thoughtjunkie

Requested by my good friend Kris, here's the rundown for my Magic: the Gathering inspired game (yes, I realize exactly how nerdy that sounds), for 5th/6th grade EFL students. I prototyped the game today with my 5th and 6th grade class, and was STAGGERED by how well it worked. They used English-- a LOT of English-- in varying ways: drawing the sentences to show understanding, writing the sentences out to practice forming the letters, and of course reading the sentences aloud. Both classes were disappointed when they had to leave. My 5th graders, I had to force out by picking up the cards, and the 6th graders stayed 20 minutes after to continue playing.

Play isn't a waste of time-- what an absurd medieval idea! Play is just learning married with fun.

This entry is simulcast on my Livejournal: floraldeoderant

The Basic Game Rules:
-Each player starts with 5 cards in his or her hand.

-Each card has a word on it-- mostly nouns and verbs, though there are a few adjectives and adverbs. Articles etc, are not in the game as cards: we will get to that in a moment.

-The objective of the game is to move your piece along a gameboard till the end.

-You move your piece by making sentences with the cards in your hand. After you make a sentence, you roll a 6-sided die. You move that many steps ahead.

-You add 1 additional step for every word beyond two your sentence contains. If you roll a 4, and have a three word sentence, you move your piece 5 steps ahead. Four word sentence is +2, etc.

-Every time you make a sentence, you draw that many cards.

-7 is the most cards a player can have in his or her hand. If a player has more than 7 cards in hand at the end of his or her turn, that player loses cards, down to 7.

-Used or lost cards go into a discard pile face-up.

-If a player can't play on his or her turn, that player loses a card then draws a card (of his or her choice) until he or she can play. Then, that player's turn resumes as normal.

-If the draw pile runs out, shuffle the discard pile and it becomes the new draw pile.

-Roll a die at the start of the game to see who plays first. Then, the game proceeds in a clockwise rotation.

Card Abilities:
-Many cards have different abilities on them.

-Cards with abilities have either an 'and' or an 'or' written on them as well.

-An 'and' card uses the ability whenever you use that word in a sentence. These abilities are relatively weak. As you can see in the examples below, the card names are also related to their abilities. Run makes you go a little faster, sleepy makes someone sleep through their turn, dice uses dice, etc.








-'Or' cards can be used either in a sentence, OR (confusing, I know) for their abilities. Their abilities are usually very strong. Note that unlike making a sentence, a card used for its 'or' ability does not replace itself unless otherwise specified.

Universal Cards:
-There are 3 universal cards in the game: Draw, Write, Act. These cards are in the deck, just like any other.



-When a player draws one of these cards, he or she plays it immediately and draws another card, then proceeds with his or her turn as normal.

-If any of the Universal Cards is in play, then any time any player makes a sentence, they must follow the Universal Card's instructions. Draw-- he or she must draw a picture of his or her sentence (linking words to meaning). Write-- he or she must re-write the sentence (writing practice). Act-- he or she must act out the sentence, somehow (again, linking words to meaning, but via a different strategy).

-Whenever a Universal Card is played, it replaces the last one (replaced Universal Cards go into the discard pile).

-Every time a student makes a sentence, he or she must read it aloud, regardless of which Universal Card is in play.


*****

That is essentially the game. It seems like it'll be great for vocabulary building, as well as word-recognition and basic grammatical structure. My theory is, review only sucks if you know it's review. If it's a cool game, then all that pressure that normally drives things like word recognition out of one's mind, evaporates.

The other thing is, just in the spirit of M:tG, I can add expansions. I can add cards that change the rules (my idea for conditionals: there are "if" cards and ", then" cards. One by itself is more or less useless, but if you get one of each, you can make one really massive sentence and rack up those bonus points. "If/ the blue/ man/ runs/, then/ we/ kill/ him." = 6 + Die roll. For this lesson, the basic hand-size would have to be expanded to 8, with a max hand of 10 or 11.

Depending on level or lesson, the basic rules can just be modified (flooding the deck with articles, for example, would just be annoying). Instead, every time you make a sentence, you have to say (or write) it with the correct articles, or you get -2 on your dice roll.

The rules of the game change with the cards, and are infinitely modifiable for any lesson.

