video game controls/Smithsonian
This past summer, I got the opportunity to live out a dream had by many a child (and many a parent's nightmare): I played computer games for a grade.
When I say games, I don’t mean games like Mortal Kombat (though I did cast some wicked spells) or Portal 2 (though I did climb some walls and solve some puzzles); I mean games like Magium and Egress: interactive, text-based games that allow the reader/player to make choices that affect how a narrative unfolds. In addition to participating in a tournament of magic-users, I also took control of Jeff Bezos, moved to New England, was put on trial in space, and had many more adventures. And here’s the kicker: I earned three English comp credits for it!
That class was called Composing Digital Media, and it’s just one of several new English courses centered around digital media that Pitt has rolled out in the past few years. And they aren’t all about text-based games, or even games at all; there are classes that focus on video games, virtual reality, audio production, and more. It’s all part of a movement to add new and growing forms of media into Pitt’s already-existing curriculum.
Of course, Pitt knows full well that it takes more than adding a new class here or there to alter the DNA of a department. For the past several years, a pair of curricula that will allow English students to specialize in different areas of digital media has been in the works. One of them, called Digital Narrative and Interactive Design (DNID), just rolled out this fall. A joint major offered between the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, Department of English and the School of Computing and Information, DNID gives students the chance to explore the different forms of code-based storytelling while requiring no prior knowledge of coding. English Assistant Professor Zach Horton and Associate Professor Annette Vee (who directs the Composition program) were two of the principal designers of the major. Horton said, “The DNID major is partly about giving people the tools to effectively tell stories and to create games that have rich stories. It allows students to move beyond creating a game that just involves interacting with an environment and shooting.”
The heart—err, central processing unit—of the program is the study of game narratives. That might sound like another way of saying “playing video games,” but that would be an oversimplification. Rather, DNID aims to explore the possibilities that different forms of code-based storytelling open up. This means evolving and incorporating new technologies like virtual reality, which Horton will be teaching a brand-new class on this coming semester. It will be taught partly in a traditional classroom and partly in a VR lab in Hillman Library, bringing an almost-literal new dimension to storytelling. “Integrating that technology into the class opens up an entirely new set of forms of narrative that we can engage, and also different themes—questions about reality itself and how we experience reality can become viscerally part of the curriculum,” Horton said.
When I spoke with Horton, the idea of narrative possibility came up often. To hear him tell it, interactive stories provide the power to make a reader feel involved in the story. That’s an awesome new tool for creators. “It’s not just that the reader/user/viewer has more agency—because often that agency is illusory—but their mode of interaction and choice itself become integrated into the story in interesting ways, so it opens up new spaces for both creators and readers,” he said.
Zach Horton
If the idea of building a game from the ground up sounds intimidating, there’s nothing to be afraid of; Horton’s background includes no prior coding experience, and he tells prospective students that prior coding experience is not required for the class. And if creating games isn’t your jam, the Game Design track is just one of three that DNID students can choose from. There’s also a Critical Making track, which asks students to think about how digital objects become materialized through different and more concrete media—like through people sitting at a table playing games together—as well as an Online Media track, which will give students the skills to analyze and design Web and mobile content in a variety of different formats.
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A few years ago, a certain Pitt student who’s now a Fifth Floor communications intern decided that he was going to record his own podcast. And so, he set up a microphone, sat down at a table with a friend, pressed "record," and they chatted about whatever came to mind. After about an hour or so, he stopped recording, uploaded it to SoundCloud, and sat back to watch the listeners roll in.
The listeners didn’t roll in. As it turns out, it takes more than just hitting "record" and chatting with a friend to run a successful podcast. If only our student could have known that!
Maybe he could have if he’d been paying attention to the English department course listings and seen the other new curriculum in the works: one centered around audio storytelling and podcasting. At the forefront of its development is English Writing Assistant Professor Erin Anderson. Anderson, who joined Pitt’s faculty four years ago after a teaching stint at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, was brought on with the specific goal of developing this new curriculum. And while it’s yet to be determined whether the program will take the form of a major, certificate or something else, Pitt has already begun to introduce new classes, some of which Erin has taught previously and others that are newly developed.
