Profession confessions. I must admit, I find it hard to think of myself much as a researcher. However, I do research, to substantiate my thoughts, refine them with peers, and channel them into something I feel is actionable.
Although I often feel that I've learned the most important things in life through labor and dialogue, research challenges that learning and demands that I do not keep it to myself. I am a particular person who views the world through a constructivist, subjectivist lens. Practicing qualitative research in that scope rarely gives me confidence that I can help anyone but myself, but if there is one thing I have borrowed from the oppressed, the dreamers, the radicals—researchers, all of them—it is hope in my work. To avoid taking a job I wouldn't love, I entered university to train for a career creating concept art in the video game industry; to avoid the competitive strife and toxic work culture of the game development industry, I entered a master's program to teach; to avoid starving wages on double-time work as a teacher, I entered a doctoral program to write about the horrible things I have been avoiding, and embolden myself and others to actually, seriously do something about them. Toward a better video game development curriculum in higher education, I intend to converge four vectors of study with the following goals: 1) Enculturating positive work-life balance and industry-critical practices in game dev education. 2) Developing critical culturally responsive pedagogy to combat games industry discrimination. 3) Developing pedagogical methods to accommodate and enrich divergent game dev students. 4) Criticizing neoliberal corporate education practices to stave back teacher proofing. With the proper execution, the result will be an effective dissertation worth the attention of my colleagues. Should I not succeed, however, I still intend to commit myself to some kind of service work, as long as I can, as anxious as it tends to make me. In the public, I glimpse the future that gives me hope, one which is communal, equitable, and socially sustainable. If I am not titled a scholar while I teach and aid the people I live with, so be it! If a dissertation does not complete this daunting puzzle, I will at least start on the corners. Reaffirming thoughts from RILE 2023. The Stanford Graduate School of Education is running the 2023 iteration of its RILE conference, and thanks to its free online admission, I was able to attend a talk hosted by Dr. Bryan Brown, presented by Dr. Uma Jayakumar from UCLA Riverside and Dr. Zeus Leonardo from UCLA Berkeley. “Pushing Back: Resisting the Attack on Diversity in Education” was a nuanced discussion illuminating how racial equity in education has not been linearly improved over time, and current setbacks act as evidence of White hegemony, “post-colorblindness”, and racial consciousness.
What stuck with me particularly strongly is how racial consciousness has allotted White oppressors more tools to oppress with. Constitutionally and experientially, our current constructs of race do imply superiority and inferiority, a sentiment that dampened the incredible strides that Black educators made in the postbellum segregated era of United states History. However, the presupposition that a racial “colorblind” mentality is the solution to inequitable treatment, and worse, that racial colorblindness is even possible to achieve in the first place is a damaging derivative. As discussed, to recognize colorblindness first requires the recognition of color, and on that basis, the attempt to manufacture equivalences where they materially do not exist (for instance, White people in the United States still have enormous privileges that Black people do not, and current reparations have failed to address this). This was not the only point demonstrating that each move toward critical education will have political complications and contention. For instance, Dr. Jayakumar described how affirmative action had more of a remedial effect than a reparative one, yet losing it was still a major blow (and even so, its “death” afforded a moment for mourning and the chance to start over with something more effective). Critical work devoted to reconstruction cannot be simple nor intangible—as removing a projectile from a wound cannot be done without some additional damage—but that is no reason to abandon such methods. Either we are working as/with victims of White supremacist systems and society to change the status quo, or we reproduce it. To face that “racial realism,” as Derrick Bell called it, we must be willing to attack it as if it were an immovable object, and we must imagine our power and efforts to approach an unstoppable force. The reason to fight for a better faculty work-life. This fall season, I’ve had the chance to attend social events for both my former academic department (Computer Graphics Technology) and my current department (Curriculum Studies). In both, the walls came down between faculty and graduate students in a refreshing opportunity to treat each other like fellow adults, rather than mentors and mentees. Admittedly, I had a goal in attending besides just getting to know my colleagues better: I wanted to know more about their work-lives. Between teaching undergraduate students on behalf of faculty and organizing graduate students into a coalition, I’ve come to understand how our workloads are interdependent—when one member of staff, faculty, or the student body is behind, whether due to ailing health or community emergencies or simply difficulties with work, it elongates or crunches the work of others. However, on the same logic, if we can improve conditions for some workers, there is a mutual benefit.
