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Computers and Composition 25 (2008) 323–340

Just For Fun: Writing and Literacy Learning as Forms of Play

David Michael Sheridan a,∗ , William Hart-Davidson b
a
Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University, C210 Snyder Hall,
East Lansing, MI 48825-1106, United States
b WIDE (Writing in Digital Environments) Research Center, Department of Writing,

Rhetoric, and American Cultures, Michigan State University, 7 Olds Hall, East Lansing,
MI 48824-1047, United States

Abstract
This article focuses on Ink, a Multiplayer Online Game (MOG) being developed at Michigan State
University. The design of Ink reflects the developers’ understanding of writing pedagogy and rhetorical
theory. Ink allows players to enter into complex rhetorical situations that include exigencies, audiences,
and rhetorical purposes. The developers of Ink hope that placing players in these rhetorical situations
will facilitate literacy learning while simultaneously providing a satisfying game experience. Players
will hopefully learn while having fun. In order to test the effectiveness of Ink as a game and learn-
ing environment, the authors designed a small-scale preliminary study with a focus group of student
playtesters. The study was designed to answer three fundamental questions: Will players write? Will
players have fun? Will players learn? The study generated some evidence that the answer to all three
questions is “yes.”
© 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Games; Literacy; Rhetoric; Writing pedagogy; Instructional technology; Textual economy; Textual
circulation

1. Introduction

What if you could learn to write by playing a video game? No teachers, no classes, no
grades. Just a fun game that you play in a web browser. Maybe the game wouldn’t even
explicitly focus on writing. Maybe it would focus on fun stuff: imagining and building cool
social venues like coffee shops, skating parks, and dance clubs; dabbling in politics (serving
on city council, proposing new laws, managing the mayor’s re-election campaign); forming
groups and finding ways to get more money, power, and influence. You know, all the stuff

∗
Corresponding author.
Email addresses: sherid16@msu.edu (D.M. Sheridan), hartdav2@msu.edu (W. Hart-Davidson).

8755-4615/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2008.04.008
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most high schoolers and college kids can’t do but wish they could. The writing happens (you
might not even notice it) in order to get the fun stuff done: the proposal that you submit to city
council; the brochure you distribute to elicit interest in your latest project; the manifesto you
write with others to announce the philosophy of your new action group. This article explores
some of the design elements that such a game might include and presents some preliminary
evidence that such an approach might work.
As writing teachers, we are committed to a pedagogy that embeds writing tasks in com-
plex rhetorical situations; writing in these situations is not an end in and of itself, but
rather a tool for addressing an exigency. Over the past three years, we have been working
with other teacher-researchers as well as artists, game designers, playtesters, and program-
mers to design a game in which rhetorical exigencies would emerge, providing players
opportunities to engage in rhetorical interventions. In this article, we report findings from
a preliminary study focused on a small group of undergraduates who were invited to try
out a working prototype of this game called Ink. Our study began with very basic ques-
tions: Will players write? Will they have fun? Will they learn? We present modest evidence
that the answers to all three questions is “yes.” Our findings suggest that not only will
players write but that their decisions as writers will reflect the contextual factors like
audience, purpose, and exigency that we (as writing teachers) hope they will take into
account.

