The new curriculum

As a high school teacher, it is completely unbelievable to me that teachers haven't found some way to textually examine video games, or even as a mere media phenomenon. Indeed, video games themselves are the lepers of the media world in high schools – there are classes dedicated towards theatre history and stagecraft, visual art, filmmaking classes. Beyond that, in the Canadian high school curriculum for English, it is required of teachers to examine films, poems, short stories, novels, plays, visual art, radio plays, TV shows and, in Media Studies, advertisements and popular culture.

How can we discuss all of these things and just pretend that video games don't even exist?

Video games are often viewed in, I'd say, three lights: one, as a social pariah that hooks kids in worse than crystal meth – manifesting itself in teachers cracking down on the playing of Flash-based games in computer-using contexts; two, as mere edutainment material – the game isn't to be examined itself, but to be used to teach other, stratified, traditional concepts (think of the variety of math games that exist, or even Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago?); and three, as a private hobby, something to blow off some steam after work or after school (for students) – I'm thinking of the lengthy conversation I had with a science teacher about the way he plays Fallout: New Vegas, having his character get addicted to drugs for the statistic benefits and killing everyone who moves for their equipment. I was personally a little bit horrified by this play style, unable as I am to separate virtual actions from my own moral compass.

What all of these views, and especially the first and the third, demonstrate, is a shocking and profound lack of awareness about the power of video games, not only as a text that a large majority of students identify with (far more than radio plays, I can assure you), but also of the fact that video games deserve as close of a reading as those canonical texts that teachers far too often rely on.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that video games aren't being discussed – high school texts have barely progressed past the 1970s, or only with the most meagre and uninteresting texts of the last decade (you'd be shocked how many schools use Chicken Soup for the Soul as a goddamned text worth considering). But what high school should be about is expanding consciousness and engendering critical thinking.

As teachers, we expect that students should be gaining the tools to critically understand and deconstruct a text (well, good teachers, anyways… of course, there are far too many English teachers who are content to have students regurgitate "factual" information, and these teachers are quite literally some of the worst people on Earth). Especially in the Media Studies strand, the idea is that students will be able to understand the machinations of the particular media that they're studying, whether it's film or advertisements. What we should be examining are the component parts of a text, the motivations and the design, the themes and the methods the author of the text uses to examine these themes. A student, at the end of high school, should be able to critically think about texts. Even if they never pick up a book after high school (which is, too often, a damned shameful thing that happens), they should be able to understand why a movie works or doesn't work, and what a movie is saying to them.

The great push right now in English Language Arts is to "connect" with students using relatively new forms. There's an integrated Hip-Hop project at a school I used to teach at, for instance, and another high school in the city piloted an English class based entirely around graphic novels. These are valiant attempts to break outside of the canon, even if both classes have fallen victim to subscribing to the canon of their respective genres a little too closely. Having students think critically about hip-hop lyrics, or begin to think critically about hip-hop culture, should have been something that happened decades earlier – ditto for graphic novels. It would be a real shame if the same didn't happen for video games.

There is some tiny sliver of merit to the complete and utter ignorance of video games in schools. We don't study games like chess or Go as "texts," per se – they're games dedicated solely to the concept of play and to mental improvement, not as narrative delivery devices. However, it would be specious at best to see video games in the same light as board games or card games. The difference is the grafting of narrative tropes onto games. Every game has its own internal narrative, sometimes much more obfuscated than traditional, "teachable" narratives. The fact that most teachers aren't even aware of this means that there's absolutely no hope for students.

So I hope we can agree for the need for students to be able to think critically about video games. They're perhaps the most widely used text outside of schools today, and they're probably also the most misunderstood. Students are far too often simply accepting the structures of videogames without really identifying what they are responding to, beyond "I like this game." To some degree, it's this culture of ignorance that has created this current culture of gamers who are far too willing to only allow a game to react in their pleasure sensors, and can't get beyond the notion of fun as the only experience worth having with videogames.

I'll save you the nitty gritty details of how I would run a Video Games in English class. But as with any other English class, it would be necessary to "read" widely – and this could be potentially problematic for a number of reasons. There are a number of what I would consider "necessary" games to play that would require a commitment of at least 20 hours to play through – but this isn't really any different from novels. And there are a number of shorter games that would act in much the same fashion as short stories or poems in this class.

The main barriers are probably skill and interest. If I was teaching this class, the actual skills in playing video games wouldn't be anything that would be assessed in the class. Indeed, I would probably even pass them along to a website like GameFAQs, and a students reliance or nonreliance on walkthroughs could even be used as a discussion starter – what kind of games require these more than others? But requiring that students be any good at video games wouldn't really have anything to do with analyzing it as a text – that would make about as much sense requiring students to be good at basketball before being able to read a novel.