We have the chain reactions of capitalistic industrialism to condemn for this insufferably fragile pipeline, but if we aren’t able to uproot it in one swift movement (please don’t look to me for ideas on that; there are far more experienced theorists to listen to), I want to investigate if there is some way we can change it for the better, be it through systemic or cultural measures. For the remainder of this post, if I mention academic workers, know that I include staff, faculty, and students all under that term, for they all produce labor which maintains the university’s operations and optics. Systemic issues. One professor I know has been suddenly hospitalized for severe health reasons, requiring two professors to attempt to cover their teaching duties in their place. When those professors have been unable to cover, they delegate to their graduate students. Aside from the graduate students’ willingness to help, the one factor preventing this work from falling into total incompleteness is chance, as the available graduate students could have registered for incompatible schedules months prior to a problem occurring. Here, a systemic issue is at play: work has been organized into a system which is meant to be efficient and self-sustaining, but it ultimately takes very little, very common issues to disrupt the system, and maintenance of the system is put upon the very workers already operating the system. When blockages occur, there may not be a release valve as an accommodation. I’ve never read of a system designer who believed in faith as a core tenant of an effective system, but so often, it is the duct tape that patches the system into “working” order. Should we find that academic workers are encountering systemic issues, it will be important to identify whether there are personnel that arbitrate and reify the system’s rules; if so, they are the root of the issue, and if not, we may actually have an entanglement in sociocultural factors. NOTE: Disability intersects any human-driven system in a way that demands more thorough, humanizing design in the first place, and stands as a reason to scrutinize academic systems even in a department which seems stable in concurrent work. Developing more flexible academic work rights and standards for disabled academic workers can alleviate constraint-based issues, or vice versa, adjustments to systemic constraints to mitigate risk would benefit disabled academic workers. Sociocultural issues. Another faculty member shared with me how they dramatically increased their own workload by requiring each student to meet with them once in the semester. This, as a cause of overwork, seems much simpler to resolve: just don’t do it, right? Don’t design such a time-intensive activity into your own course. However, the drive for this course design was not a purely mechanical need: there is a personal desire to connect with students; there is a departmental culture which seeks to correct prior errors in the student-teacher exchange; there is an experiential culture which values the success of responsive pedagogy and student welfare; there is a disciplinary culture which promotes interpersonal care and collaboration; there is a spiritual culture which demands idealism and martyrdom; there is a national culture to breed excellence for capital, colonial, and imperial competition. Some of these cultural affects are vital, and others are horridly damaging—countercultural measures are possible, but to varying degrees in certain contexts (for example, rural educators are hard-pressed to teach the racist histories of the United States in the classroom without direct threats from parents). Still, culture empowers us to find a way. Just because the harm of not holding student meetings can’t be precomputed or quantified retroactively doesn’t mean a material benefit cannot be observed in prior meetings with students, then expanded into course design as a greater good, one believed to be worth the extra time spent. The suffering involved feels possible to contain to oneself, and the benefits feel palpable for more than just the person being helped. Thus, we are driven to act. Which is it? Things become more complicated when the line is blurred between systemic and cultural. White patriarchy may seem to be intangible cultural concept, but it can be outlined with the material impacts of the capitalist business sector, which exploits International workers, and non-cisgender males. When public education is defunded by the nationalist government in favor of private business stimulus, educators can rarely secede from these influences without losing operational power. Bringing things back down to a fundamental level, why not just cancel class when someone gets sick? Because the academic system’s seasonal, semester-based calendar is disrupted by that one delayed course track, which can have a rippling effect that damages other course tracks which are running on time in isolation. But why have an academic calendar? For generalizable convenience, so that learners can embody the same context and learn together, which is valued for mechanical and cultural success. The convenience of many is opted over the inconvenience of (relatively) few. There is no such thing as an invulnerable system as long as human life is differing, diverging, and unpredictable, but looking at the victims who fall through the cracks, aren’t they the ones who are already facing inequitable circumstances? A hope for us all. The disabled, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised are not strictly deficient in qualities of life, but they are systemically and socioculturally denied fair living conditions, and they face an extreme magnitude of suffering compared to the “normal” population. It has been reasoned that what we often feel are cultural issues—such as racism, sexism, and ableism—are truly systemic issues (e.g. redlining to curtail the freedom of living and voting power of BBIPOC). Culture is hard to pin down, but systems are constructed by people with a purpose, which is to say, they can (and should) be reconstructed when they do not work, even if it is difficult to do so. Using this lens, insisting that the welfare of othered peoples be seized through systemic change, should we not challenge academia with the same strife? When we bemoan our inability to turn down a project, or spend days making custom content for a class—so-called problems of our own making—isn’t it unrealistic to believe that systemic change would not let us have this, and more? Are we using the lens of normative cultural and social desire to look away from challenges only because they appear too big to apprehend? Can we turn away from this opportunity while the most vulnerable people have been fighting to lay the groundwork for revolution and obtain impossible victories, simply to survive? If interest convergence is what the “normal” population relies on for change, then why pretend that this mutual benefit is not within possibility? Rewinding the Black feminist mixtape. As much as I feel collaboration and interdependence is a valuable part of a thriving society, I find myself awfully slow at reviewing literature in my field, and honestly, sort of dreading it. Surely, it’s crucial to have work documented this way (and there are many times I wish I had transcripts to non-written works for analytical purposes), but without interaction with the author, I find myself trudging through papers, mired in isolation and cycling through unanswered questions, which is not the ideal image of a researcher. Even so, if I’m going to press on, I’d like to rebuild a habit of note-taking: if I’m feeling invited into the depths of a work, I may as well leave myself a proper breadcrumb trail out!