2. Correct commas = 50 points: Can video games teach writing?

The attention of the Ink development team was piqued some months ago, at just about
the time that we were ready to begin basic playtesting, when an issue of Harper’s Magazine
featured a panel discussion focused on the possibility of teaching writing using video games.
With a mixture of hope and fear, we read through the discussion quickly, eager to discover
how close the panelists would come to the concepts we ourselves had arrived at. Perhaps they
would independently invent a game just like ours.
The panel, a mixture of educators and game enthusiasts, began by considering “the
rote elements of writing—grammar, punctuation, and spelling” (Avrich, Johnson, Koster,
de Zengotita, & Wasik, 2006, p. 32) and imagined relatively simple games that might
address these components. But they gradually talked their way to more complex games
and more complex dimensions of writing, such as argument, structure, and aesthetic con-
siderations. “There are two ways you could do it,” said panelist Steven Johnson, “one
of which I think would potentially work, the other of which would not” (p. 35). The
first option was “to use the game as a way to broaden the realm of experiences the stu-
dents have” by immersing them in settings relevant to their writing (p. 35). In the second
option,
where the actual text of the story is being built and evaluated inside the game—you would need
a game engine that itself had some form of consciousness. You can’t evaluate complex forms
of writing without consciousness. And with our current technology, you know, my grammar
checker in Microsoft Word can’t even tell if my subjects and verbs agree. (Avrich et al., 2006,
p. 35).
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Later Johnson asserted: “Honestly, I doubt that video games are capable of dealing with
psychological depth at all” (Avrich et al., 2006, p. 36). Eventually, however, the panel explored
a more fruitful possibility, that Multiplayer Online Games like Second Life1 might be able to
recover some of the complexity demanded by good writing pedagogy. The panelists stop short
of sketching out a specific approach but they identify a number of salient features of this kind
of game: an economy, an immersive environment, complex social interaction—and exigencies
that can be addressed by writing, which inevitably emerge when any group of people begins
to interact in complex ways.
This conversation was striking to us because its general trajectory echoes the evolution in
thinking that we went through in developing our own game. We knew that games could be
used to teach spelling and grammar, but we weren’t interested in those things. But in our early
thinking, we kept running into the same dead-end: for a game to address deeper issues of
writing like ideas and arguments, it would need full-blown consciousness, and we knew that
at least for the foreseeable future, this was not possible. How could a computer respond, in
any meaningful way, to an essay or a poem? How could a writer “win” a game about writing
if a computer were left to determine whether or not that writing was successful?
The answer, of course, was that the game itself would not deploy sophisticated non-
human intelligence; instead, it would leverage human intelligence by providing an immersive
environment—a world—that included the kinds of structures necessary for rich social interac-
tion. The game wouldn’t be conscious, but it would invite consciousness into it. The machine
wouldn’t respond to writing; it would get players to respond to each other’s writing. A number
of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), from Sims Online to
Second Life, were already demonstrating the potential of digital environments to facilitate this
kind of complex social interaction.

3. What is Ink?

Developed by the MSU Writing Center in collaboration with the Writing in Digital Envi-
ronments (WIDE) Research Center, Ink is a MMORPG informed by scholarship on writing
instruction and by rhetorical theory. It is an experimental response to a persistent question: if
learning to write is a lifelong endeavor, what kinds of learning environments can we provide to
facilitate literacy learning that are viable, 24 × 7 × 365? We developed Ink to conduct research
to determine whether gaming environments can effectively facilitate literacy learning—that is,
can students learn to write more effectively by interacting in a gaming environment? This repre-
sents a fundamentally new approach to learning and teaching writing. As such, if learning takes
place, this research (and serious gaming environments) stands to make major contributions
both to liberal education and to the scholarship on writing instruction.
Ink (see Fig. 1 for a screen capture of the game’s interface) is what Kym Buchanan, the
game’s lead designer, calls a Persistent Alternate World (PAW). As a persistent alternate world,
it supports multiple arcs of gameplay over long stretches of time. Players don’t “win” games
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1
We are mindful that Second Life is not strictly speaking a game, but instead is an online environment that
supports an array of activities, some more game-like than others.
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Fig. 1. Screen capture of Ink.

with the finality and closure of single-player video games like Pac-Man. There is no score,
no “game over.” As a persistent alternate world, Ink offers multiple players the chance to
become immersed in a socially, culturally, and sensorially complex ecology (for discussions
of the concept of “immersion,” see Dede, 1996; Buchanan, 2006). Accessible by the general
public through a web browser, Ink is available twenty-four hours a day to anyone with Internet
access. This has important implications for delivering writing instruction: Ink has the potential
to make literacy learning a recreational activity that players voluntarily engage in.
Adopting the metaphor of a city, Ink invites players to create neighborhoods and other
game spaces through a simple web interface. Ink has a currency (ink), an economy, tools for
communication (e.g., a chat window), and for creating objects (such as documents, furniture,
and toys). When they are not maintained by players, objects and spaces in Ink generate entropy.
When entropy builds to a certain point, an entropy discharge can result, which means that the
un-maintained space as well as surrounding spaces are compromised. This dynamic is meant
to parallel real-world realities: if I don’t maintain my home properly, not only does my own
house lose value, but surrounding homes lose value as well.
We are often asked: How do you win? There is no simple winning or losing in Ink, just as
there is no simple winning or losing in life. Instead, there are a variety of markers of success
and advancement—some of which are provided for within the structure of the game itself,
some of which reflect the individual goals, values, and attitudes of players. Simple forms of
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success are measured by earning ink and by creating and maintaining rooms that are popular
and that therefore avoid entropy discharges. A more involved structure for marking success
within the game is a feature called “pathways.” Pathways are a collection of activities that relate
to a particular theme—the Path of Government, for example, or the Path of Technology—and
these activities are organized into levels. An example of a Level One task on the Path of
Government might be attending a town hall meeting, while a Level Two task might be writing
a fundraising letter for a political group, and a Level Three task might be running for city
council. Activities are documented in journals that are in turn reviewed by other players. Most
activities also result in various forms of writing, so completing a level on a given path typically
results in producing a portfolio of documents.
But players also set their own goals for succeeding within the game. For players who hope
to make the game world more satisfying, success might mean proposing legislation to city
council that fine-tune the ground rules of the game. Other players might consider themselves
successful if the social spaces they create in Ink are popular with other players and/or serve an
important function within the social life of the game. Still others might consider themselves
successful if they effectively secure leadership roles, such as organizing a large action group
or serving as mayor of Ink.