Erin Anderson
Anderson feels that Pitt is uniquely well equipped for this foray into new territory, and there are a few reasons for that, including, she notes, "the Writing program’s effort to reach out beyond print-based—and explicitly text-based—writing and storytelling and poetry and think about other forms.” She’s confident that the English department is already built upon a strong foundation: the people teaching the classes. “I think the thing that’s cool about what we’re doing at Pitt with podcasting and the Writing program is that it’s coming out of a place that’s really invested specifically in narrative and telling good stories," she says. "We have these amazing faculty who are longform journalists and are able to move into this new space and take what they know about storytelling and apply it in this new direction.”
Much like DNID, the audio/podcasting curriculum is aimed at a medium of storytelling that’s recently exploded in popularity—between industry catch-alls like NPR to podcasts about podcasting like CashFlow Podcasts, it feels like most of the industry’s niches are filled. This means that, as with DNID, it’s important to carve out a unique new space within the field. But in a bloated industry, this can be a difficult proposition—which is why, also like DNID, the audio/podcasting curriculum will emphasize using technology to enhance a narrative rather than, say, hitting "record," chatting with a friend for an hour, and calling it a day. Says Anderson, “There’s definitely, across the board, a proliferation of shows—everyone wants to have their own show—but I think what we’re doing in a very deliberate and specific way in the Writing program is focusing on narrative, audio storytelling, and produced narrative—things that are based on interviews or field recordings that you then come back, piece together and write around to create something new.”
So, what types of things will students be creating? For starters, there’s a new class called Intro to Audio Storytelling, which Anderson considers a “gateway course” that will teach students not just narrative components of audio stories, but some technical components as well. In that class, students toy with multiple types of audio stories including flash fiction, essays, documentaries, and more. Then, once you reach the higher-level courses, things start to get more specific: The Multimedia Essay, which Anderson brought with her from her time at UMass, asks students to produce essays using different forms of audiovisual storytelling; Studio in Audio Documentary, which Anderson expects to roll out next year, teaches students to produce more long-form documentaries for podcast or radio; and Narrative Audio Workshop, an MFA class, has students work in depth on a single audio documentary over the semester. Finally, there are classes like Listening to Narrative Audio, which is a critical listening class in the same vein as Readings in Poetry/Fiction/Nonfiction that asks students to listen with the ears of an audio producer and develop their own work in response. Whatever form this new curriculum takes, it’s sure to make a solid addition to Pitt’s English program.
Actually, why wait until the programs are "done" when Pitt English alums are already making soundwaves in the professional world? MFA graduate Rachel Brickner went from editing science textbooks to writing and producing podcasts with Pineapple Street Media. She’s done audio essays like “How to Survive a Fire,” which was named runner-up for the Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize; video documentaries like “Marianne,” which was published by Requited; and is currently working on her first novel. Brickner said that Pitt’s MFA program not only provided her with “the time and resources to develop [her] multimodal storytelling abilities,” but also strengthened her ability to pitch to clients and apply for jobs in the field.
As it happens, Pineapple Street Media employs another Pitt English graduate: MFA alum Courtney Harrell is a podcast producer for the company. Her job has her working on various short- and long-form audio projects, including Running from COPS, a six-episode audio miniseries, which she spent her first year on the job producing. Making that took plenty of research, reporting, over 150 (!!!) interviews, and, of course, a healthy dose of audio editing—all skills which Harrell developed in grad school. “My experience at Pitt was the first time I learned to interview people for audio instead of print, thinking about the kind of tape I would get from their answers and how to craft a narrative in real time. … [It] offered me incredible guidance from professors like Erin Anderson and gave me time and space to experiment with low-pressure projects to develop the skills I now need for my day-to-day work.”
