Four years ago, I began teaching in a new instructional program at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Washington.  Prior to that, I was more than a little burned out and needing a new challenge.  Too many times had I stood in front of the classroom, had seen the bored stares and the glazed looks and the blaring earbuds and buried heads in laptops…and if I am being honest, I was bored by the “same old, same old,” too.  Since composition courses – “stale cake,” to use a metaphor from Michael Joyce – are the gateway to what the college or university has to offer, I knew that I was undoubtedly in trouble. How could I sell my own product if I couldn’t stomach it, either? 

Fortunately, my administrators had thrown down the gauntlet with this new program: within the context of existing college course outcomes and requirements, experiment and create classes that would reach–and, more importantly, engage–a dual-enrollment (ages 15 to 18) audience.   This age range constitutes the millennial generation, or the group of children born in 1985 and later–also known as the gamer generation (Beck & Wade).

This shift reinforced what I had suspected, that, as Charles Deemer noted in his 1967 article “English Composition as a Happening,” “[f]or better or worse, our educational system is undeniably rigid.  Not even the university is free from its demands.  The English Composition course, as we should expect, is the rigid child of a rigid parent.  It is, after all, taught in a classroom, a medium (in its present form) Marshall McLuhan would call ‘hot’ and of ‘low participation.’"  Despite tradition, students resisted critical engagement because they had been trained in the ways of hot/ low participation.  What I needed to develop as a part of this “early college” experiment was a cold/ high participation model that more closely mimicked their daily lives. 

In a recent issue of Wired magazine, Rex Sorgatz argues that “we’ve gone from games representing life to becoming life” (39).  Such games have become pervasive, and have done so by playing off the seemingly-basest of human instincts: competition in its varied forms (setting records, prize winning, etc).  One way this “gaming mentality” can be seen is in how other technology shows these same competitive desires: having the most Amazon book reviews, striving for top ranks for MySpace friends or achieving a higher blog rating on Technorati (Sorgatz 40).  “How did we end up with a world we play like a game?” (40) Sorgatz queries.  But I would argue this is the wrong question, most especially if the world has already changed as Sorgatz admits.  The real question is how might this mindset be utilized in more than just the user’s spare time?  Certainly elements of gameplay–and more specifically, game design–can be seen in workplace tools, as “[d]esktop editing apps let us manage our data, but they also let us manipulate it” (Sorgatz 40; see also Carr).  These types of modifications have been seen for years in “entertainment” video games and their design.  Games continue to be designed to facilitate user choice, interaction and control.  From platform to even Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), games are now designed to engage the user far more than Pong ever did.  And if the games have truly become life as Sorgatz asserts (I happen to agree), then how should instructors, specifically in the composition classroom, be applying these concepts? 

This view of games and games-as-learning "as activities that are most powerful when they are personally meaningful, experiential, social, and epistemological all at the same time" (Williamson Shaffer, Squire, Halverson and Gee) is essential for the instructor to recognize. One way that I attempted to infuse this notion of experience was to talk to students about what they found interesting and entertaining, what was working and what was not working in the class, and how they might design a writing class.  Course design became like a video game to me, an attempt to adapt what students were already doing outside of class into their coursework – and to “win” by engaging them.  That, of course, doesn’t seem all that ground-breaking or new.  But what I discovered was more than a simple incorporation of their interests–in this specific case, video games–into my composition classroom.  I began to design my course as if it was a video game.  As technology and “new” media have developed and opened opportunities for cooperative play, online community building and experience design, I saw–but more importantly felt–that lack in my own classroom.