4. Why a MMORPG game?

In recent years, education researchers have become interested in the promise of games
as a general framework for facilitating learning across grade levels and subjects (e.g., Gee,
2003, 2005; Johnson, 2005; Kierrimuir & McFarlane, 2004; Ritterfeld, Weber, Fernandes,
& Vorderer, 2004; Winn, Heeter & Dickson, 2004). MMORPG’s have been of particular
interest because of their ability to create socially complex settings for learning (Dede, 1996;
Gee, 2003; Young, 2004; Young, Schrader, Zheng, 2006). In this relatively new type of game,
complex social ecologies develop, facilitating highly ordered social relationships and intensive
social interaction. Players use digital communication tools like email and synchronous chat to
collaborate with other players, to organize into groups, and to accomplish mutual goals.
We felt that a MMORPG was particularly consonant with a rich tradition of rhetorical theory
that emphasizes rhetoric as an intensely situated activity (see, for instance, Biesecker, 1989;
Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Paré, 1999; Dobrin & Weisser, 2002; Flower & Hayes, 1980;
Gee, 2003; Miller, 1992; Porter, 1992; Vatz, 1973). If kairos, as James Kinneavy (1986) told
us, is “the appropriateness of the discourse to the particular circumstances of the time, place,
speaker, and audience involved” (p. 84), MMORPGs can provide writers with a confluence of
kairotic elements.
Lloyd Bitzer (1968) asked us to “regard rhetorical situation as a natural context of persons,
events, objects, relations, and an exigence which strongly invites utterance; this invited utter-
ance participates naturally in the situation, is in many instances necessary to the completion of
situational activity, and by means of its participation with situation obtains its meaning and its
rhetorical character” (p. 5). This observation is consistent with studies (e.g., Dias et al., 1999)
that contend writing in contexts outside the classroom is a means to other ends, an activity
that occurs naturally in the process of achieving other goals: securing funding for a project,
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structuring an organization, getting a group of collaborators to behave in productive ways. But

these activities aren’t always easy to bring into the classroom. It’s problematic, for instance, to
ask a student to become a project manager in a corporation so that the student can authentically
be charged with the task of writing a report whose function is to secure additional funding from
upper management; or to become an officer in a non-profit organization so that the student
could be charged with writing the memo whose function is to accomplish a change in the
organization’s mission; or to become a vice president in a construction corporation so that the
student could be charged with developing a proposal for a new project. Writing instructors can
ask students to pretend to be these things and write as if they are in these rhetorical contexts.
Alternatively, a service-learning approach (which we both value and use ourselves) helps to
address this issue to some degree by inviting students to write with community partners in
real-world situations (see, for instance, Warschauer, 1999); but there are severe practical and
ethical limits to the amount of freedom students have. In an immersive game world like Ink,
student-players could conceivably function as project managers or become officers in non-
profit organizations or serve as vice presidents of construction firms and could engage in the
kinds of rhetorical interventions that are essential to these roles.

