Marshall Saenz & Ethan Jordan Open General Studies Writing Game Space Learning Laboratory

The Game Space Learning Laboratory’s explores writing and writing pedagogy by fostering relationship between games, academia, and community. The lab facilitates faculty and student collaboration within and across disciplines, positing the many ways games provide researchable opportunities for the development of critical thinking, composition, WID, WIC, design, and curriculum development within the lens of rhetoric and composition. The lab offers a comfortable setting, housing a high-end computer system and a number of consoles.

Current initiatives include the following ongoing work:

• Written, multimodal gaming literacy narratives (audio/video recording, screen capture)
• Analyses of individual gameplay experiences/choices
• Interdisciplinary student learning and interactions between BGSU colleges (WAC, WIC in English, Art, Education, and possibly more)
• Connecting student writers and researchers with faculty across the curriculum and within disciplinarily contexts as per Writing Resource Initiative goals.
• Multiplayer ethnographic research - observation in game worlds, analysis of interactions
• Development of archivable writing course materials for present and future use
• Embodied learning practices
• Analyses of game design/composition/rhetoric/literacies (research on a game itself)
• Opportunities to explore and expand visual and play components that support transfer and vertical curriculum
• Game criticism (using film theory, music theory, animation theory, rhetoric, literacy theory, etc.)
• Narrative across media implications

Student and faculty are encouraged to explore ways in which the GSW GSLL can assist their projects and research interests.