Most recently, I’ve been captivated by “Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist Thought,” written by Dr. TreaAndrea M. Russworm (who I’ve heard on Dr. Samantha Blackmon’s podcast, Not Your Mama’s Gamer) and Dr. Samantha Blackmon (a professor I’ve met and admire here at Purdue). The mixtape is comprehensive and well stated enough that my own paraphrasing wouldn’t do it justice, but I felt compelled to note some of the familiar, powerful themes that recurred in the work. Radical Black joy. For a number of participants, it hadn’t crossed their young minds that Black girls playing video games was not the norm in the eyes of marketeers. Whether making a commotion at home, surviving the online hellscape of modern gaming, constructing curriculum and an academic career around playing games, or indulging in casual gameplay while going on in years, a Black woman’s joy found in games is socially radical. Some participants advocated for Black niche games in the vein of Madea and Harriet Tubman: Demon Slayer, punching up against model minority expectations. This alone helped me to confront a latent bias I’ve had against Black kitsch: I’ve worried that works like that of Tyler Perry were harmful reductions of Black culture, but stepping back, how could it ever be fair for me to suggest art be limited to serious straight-laced productions for the sake of revolution, eliminating the levity of low-hanging fruit in the process? Black joy is invaluable in surviving and thriving. Black excellence. The subversions required by cultivating Black joy do not exclude a life of Black achievement! Owning arcades or ruling them, Black women rose to the challenge, and found it fun and liberating to do so. One participant noted how games were a context where crossing racial and gender boundaries was not only possible, but empowering. In a racially integrated world that is still harshly divided by White culture (and its threat of assimilation), Black girls were using the playing field to contest the White superiority narrative, and to refuse Black inferiority—in the case of this paper, often up into careers in scholarship and social discourse. Greater community. Even when playing single-player games, gaming was a path to socialization for Black girls. Visiting others to play games they’d otherwise never get to try, finding community in arcades, clubs, and online guilds, and enjoying parallel play, there has been a wide range of different ways for Black women to interact through gaming. Although their presence in the toxic online sphere has been a novel challenge to surmount, Black-led gaming collectives have grown from secure pockets to entire creative movements, such as the authors’ very own project, the Black Games Archive. A culture of silence. This is discussed in two intertwined trajectories: the oppressors, and the oppressed. The participants and authors narrate ways that White supremacist patriarchy has neglected Black women in and around gaming (such as corporations ignoring the need to proactively defend Black women content creators from harassment, and the omission of Black females from gaming history and marketing). Additionally, they describe their hesitance, anxiety, or full-on fear of participating in gaming activities, culture, and criticism. A group of participants chose to remain anonymous, wishing to keep their casual gameplay private, which should break the heart of anyone who claims to be a gamer, and furthermore, should motivate White people to break ground for safe spaces dedicated to BBIPOC, as well as strike at the material conditions that their dominant culture upholds to conveniently paralyze BBIPOC. As a video game development educator, these effects strike me as particularly interesting: the clichéd talk around video game play as a healthy activity trends toward building hand-eye coordination or fascination with computer skills, but practically nothing mentioned here relates to a hard skill in these women’s careers. Rather, we see social networks built interpersonally and institutionally, identities being conceptualized and contested, criticality sprouting, and joy as an implicit part of these experiences, rather than a spontaneous element. As someone who has been dissatisfied with the ways that game development education funnels students through hard skill coursework with rare attention spent on the “Why?” (how history, culture, and power have shaped industry standards that are followed or enforced in game industry careers), this Black feminist mixtape affirms demands for curricular change. Most recently, I’m fond of Gholnecsar E. Muhammad’s approach, Cultivating Genius and Joy in Education through Historically Responsive Literacy (2022), and I’m eager to implement it in the next opportunity I have. In so many ways, Black women are picking at intersectional discrimination from the far corner, where they may be multiply prejudiced against due to their race, gender, ability, and class. Reading about and truly understanding the success of gaming Black women must also incense White people with a sense of confidence, that this oppressive culture we’ve created can be dismantled, and will be more effectively if we take inspiration and apply ourselves fully. Muhammad, G. E. (2022, January). Cultivating Genius and Joy in Education through Historically Responsive Literacy. Language Arts, 99(3), 195–204. https://doi.org/10.58680/la202231623 Russworm, T. M., & Blackmon, S. (2020). Replaying video game history as a mixtape of Black feminist thought. Feminist Media Histories, 6(1), 93–118. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2020.6.1.93 Making a researcher out of me. I'd once heard that your Master's thesis is the worst major publication you will ever write. I found that hard to believe, given how seriously I took it, and how enormous it became as I developed it. After observing that attendance was extremely strong in the game development course I co-instructed, and that attendance was at a steady peak during group project work, I analyzed the relationship between cooperation and attendance, as well as the long-term benefits that engaged attendance could have on retention and belonging. My thesis—centered on attendance—was defended remotely in a Zoom call in the spring of 2020, during COVID-19 pandemic isolation. When the pandemic began, I started teaching with no required attendance and hybrid attendance policies available for all students, then continued to do so even after Purdue reopened campus, with no stipulations regarding health or ability. Attendance became the least of my concerns, and thus, the truism came true for me, in a way.