5. Research questions and our iterative, user-centered development process

Our research questions during the early stages of development are modest in the sense that
they reflect the fact that we are in the earliest stages of understanding games as environments
for learning rhetorical practices. We have three primary questions: Will players write? Will
they have fun? Will they learn? Each of these questions implies a cluster of related questions:
(What) Will players write? What genres of writing will they engage in (e.g., reports, memos,
analytical essays)? Will players produce sustained pieces of writing as opposed to short emails
and text messages? Will players engage in practices, such as analysis, research, and argumen-
tation, that are valued by the academy? As writing teachers, we hope to prepare students to
participate in academic, professional, and public contexts, so we are particularly interested
in whether or not Ink will elicit the kinds of writing valued in these contexts. Although this
writing includes the short emails and text messages that students already produce in various
contexts (e.g., Facebook, AIM, and various games), much of the writing in these contexts
involves a more sustained performance. Academic essays, for instance, are much longer than
a typical email.
Will players have fun? Will players find the game engaging? Can a game be designed so
that it elicits writing from players and still provide “a compelling framework for play” (Pearce,
2004)? Will games foster positive associations with writing? These are critical questions not
just for us but also for others in the field, because if games are not compelling, students will
not play them. If they don’t play, no learning is possible.
Will players learn? Is there evidence that players are improving as writers and thinkers
as a result of gameplay? Is there evidence that players are able to articulate their ideas more
clearly, produce more compelling arguments, and synthesize information more effectively as
they spend more time in the game? Is there evidence that they are developing more sophis-
ticated metacognitive frameworks for representing communicative tasks to themselves? Are
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players more sensitive to fundamental features of the context for communicative tasks, such as
audience, exigency, purpose, and the material and cultural conditions of circulation? Is there
evidence that players are developing deeper understandings of the writing process?
Developing Ink is the means by which we set out to answer these three sets of questions.
Our approach to data collection has been to combine playtesting, a method that is similar to
the iterative development process associated with user-centered design, with more traditional
methods of qualitative data gathering and analysis. Our data from participant-players during
our iterative development research cycle typically includes:
• samples of in-game writing
• surveys about gameplay expectations, experiences, and satisfaction
• follow-up interviews with players to probe more deeply into game experiences and strategies
• global activity statistics from the Ink web server.
We analyze these data with two broad categories of outcomes in mind. First, we examine the
data for patterns of activity that indicate engagement and learning (or their opposites). Initial
indications of such patterns are typically visible in the web server statistics and surveys. These
patterns indicate where we should seek out participants’ in-game writing for closer rhetorical
analysis and suggest issues to address in interviews, such as the choices players made when
they were creating, sharing, and revising their in-game writing.
Another focus in examining playtesting results is to improve Ink. The design of Ink embod-
ies expectations about the opportunities for literacy learning that we derive from theories of
rhetoric, writing, and interactive games as learning spaces. The data we collect during playtest-
ing help us to explore some of these expectations in a way that creates new knowledge but that
also hopefully points to concrete improvements to the gaming environment.

