Help Us Spread the Word on Authentic Writing

Writing games without the pitfalls of "gamification."

Below, I’m going to ask for your help, but first a few thoughts.

It’s been a minute since I’ve had a chance to post something to this newsletter, which doesn’t mean I haven’t had anything to say, but is more a byproduct of feeling like I didn’t have sufficient time to say something genuinely new, or vital when it comes to the issues impacting our attempts at getting students engaged with their learning.

The issues we’re confronting are the ones I’ve been thinking and writing about for years, so a big part of me wants to just point to my books and talks and podcast appearances and say, “Look, I’m right! Just do what I say!”

I both do and don’t believe this. Even though I am very confident in both my diagnosis and treatment for what I think is the crisis in student engagement (particularly when it comes to writing), these are issues which require broad social engagement and sharing of perspectives so we can arrive in a place where, together, we have a path (or paths) that lead to students having meaningful, enduring, learning experiences.

One of the reasons I joined up with Frankenstories is because I liked how their approach to writing was fundamentally rooted in having an experience as a writer, an experience rooted in community, and an experience that was, god forbid, actually fun.

Importantly to me, Frankenstories is a game without a full embrace of “gamification.” I’ve come to believe that the push to gamify schools as a way to engage students has been a strategic error because it has dodged a deeper necessity to show students the deep pleasures of genuine challenge.

Gamification arose because we theorized that it is hard to dump students into those deep challenges so if we can give them small pleasures along the way, we can get them doing the work without them noticing it. My objection to gamification was always that the gamifying seemed to distort the underlying work - sometimes in subtle, but often larger ways - and it created a surface-level reward that privileged an activity that may not be the same thing as a learning experience.

At its core, a Frankenstories game is a writing experience. The wrapping of the game may give the experience structure, but it does not distort the experience in doing so.

That experience is rooted in principles and design of “improvisation” or “improv,” which have deep connections to how we go about writing. To my mind, it’s what makes the game both fun, and meaningful.

Learning to write should be challenging, fun, and meaningful. I will believe this to the end of my days.

Here’s where I’m asking for your help. We — Andrew Duval of Frankenstories, Danielle Witten of the Humble County Office of Education, and I — are trying to get to next year’s convening of SXSW EDU.

SXSW EDU uses public sentiment as its method for choosing participants, where folks can look at proposals and then choose to “heart” those that they feel should be included. This is where you come in should you so choose. At the button right below this paragraph is a link to our proposal.

If you click on that and create a profile you will be eligible to “heart” our proposal (and any other proposal you find intriguing).

I understand that this is a bit of an ask, and truth be told, this is not my favorite thing to do, as belied by the fact that I’ve put off doing this until two days before the voting ends, but any support for this work that seeks to put humans first when it comes to learning to write is appreciated.