Reflection

In the semester of Spring 2019, I have learned so much in the literacy universe as well as expanded my horizons as a writer. I started this semester by writing my literacy narrative which was an interesting exploration into my youth and me as a person. The literacy narrative let me look into my past experiences and link it to literacy and writing. I chose the topic of how the developments of technology have changed how I receive literature and texts as I grew up during the prime time of technical innovations. I started with my experienced with novels as my first introduction into literacy with the book ‘The Great Gatsby’ as that was the first novel I read as a child and I also ended up studying that specific book in high school for my English class, and as I grew up I went from reading novels to reading Marvel comic books because my interests have changed as a child where I became more interested in fantasy and the impossible rather than actual story telling through novels. And then now I have eventually grown into appreciating movies more than the previously two mentioned forms of literacy. Being the teenager I was I was more interested in instant gratification as well as flashy visuals rather than having the patience to have the rewarding experience of finishing a novel from cover to cover or completing the newest edition of Marvel Comics. It was an interesting dive into the past and how I grew up into the person I am today.

After that I wrote my piece for the discourse community. This also allowed me to look into my past and my character but on a more recent level as I chose to pick the gaming community as my discourse community. I chose it since I consider myself closely linked to that universe as I am an avid gamer in present. It was an interesting task to undertake as it made me view my closed off bubble of video gaming in a new light. I analyzed the way that makes the gaming community a discourse community and made interesting links that I never would’ve thought of. The six key aspects of a discourse community showed me that there are deeper subconscious elements that link me and other gamers like myself together. I already knew some of the elements such as discourse communities having common goals to achieve, however I came to realize more niche elements such as having specific methods of inter communication and lexis when communicating with other members of the same discourse community. I didn’t realize that we, as gamers, have a whole different dialect which some would refer to as ‘online speak’ and I didn’t even realize to the extent in which I was fluent in said dialect. When going through my discourse community paper with friends of mine and them having to review it, I had to clarify multiple terms for them as they weren’t gamers themselves thus did not understand the content for that specific point in the discourse community paper. Overall, the discourse community paper offered me an opportunity to look into my favorite aspect of my life right now, video games, and gain a whole new level of deeper appreciation for that community.

Finally, to end off the semester, we wrote a research paper for a desired topic we had a lot of interest in. I chose to examine video games and their common controversies as I personally believe that the said controversies aren’t true and are simply cherry picked examples that the media chooses in order to portray video gaming in a bad light as it is a relatively new industry and isn’t well established with the older generation thus is very vulnerable to attack of misinformation to the ignorant. I addressed two common misconceptions of misrepresentation on the topics of religion and female sexualization. I chose religion as it was a lesser spoken topic yet an equally problematic one to the rest of the controversies. Due to certain video games choosing to dwell into the contents of religion, they are bound to make mistakes at points throughout the game’s development. I chose to pick a specific game called SMITE as it was a video game centered all round mythology, pantheons, and religions. I examined the game’s portrayal of religious characters and how accurate they are compared to their real life depictions. I came to the conclusion that the gods were somewhat accurate in their depictions yet were often off purpose as most of the gods included in the game aren’t inherently fighters, yet are portrayed that way in the game. After that segment I chose to analyze female portrayal in video games and chose a very cherry picked example of the game Bayonetta. I came to the conclusion that that specific game where the selling point is essentially the sexualization of the woman in the game is a cherry picked example of the media to put video games in a bad light. Moreover, I analyzed game companies depicting strong female characters in two different scenarios, one where the female character was an already established character, tomb raider, and the other was a created fictitious character, Star Wars. The stronger and more natural female character was Lara Croft from Tomb Raider as the series was already established through the multiple movies and depictions in the previous decades. Furthermore, the weaker and more forced example from Star Wars was evidence that attempting to appease the social groups offended by the lack of female representation in video games would simply end up upsetting the core market that the game companies are selling their products to.

In conclusion, English Composition II has allowed me the opportunity to dive into my past and interests and analyze them from an academic point of view to understand them better both as a student and as an individual.