6. Replicating the conditions for embedded rhetorical interventions

At this stage in its development, Ink is not ready for full-scale testing as a writing–
learning–playing environment. Ideally, exigencies will emerge from the social ecology of the
game and players will respond with rhetorical interventions that they deem appropriate. But
right now the game is in alpha testing (small-scale testing of basic functions with select
groups of users), so there is no social ecology and no persistent player base. Nevertheless, we
have devised small-scale preliminary testing scenarios to explore specific dimensions of the
game experience and to begin answering the basic research questions mentioned above.
The current study focused on twelve undergraduates enrolled in a special course designed to
prepare students to serve as Undergraduate Writing Consultants in the MSU Writing Center.
Our study asked student-playtesters to enter a specific rhetorical context in the game. Our
test cycle spanned three eighty-minute class meetings. Throughout the test cycle, we used a
multifaceted approach to collect data. Four researchers took notes during the class meetings.
We distributed a short survey at the end. And we (Bill and David) interviewed three students
for approximately one hour after the test cycle was complete.
The rhetorical context we created for students asked them to assume the role of players in
Ink who specialized in helping neighborhoods thrive in the game world. We created and asked
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students to visit a simple Ink neighborhood called “Three Hills,” comprised of three sparsely
described spaces: a residential area, a park, and the offices of Three Hills Neighborhood Asso-
ciation (THNA). Students were divided into two groups, each of which assumed the identity
of an organization (Revitalize Ink! or Urban Renewal Specialists) devoted to creating plans
for helping neighborhoods within Ink realize their full potential. We created in-game office
space for each organization, including a simple mission statement and a logo. As members
of organizations devoted to revitalizing Ink neighborhoods, our group of student-players was
ready to be invited into a rhetorical situation that mirrored the kind of situation which might
emerge once the game was made public and had attracted a substantial player base.
During the first class period of the test cycle, we introduced students to the interface of the
game and presented them with an embedded rhetorical exigency. We distributed a “Request
for Proposals” written from the perspective of THNA (see Fig. 2). The RFP announced that
the THNA “seeks proposals from development groups for improving our neighborhood.” The
RFP informed players that Three Hills “aspire[s] to be one of the game’s premier neighbor-
hoods!” but disclosed that “Currently, however, we are not living up to our full potential.
Few people visit us, leaving residents to pay large maintenance fees that are not sustain-
able.” Finally, the RFP specified that “On the morning of 19 April 2007 representatives of the
THNA will [be] available in the Three Hills Welcome Center to receive proposals. We are
asking groups to make a brief (five minute) presentation and to submit a brief written pro-
posals [sic] outlining their basic ideas for neighborhood revitalization.” In a limited attempt
to generate a sense of immersion, we designed the RFP to look like an official organizational
document printed on letterhead with a simple logo. Student-players had a short time after
receiving the RFP to meet as groups and brainstorm ideas for a proposal they might submit to
THNA.
The second class-period was devoted entirely to developing proposals in working groups.
One researcher who was familiar with Ink and could answer questions regarding game mechan-
ics was assigned to each group. During the third and final class period, each group presented
its proposal in the THNA offices within the world of Ink. David logged into the game from a
machine in a different room and played the role of the THNA representative.
The rhetorical context focused on the THNA was characterized by several components that
relate to what we consider to be fundamental aspects of Ink as a learning environment. It
included an exigency (a neighborhood that needed improvement), an audience (representa-
tives of THNA), and a mild sense of competition (two groups were submitting a proposal,
but only one would be accepted). The scenario also left certain dimensions unspecified, forc-
ing group members to make certain rhetorical decisions on their own. We didn’t specify, for
instance, what the proposal should look like, what documents might accompany it (e.g., Pow-
erPoint presentations, brochures, mockups), what level of formality to adopt, or what stylistic
approach to take. The precise form of proposals was not dictated because we wanted players to
make decisions about what rhetorical strategies would be most effective within this particular
rhetorical context.
Given the compressed timeframe and the fact that this work was not an assignment specified
on the syllabus, we expected that groups would generate brief or even incomplete proposals.
Instead, both groups ended the work session not with a draft of a proposal but with a concept
and plan for how proposals would be completed as homework in the intervening time before
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Fig. 2. The request for proposals distributed to playtesters.

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the third class meeting. They divided the workload among themselves and came to the final
session with relatively well-developed proposals.
One group proposed “The Fourth Hill,” a multi-purpose park that would sponsor concerts,
sporting events, and film festivals. The other group proposed “The Three Hills Library,” a place
where Ink players could provide and receive comments on writing, as well as publish writing of
various types (creative, professional, journalistic, and academic). Both proposals were simple
brochures: multimodal documents in which text flowed around images downloaded from the
web.

7. (What) Will players write? Responding to rhetorical exigencies in Ink

The design of Ink reflects our belief that rhetoric is a strategy for addressing certain kinds
of problems or exigencies that are always contextual. We believe rhetors are most successful
when they are able to create a rich profile of the exigencies they hope to address and the
contexts in which these exigencies are situated. This means that rhetorical interventions are
informed by awareness of audience, purpose, medium, genre, and other factors. If players
write in Ink, we hypothesize that it will be in response to some identifiable exigency and that
the writing will be adapted to contextual realities perceived by players. Our test cycle provided
some evidence that this was indeed the case.
Each group of students produced a more or less complete proposal in response to the RFP
they were given. While we expected simple proposals that relied mostly or exclusively on
alphabetic text, students turned in multimodal compositions that combined text and images
and that demonstrated attention to basic design and readability issues. Images were placed
at regular intervals on alternating sides of the page, creating a sense of rhythm and balance.
Further, these documents were scannable, favoring short chunks of text, bulleted lists, and
subheadings in bold fonts. Student-players established a visual hierarchy, using graphical
tools (such as font style and size) to help readers make distinctions between main headings,
subheadings, and bullet points. In other words, the basic approach of these documents was
consistent with a proposal for a professional audience whose needs would likely include the
ability to process the proposal quickly. This was true despite the fact that document design and
visual communication were not taught or thematized within the class. While it is likely that
these students had been introduced to concerns of document design as a result of their work
in the writing center and/or previous courses, the fact that Ink prompted them to activate this
knowledge is notable.
One member of the group that proposed “The Fourth Hill” produced a web page meant to
serve as a mockup of what players might see if they chose to visit the park (see Fig. 3 for
a screen capture of this web mockup). In reporting on her composing process, this student
said that she first determined that a mockup would strengthen her proposal. This choice itself
demonstrates a willingness to engage with the rhetorical situation, evidencing the student’s
processing of exigency and the needs of the target audience. The form of mockup that she
produced demonstrates an awareness of audience and purpose as well: bright, cheerful colors
and fonts; a clean professional design; a photograph of a park showing welcoming shade trees,
green grass, and picnic tables; the logos of relevant organizations placed in the conventional
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Fig. 3. Web mockup that accompanied the proposal of one group of playtesters.
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location at the bottom of the page. The professionalism of her document is enhanced by the
addition of an attractive logo, which she created for the purpose.
We are not arguing that the documents students produced in this test cycle are exceptionally
well written or that Ink is the only way such documents could be elicited from students. Instead,
we are simply observing that within the limited test scenario, student-players seemed to make
choices about their rhetorical strategies that reflect fundamental aspects of their rhetorical
contexts. These choices seem to emerge out of the embedded nature of the rhetorical tasks
and were made explicit by the competitive nature of the game scenario. Given our goal that
Ink is designed to be an alternative learning environment for writing, the amount and variety
of rhetorical engagement is encouraging to us. While far from definitive, we see evidence that
spaces like Ink can motivate student learning in ways that traditional classrooms struggle to.