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The two new curricula may be the most visible products of Pitt English’s new focus on digital media, but there’s far more to be seen. On the fourth floor of the Cathedral of Learning, you’ll find two media labs. There’s the Digital Media Lab, which provides instructors with the space and resources to do digital research or incorporate digitally centered methods of teaching into their teaching. Then there’s the Vibrant Media Lab, which is used for the development of projects that explore both past and present forms of media. Directed by Horton, the VML houses arcade machines, old game systems, 3-D printers, and even an old vintage printing press. The lab’s current project is called OdysseyNow, and it’s dedicated to recreating the world’s first-ever gaming console, and discovering the stories it told and what they meant to players.
Video game level design
Even if they don’t take any of the new classes or venture into the media labs, students will find digital media scattered throughout the rest of the English department’s pool of classes with varying degrees of immersion. Looking toward the deeper waters of digital media? Try Integrating Writing & Design or Digital Humanity, which revolve around creating multimodal projects such as visual arguments or podcasts. Prefer to stay where your feet touch the bottom? See Writing for the Public, a two-ply class in which students alternately write traditional papers and create multimodal projects. And, if you just want to wade around the kiddie pool, many intro-level classes are having digital components added to their syllabi.
Perhaps no one has played a bigger part in this proliferation than Digital Media Learning Coordinator Katie Waring. A graduate of Pitt’s MFA program, Waring assists English department staff by offering tutorials or consultations on incorporating digital media in their classrooms, developing resources to assist in those tasks, and covering administrative lab duties. She’s also in charge of organizing Pitt’s annual Digital Media Showcase, which puts on display some of the finest work that students have done in their classes each semester.
This fall’s expo took place on December 6, which meant I had time to go on a scouting trip. There was, umm, a lot to see. And hear. And play. The English department’s fifth floor headquarters was decked out with laptops, poster displays, and a large viewing screen, each featuring multimedia projects created by students in their coursework. (Side note: Also participating in the showcase were the students of the Secret Pittsburgh literature class, who came packing tight displays and some slammin’ food—shoutout Secret Pittsburgh students.)
Remember when Zach Horton talked about narrative possibility? The students in the Digital Media Showcase must have taken that to heart, because it was a clinic in narrative possibility. A podcast called Only White People Can be Part Indian, by MFA student Brian Broome, told the story of a fifth-grader grappling with his heritage; it was narrated in a frantic, breathless speaking style to emulate how a kid might speak, and quotes were synced up with direct audio snippets from the sources themselves. Melanie Pantano’s short film, Cats, detailed the experience of veganism and dealing with predatory instincts from the perspective of a house cat. Joe Shakien’s multimedia essay, “The Art, The Artist and the Athlete: How Tattoos Are Complicating the Copyright and Video Game Industry,” interlaced videos, game screenshots, and traditional text. And John Hansen made an interactive Twine game titled The Legend of the Mothman that took players on a quest to uncover a government conspiracy, using text effects to enhance the atmosphere of each path (e.g., the word “rumble” would shake on screen, “glowing red” was illuminated, etc.). Even just the small handful of projects I got to experience (there were a lot of people waiting in line) was enough to show just why digital storytelling is so exciting.
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When I was first assigned this story, I felt like I had an idea of where it was going to go—out with the old, in with the new, “the future is now, boomer," or something along those lines—and when you’re talking about making podcasts and video games part of a college curriculum, it’s tempting to think that's the long and short of it. But it’s clear that Pitt English is making digital media a branch of the department rather than replacing its roots with synthetic ones. Judging by the people who built that tree (that’s how those things work, right?), the new branch should provide plenty of fruit.
—Nick Trizzino
Nick Trizzino is T5F’s communications intern, a senior Public and Professional Writing major, and a failed podcaster. He’s hoping a writing career goes a bit more smoothly.
Top controller image: Smithsonian American Art Exhibition
Level design image: Mobigame