By that point, my students had been graduating and navigating the job market. Their struggle to compete, plus an uptick in investigative journalism revealing toxic working conditions in the games industry incensed me to do my own research on vocational conditions, beginning with those who landed careers after earning their game dev degrees. Having crunched myself hard in undergrad, and spending years of therapy unlearning my own crushing overwork habits, it felt right to take on. With the findings I have currently under review, I've been able to unfurl a great deal of contradictions alive in my past students' working lives: novice skills and high expectations, self preservation and selflessness, and even simply love and hate for the work/workplace crash together to leave few comfortable paths toward equity, and even fewer attainable in any objective sense. Fortunately, I'm fond of leaning deep into subjectivity. I strongly believe that pedagogy and curriculum can bring positive change and help to heal the industry's sorest growing pains. Exposing the hidden curricula of experienced instructors who have advised students to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is critical in denying unhealthy work-life balances. Developing culturally responsive courses (not just a single multicultural class in the mix) could sustain diverse cultures heading into industry, rather than assimilating them toward White U.S. individualist patriarchy embedded in functionalist curriculum. Delivering flexible instruction and inviting student agency in concert with instructor mentorship can do what thousands of tutorials and pages of online documentation cannot. Although I don't particularly relish doing research, these are things I strongly feel are worth doing; I intend to push this motivation as far as I can (of course, without rushing myself into academic burnout). Who have I become? (A self-indulgent retrospective.) My name is Brantly McCord (he/they/she), and as of now, I am officially a Ph.D. student in Curriculum Studies in Purdue University's College of Education. I’ve loved video games nearly my entire life, and was fortunate enough to study game development in high school and Purdue Polytechnic Institute in the CGT program. At the end of my undergraduate degree, I felt that I was more interested in teaching game development than doing game development in industry and applied for a Master’s in CGT at Purdue, specifically to obtain a teaching assistantship. I spent 6 years as a TA (3 in a CGT Master’s, graduated, then 3 more in a CGT Ph.D.) developing content and co-instructing, having a major influence on the program, but as the TA position had been absorbing all of my time at an unsustainable wage (especially bad in CGT, but true for all grad assistantships at Purdue), I decided to shift to Curriculum Studies in EDCI, where I had done most of my Ph.D. classwork thus far. As much as I loved learning game development in secondary and higher education, I often found myself frustrated with the pedagogical and curricular approaches used. As pretentious as it sounds, “I could do this better” was a common thought I had—the desire for my own students to never feel that same way propelled me to devote myself to teaching, and along the way, I found a new life in my collaboration with students and their diverse needs. Graduate school gave me the social context and challenging circumstances to spark my interest in critical approaches to education, and I’d never want to settle for anything less than that. Since I began teaching, my practices and class structures have only become more flexible in favor of the students. I defended my thesis linking attendance and collaboration in 2020 in a remote call during lockdown, which helped to awaken how absurd many of the obligations in my course designs were. Additionally, Purdue’s lackluster institutional response to the pandemic—and plenty of other major issues—radicalized me heavily (for instance, I was expected to teach to a full room of in-person students without enough square footage left to properly socially distance, so I rejected that and invited students to attend online or in-person). Across six years of being a TA, I leaned into hybrid non-compulsory attendance, eliminated late work deductions, used DRC accommodations as the standard for all students, invited students to introduce themselves with their preferred name and pronouns, and directly asked students to conscientiously avoid overworking. My research is wholly qualitative, interested in the narratives of all those involved in game development education. My most notable work, currently in review, involved eleven of my graduated students who are now in industry, discussing their working conditions and relating them to contemporary game development curricula. My goal is to prevent the worst of the industry’s problems from being enculturated or reified in higher education, and beyond that, my hope is to interrogate more particular aspects and outcomes of game development curriculum (such as Black/anti-Black experiences in game development and corporate teacher-proofing) to form a more complete picture of a culturally responsive, liberatory curriculum. |
Brantly McCord
is a game dev educator who sometimes needs to put thoughts somewhere. Archives
November 2023
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