8. Will players have fun? Level of engagement and motivation

We observed evidence of engagement during this test cycle. Discussion was lively as students
generated ideas for their proposals. At one point during a moment of intense brainstorming,
one student hushed his group because he was concerned that the other group would steal their
ideas. During the second class-period (the work session), students stayed for several minutes
after the class was over. When one group overheard the ideas of another, they poked fun
saying their ideas were “way more cool.” When the groups presented their ideas in the game
during the third class meeting, there was evidence of nervousness even though they knew
the representative of THNA was just one of the researchers with whom they’d been working
throughout the process.
Students could have conceivably turned in much simpler proposals or have been satisfied
with incomplete proposals. The fact that they elected to develop more complex and devel-
oped proposals outside of class evidences motivation and engagement. In her account of her
composing process, the student-player who created the web mockup informed us that she
had never made a webpage before. Spotting iWeb—a user-friendly web-editing application
that comes pre-installed on Mac computers—in her applications bar, she speculated that this
application would accomplish what she needed and decided to open it. That a student was
willing to identify and learn a new application and compose in a new medium suggests she
was highly motivated and engaged by the task. Survey data confirm some students found this
test activity engaging (see Table 1). Out of ten respondents, six said they Agreed and two
said they Strongly Agreed with the statement, “In general I found this experience fun.” Six
respondents said that they Agreed with the statement, “Once Ink has been publicly launched,
I can imagine myself logging in and playing the game.” Collectively, this evidence suggests
that it is possible to create a writing-focused game that provides “a compelling framework for
play” (Pearce, 2004).

9. Will players learn?

Learning, of course, is notoriously difficult to measure, and at this stage our claims about
learning in Ink are very modest indeed. James Britton (1970) wrote that in order to become
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Table 1
Student response to using ink
Strongly Disagree Neither agree Agree Strongly Total
disagree nor disagree agree
1. In general I found this 0 1 1 6 2 10
experience fun
2. I would consider enrolling in a 0 3 3 4 0 10
course that used Ink as a major
component (i.e., a course that
centered on activities like this
one, but on a larger scale)
3. I feel that after this experience 0 1 3 5 1 10
(interpreted broadly to include
framing materials and
discussion as well as time in
the game itself), I have a
deeper understanding of how a
particular composition can
reflect key contextual factors
such as genre, mode,
audience, purpose, exigency
4. Once Ink has been publicly 2 1 1 6 0 10
launched, I can imagine
myself logging in and playing
the game

more effective users of language, children “must PRACTISE language in the sense in which
a doctor ‘practises’ medicine and a lawyer ‘practises’ law, and NOT in the sense in which a
juggler ‘practises’ a new trick before he performs it” (p. 130). Our study indicates that Ink
can potentially allow this kind of practice. Writers in Ink are not producing what Britton calls
“dummy runs” or “exercises” but are using writing to solve problems in which they are invested.
That students engaged in the process of identifying a rhetorical exigency and engaging in a
rhetorical intervention meant to address that exigency means that they engaged in the practice of
writing as we understand it. Survey evidence indicates that some students perceived themselves
to be learning. Five Agreed and one Strongly Agreed with the statement, “I feel that after this
experience (interpreted broadly to include framing materials and discussion as well as time
in the game itself), I have a deeper understanding of how a particular composition can reflect
key contextual factors such as genre, mode, audience, purpose, exigency.” Whether or not
students are critically reflecting on their practices in Ink is another matter (see our discussion
of meta-cognitive awareness below).

