspired renewed attention to older playful and game-like texts, from OuLiPo's experiments with rule-bound writing to Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks. For scholars like Tison Pugh and Lynn Ramsey, these developments have underlined the intimate relationship between literature and play, revealing "the ever-present potential of a ludic experience existing concurrently within a narrative one."4 Given this, it is hardly surprising that games are becoming a fixture on university English syllabi.
At the same time, there are reasons to be suspicious of the terms on which games are entering the literature classroom. English departments are looking to games, and especially digital gaming, to "future-proof" their degree programmes and help their students acquire digital literacies and creative skills. These efforts have become more fervent in the wake of political attacks on the utility of the humanities, including comments by the current UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak about the need to "crack down" on so-called "rip-off" or "low value" degrees.5 Whilst there is ample evidence that the humanities have plenty to offer students even from a limited "economic growth" perspective, an instrumentalist approach to "employability skills" and "graduate outcomes" is shaping teaching and learning environments. In such a context it's understandable that some colleagues would have doubts as to whether games really belong on literature syllabi.
And yet, as researchers and educators straddling the already porous border between literature and game studies, we remain keen to embed games into our literature classrooms. The experiences detailed herein occurred during our time working together as part of the Manchester Game Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University. The Manchester Game Centre (MGC) is primarily a research center, fostering collaboration between staff and postgraduate researchers across multiple departments through a common interest in critical game studies, game design, and in exploring the use of games as innovative tools for education and engagement. As researchers working within an English Department, but with an active role in the interdisciplinary work of the center, we brought our interest in game studies and game making into our classroom practice. In so doing we did not aim solely to keep courses up-to-date. More importantly, the introduction of games into the literature classroom allows students to examine the entanglement of these creative media, and the relationship between the ludic and narrative "experiences" that characterizes their cultural and social lives. With these priorities in mind, this piece explores some of the pedagogical difficulties that games present before outlining some of the strategies we have developed to deal with those difficulties. Grounded in our experiences of curriculum development and teaching on BA and MA English, Media, and Creative Writing programs across the UK, these strategies reflect our commitment to game playing, game analysis, and game making as vehicles for cultural creativity and critique, as well as our varied interests and areas of expertise as researchers and practitioners. Taken together, we hope they offer a glimpse of what literature classrooms can and should look like in a culture increasingly conversant with ludonarrative media: spaces in which students can reflexively examine their consumption of narratives and storyworlds, exploring the complex and entangled networks of agencies that congeal in their experience of "reading," or playing, stories.