There's no denying that this is a barrier, however. Even many experienced gamers don't ever finish games, so discussing the whole work becomes an issue. But video games are slightly different from other texts in that the personal responses of the gamer are integral to discussing the game, and a student's experiences, either pleasurable or not, are just as valid for discussion.

Here's how I'm basically envisioning this class. It would have to be largely blog-based, if only because things like formal essays aren't really suited to the medium – mixed-media presentations would be the norm, though of course there would have to be some enforcement of standards, if not because that would be necessary to ensure the continued support of the fairly ludditical administration, then because it's simply a good idea. I can even imagine doing such a class as an integrated project with the Communications and Productions Technology class, allowing students to apply the theoretical framework of their English class to actually making video games. And students would likely have the opportunity to study any game they wanted (in addition to teacher-chosen games) within the theoretical framework, especially if the teacher employs Peter McLaren's theory of cultural studies and cultural units as a method of discussion – then any work, good or terrible, canonized or not, can be thoroughly analyzed, which is presumably what schools should want to do.

That theoretical framework, like all other forms of literary criticism, has a variety of different "levels" of critique. As is often the case, students at a high school level wouldn't likely make it to the highest level, but the goal would be to move through each level in an effort to deepen understanding of video games as a textual object.

Level 1 – Is the game fun?

This is often the level that students and (unfortunately) reviewers operate on – they don't consider the game as a text, but merely as a tool for entertainment. This view should be taken as only a base level understanding of video games, and the concept of "fun" is one that is useful as a starting point, but can hopefully be subverted at some point throughout the course.

Level 2 – What component parts make up the experience of the video game?

Students understand that video games are comprised of gameplay, surely, but just as important is understanding the various technical and artistic pieces that create the whole of a video game.

Level 3 – What conscious or unconscious design choices did the developers of the game make to arrive at the game as a whole?

Here, it would likely be appropriate to introduce an outside source as a means of defining the terms and the framework that make up any given game, and to begin to understand that, as with a director in film or the author of a book, the development team makes numerous decisions, both conscious and unconscious, that affect the outcome of the game (everything from plotting to art design to gameplay mechanics). The goal here would be to move the students beyond what was intended, however, and to read the text not necessarily as "what the developer intended," though that is often an interesting standpoint to begin to analyze a game from.

Level 4 – What are the broad themes of the game?

Just as with any other text, the method for uncovering the themes of a game are largely produced in the same way – through a close reading of the events of the game, though with games there is also the question of the player's interactivity to include as well. Theme should be largely tackled in a similar manner as one would with, say, a film or a novel.

Level 5 – Determining the differences between narrative and non-narrative forms in video games

There are a number of games that more or less follow, say, a three-act structure, or the outline of the Hero's Journey. Analyzing these games requires a knowledge of literary and cultural history, as well as the understanding of how video games differ from historical genres. But video gaming is different from most media in that completely non-narrative forms exist as well. The questions for students will be: are there embedded narrative tropes within these games? Do these games create their own form of narration, intrinsically different from other media? Or are these games simply the digitalization of games and play, with no narrative or thematic consequence?

Level 6 – How does interactivity affect the interpretation of the themes?

Though I've mentioned that games are made up of numerous component parts, the most important, the one that gives a game its status as a game, is the role that the player plays in the progression of the game. Questions arise, such as: why is this game a game, and not a film or a book, for instance (i.e., what is particularly "game-y" about it)? How does my level of interactivity or non-interactivity play with the themes of the game, or is it largely disconnected from the themes? If a developer has decided to limit interactivity, why? And how does the game cope with the inclusion of player history and morality and belief systems in the framework of the game proper?

Level 7 – Do the themes necessarily engender entertainment?

Some games can be entertaining for reasons that the game doesn't intend, or the themes can make a game intentionally non-entertaining. How important is the role of the player and their enjoyment to a game? Does the concept of fun need to necessarily correlate to the idea of video games on the whole?

Level 8 – Connecting video game theory to a philosophical history; making a new form of video game criticism

This then allows students to focus less on how the game entertains them, and moreso on applying historical criticisms (Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, postcolonial theory, etc.) as well as perhaps moving towards a new form of criticism specific to video games, that takes into account the question of interactivity and its meaningfulness (or non-meaningfulness). Will it be based on reader response, auteur theory, or something else entirely?

This is a loose framework for the sort of thinking that students would be doing. Obviously the way the player feels and interacts with the world is as important as any theoretical discussion – hence the blog format. Video games are one of the largest cultural forces on the planet, and it's completely ludicrous that teachers and schooling have thrown students to the wild, to leave them to their own devices, and to ignore the social and intellectual ramifications of ignoring what is certainly an emergent textual discourse. Not to mention that the modus operandi of schools now is to try to engage students by talking about what is important to them. There's a kid watching Bioshock 2 videos right now instead of working, sitting right in front of me. I bet he'd rather talk about that game then The Chrysalids, that's for sure.