10. Limitations of this study

There are several important limitations to this very preliminary and informal study, most
of which stem from the nature of our work as focused on the design of Ink rather than on
research to produce generalizable results. Our test group consisted primarily of strong writers
(mostly sophomores and juniors) who had expressed an interest in working at the MSU Writing
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Center. Clearly this is not a typical group of college students, but selecting users who have an
interest in the central activity of the game is a useful strategy when evaluating gameplay using
early prototypes. Our test case took the form of a class activity, so it is unclear to what extent
students were motivated because they were eager to satisfy the expectations for a course and
to what extent they were genuinely engaged by the game and the activity associated with it.
This is true despite the fact that we were not instructors for the course and participation in
the test session did not influence their grades in the course. Finally, this activity was clearly
an artificial construction of the researchers: we created a neighborhood with problems; we
pretended to represent that neighborhood. In actual gameplay, we hope that problems emerge
organically within the social ecology of the game and that players are motivated to address
them as part of gameplay, not because a designer (or teacher) has asked them to.
Despite the limitations of our study for producing generalizable results, the playtesting
sessions demonstrated a number of problems associated with the game that we hope to address
as the game develops and as our pedagogy develops alongside it. This is a positive outcome,
on the whole, because playtesting is meant to highlight areas in need of further development.
One of the more interesting issues that arose included difficulties confronting the nature of the
game’s reality. For instance, when one student-player proposed creating a swimming pool in
what became The Fourth Hill, another student-player rejected the idea, saying that swimming
pools are too costly to maintain. This comment seems to reflect the nature of swimming pools
outside the game world; in Ink, the cost of object maintenance is determined by word-count and
other rhetorical features, not by real-world maintenance costs. We take up this issue, among
others, in the concluding section.

11. What should a game that teaches writing look like?

“What kind of writing do we hope to teach?”—Raph Koster (Avrich et al., 2006, p. 39)
In this final section, we would like to frame some contributions to the discussion begun in
the Harper’s forum on games, education, and literacy. Our contributions are informed not only
by our orientation to writing and rhetoric and to writing and rhetoric in digital environments
but also more specifically by our experience designing and testing Ink. What have we learned?

11.1. Writing may not be a focal activity for players. It may be, instead, a means to an end

The attraction of MMORPGs as learning environments is their ability to create immer-

sive spaces that facilitate complex social ecologies. Within these social ecologies, exigencies
emerge, and players are sometimes motivated to address these exigencies by engaging in
rhetorical interventions. If a neighborhood isn’t doing well, perhaps someone will form a
neighborhood organization that will write a Request for Proposals. Other players, wanting to
help the neighborhood and/or wanting to earn funding for their own projects, may be motivated
to develop proposals and submit them to the neighborhood association.
It’s possible, however, that players engaging in these rhetorical interventions will not become
reflective about their rhetorical choices. They may be so focused on achieving a particular end
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that the means may become invisible. This would not be too surprising, as it echoes what often
happens in the world outside of Ink. In their study of workplace writers, for instance, Dias et
al., 1999 noticed that writing was often invisible to the professionals they studied, even when it
constituted an important part of their work routines. Dias et al. contended that this reality may
warrant a shift in writing pedagogy: “If as we argue, writing is a by-product of other activities,
a means for getting something else done, we ought to consider how we might engage students
in activities that commit them to write as necessary means—but only as a means not an end”
(p. 235).
This in turn might ask us to re-examine one goal that we have often made prominent in
our classrooms: the goal of achieving meta-discursive reflection. Both of us, as teachers, have
felt that it is important for writers to become reflective about the choices they make within
rhetorical situations. Transference of learning seems to rely on students being able to abstract
from what they do in one situation and apply this knowledge in another situation. But although
the players we observed and interviewed seemed to make rhetorical choices that reflected the
contexts in which they wrote, at least some of them claimed afterwards that they were not
aware of making these choices. When we asked students why they had chosen to make a
brochure and why their brochure had taken the specific form it had, one replied that it was “not
really a conscious choice [it] just came into being.” If meta-discursive awareness is indeed an
important part of learning to write, we may need to include game mechanics that specifically
encourage the development of such awareness.

