Writing
We will be doing a fair amount of informal and formal writing this semester. Depending on the purpose, we may need to make use of multiple environments. The two most handy are G. Drive and Slack. A Google doc seems like a good default place and type of document to use for most purposes. It is easy to use, share, discuss, and revise. Slack has rich posts that are a bit more handy and pretty, but we lose some of the social features. I won’t be too picky about the difference for most things.
One of the things these formats leave behind is that the ultimate goal for a lot of writing is to be on the open internet. But no one wants to write in HTML or read it uninterpreted. Converting word docs gets really old, really fast. Markdown allows us to use a standard format to create human parseable hypertext that can be machine translated into html. markdown’s simple text file format means you do not need special software to work on it. For ARIS in particular, we may want to use HTML to make things look nice or be tricky. It will likely be good to know there are good tools for Markdown, including HackMD, where we not only get a nice place to write but a lot of the social features we love from Google.
Writing is also collaborative. We will make use of these environments for collaborative writing, not just individual work.
Your conference proposal will be in the word doc format in the end, an easy translation from Google. Even though it is old school, it is still standard for a lot of academic stuff. If you need any special help producing this kind of document (i.e. you don’t have word), just ask.
Writing Templates
There will often be templates for specific assignments, to help you fill a blank page and center a discussion. Here is an example:
Submitting Assignments
Most likely there will be a particular folder in Google Drive to put a particular piece of writing in, and a link posted to Slack will let everyone who needs to that your writing is there to read. That’s the official submission.
When asked for APA formatted references, do not worry about indentation (except for the conference proposal).
If you post on Slack, submit your work as a post (click the arrow to the left of the posting box and choose “create a post”) in the appropriate channel. Copy and paste your text from the Google Doc into this post if you want. Eachpost gets its own comment thread in Slack, helping to keep discussion centered.
You may also want to write in your own online space, like a blog. This works just fine and a link again connects our conversations on Slack to your work.
To comment on writing, then you can leave comments on the post on Slack or directly on your blog if that’s how you want to do it. They will also show up in the channel, but will adhere to the original post (and not the others), making for coherent conversations. Be thoughtful and supportive, even and especially when you have an important point to make.
Collaboration
Rather than email and paper documents, we will make use of a course homepage for official stuff and Slack for collaborative teamwork outside actual collaborative writing.
- Course webpage. Syllabus, etc. are here. So is anything final and public we make, like your game project Kickstarters and conference proposals at the end of the semester (not their grades of course). As much as is possible, your work should be directed to and actually inform an outside audience, including future students in this course.
- Slack.com – questions about assignments, discussions about readings, connecting with team members, etc. Slack is mobile and desktop, cross-platform, and brand new. It’s not just something we use in our course, but its existence and affordances is relevant content to our course.
Game Development
For obvious reasons, I will somewhat foreground ARIS as a design tool for your projects. But it is not the only possible choice. Your project’s direction or your personal thinking may see you using other design environments. Exploring other tools is welcome and encouraged, especially if you can turn around and produce supporting documentation to help others follow your path with these tools in the future. See the Resources page for more options.