11.2. Participating in a textual economy is the likely source of realism, suspense, and
tension in Ink

One of the more compelling things about the Three Hills Neighborhood scenario for our
group of playtesters was the way that their texts were caught up in an explicit system of
value. Literally, writing a winning proposal could bring them in-game rewards (in the form
of the game’s currency, which is known as “ink” in Ink). Indeed, it is this possibility that
makes extended playing arcs seem plausible and enjoyable. Why would one write in Ink? To
garner the support of others that, in turn, leads to resources that would sustain a character’s
development. This is not terribly different from other role-playing games that have currency
of one sort or another. So what do we mean by a textual economy?
Textual economy is a term to describe the value that accrues as texts circulate and become
valued by other players. Texts that do this earn ink for those that are connected to them in
various ways as originators, as authors or co-authors, as users or re-users. Ink is needed, in
turn, to create and sustain a text in the game. Texts in the Ink world are subject to a gameplay
phenomenon we call “entropy.” Texts that are not maintained go away over time. Without
someone’s attention, they become harder and harder to find in the game world. Textual entropy
creates tension in the Ink game world by magnifying the effects of a similar entropic function
in RL. Texts that are ignored lose social value and may not literally vanish, but they become
increasingly difficult to find and increasingly less important.
One way that Ink may evolve, in the future, is to become more and more of a textual economy
simulation experience, similar to simulation games like SimCity or SimEarth. Ink simulations
would likely take the shape of bureaucracies of various sorts.
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11.3. “The game” is an intersection of the virtual world of Ink and various RL contexts in
which that virtual world is encountered

Much of the activity that our playtesters engaged in did not happen “in” the game: it did
not involve the graphical user interface of the game, nor did it happen in the virtual spaces
of the game world. If you had watched our playtesters “playing” Ink, you would have, for
much of the time, seen two groups of students sitting at a table, talking, sketching, taking
notes. At times you would have seen them turn to a laptop computer, not to enter the space
of Ink, but to email a file to a groupmate, to find an image using Google, or to look up a
definition in Wikipedia. We would like to suggest that this is not necessarily undesirable;
indeed, it suggests that when we design writing games, we need to confront the complex
relationship between infrastructural resources (including technologies, physical spaces, and
conceptual spaces) created specifically for the game and resources that already exist outside of
the game (for a discussion of infrastructure and composing, see DeVoss, Cushman, & Grabill,
2005).
Because our game is still in development and the full set of features called for in our design
document are not yet implemented and functional, we needed to rely on other, non-game
infrastructural resources—including F2F interaction. For instance, the game crashed as we
went to create the RFP, so we distributed it to student-players as a paper document.
But these developmental contingencies simply made more visible dynamics that are
inevitable. Reliance on non-game resources will always be integral to the game, and to some
extent we always anticipated this. From the beginning we hoped, for instance, that players
would use standard production tools like Photoshop and Flash to create multimodal doc-
uments that would be used in the game. We never intended to replicate the functionality of
these applications in the game. We also anticipated that players might want to create websites
outside the game that would serve in-game purposes. They could, for instance, embed links
in rooms that would open a new browser window and load a website hosted on a different
server.

12. Conclusion

We remain convinced that MMORPGs like Ink that are developed specifically to teach writ-
ing can prompt pedagogical innovation and deserve funding for development and research.
While one challenge is that fully exploring the potential of writing games may require sub-
stantial investment, we hope our provisional study demonstrates that key game dynamics can
be tested on a modest budget, using a combination of in-game and out-of-game infrastructural
resources.

Acknowledgments

Many people have contributed to this project over the last three years, including Andrew Det-
skas, Andrew Koelewyn, Stephanie Sheffield, and Janet Swenson. We gratefully acknowledge
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the support of the WIDE Research Center, the MSU Writing Center, the Red Cedar Writing
Project, and the National Writing Project. As an undergraduate research assistant who made
important contributions to this study and to the game more generally, Seth Morton deserves
special mention here. Kym Buchanan, now assistant professor of Education at University of
Wisconsin-Stevens Point, is the lead designer for the game and was largely responsible for
developing the original concept and game mechanics of Ink.

David Michael Sheridan is an assistant professor in Michigan State University’s new

Residential College in the Arts and Humanities. His research interests include visual and
multimodal communication, digital rhetoric and alternative learning spaces.

William Hart-Davidson is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric,

and American Cultures at Michigan State University. He is also a Co-Director of MSU’s
WIDE (Writing in Digital Environments) Research Center. His research interests include
technical communication, human-computer interaction, information design and usability,
user-centered design, and rhetorical and social theory.

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