***

If anyone who stumbles across this would like to try it, just post a comment request for my supplies. I can email the cards I have created in microsoft publisher (the prototype cards look different from the pictures above) or excel formats. You have to provide your own gameboard, pieces, and 1 six-sided die.

I can also email you a blank template, so you can make your own cards, for your own lessons. As you can see, I keep them color-coded for ease of use (nouns are blue, verbs red, adjectives yellow) but if that's too easy for your class, you can print the cards all in white. Please share any new cards, rule ideas, or success/failure stories!

*One pitfall this game runs into: Obviously it's complicated right at the start (much more complicated to explain than to play, actually). You basically need a coteacher with you to translate, the very first time. Then, once the students get the hang of it you won't need teh translator.

**As with most lessons, your students will need your help-- more at the start, and less as things go along (yay! progress!). On days without my coteacher, I open two tabs in Google's translator (I like google translator because it's decent and it translates as you type)-- one tab for English->Korean, and the other Korean->English. My students can ask questions, and I can answer them effectively. If my sentence is complex, I also like to translate English->Korean, and then back again to make sure it's meaning was preserved.

Cheers,
Christian

If you post something online, it is published.

Unfortunately, what this means is that one has to stratify their ideas-- is this concept craft-worth? Something I'll work on and refine, revise and turn into something artistic and meticulous?
Or, is it just a blog idea? Something to post, think about, and move on from?

Originally, my nonfic was going to be blog-material, and my fic was going to be career-material. It's a silly notion that relegates nonfiction to a second-tier artform, but at least it's not arbitrary, like any other line I draw seems to be.

How do you folks balance the two pulls? Do you only post about yourself and your day? Or have you drawn other lines?

Was talking with Jei about Manga production companies... She was saying how everyone always complains about the low quality of the books, even though they print so many in a run that they will never really become collectors items. My idea, tired and hungry as I was (we were in a bookstore after failing to get to a yoga class) was for the manga companies to have 3 parts to their business. 1, the manga writing. Pretty straightforward. Then, they put them on the interwebz. 2, they sell crappy paper, binding materials, printers, and ink on the cheap. And 3, they sell really nice trade paperback (and, for their really successful titles, hard cover) books of manga. Seems like a pretty simple horizontal business model, though it would require a bit of investment capital right at the beginning (to kick-start the printing-material production aspect). We left the bookstore, changed conversations, ate some pizza, and then went home.

When I got back, I saw another reincarnation of the People Pay for Form, Not Content argument on boingboing.net. This particular entry on boingboing was in regard to an article ("Post-Medium Publishing") where Paul Graham argues that we've been paying for form all along. To super-duper paraphrase, "[A great paperback book is approximately the same price as a bad one. Same with hard covered books. But a brilliant paperback is still cheaper than a terrible hard cover.]"

Publishing is (and always has been) running on the bottled water model-- the water's free. But the bottle. That's $2.50.

Now this is interesting to think of, in terms of intellectual property rights, obviously. Ideologically, I support Creative Commons, and have been wrestling a lot with the notion that gaining recognition as a writer nowdays means operating, at least partially, inside old int. property rights models (which I really don't support).

That was when I developed my hairbrained scheme. Or. Well. My newest hairbrained scheme.

Keep doing the "sub to lit mags" thing. Then, every time a story gets published, just put it out under one of the creative commons licenses (provided I get my rights back.... I don't know if I would sign a contract where I regained and retained no rights, anyhow. Unless it were me writing romance novels, or Holywood scripts which I didn't care about, of course). Then, set up in the CC license for anyone using my work to direct people to my website, where I will set up a service to commission a hand-bound book of 1+ of my stories.

I realize that this would never ever make any money. But it would be really fun, and crafty, and I have a feeling I would learn a lot doing it. AND, of course, it would be very much in-tune with both the pragmatic realities of the publishing biz (you pay for materials, not for words), and with my ideals.

So. Whaddaya think?

That's great.

I'm going for it. Anyone know HOW I can learn to bind books?

I've been a bit apprehensive about this whole big 'being a professional writer' business that I'm trying to break into, and I think I can speak for a while, at least, on why exactly that is. Before I posted or talked too much about it, I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just me whingeing on about it because of something silly and juvenile like "zomg, y for am i not published yet?" or "i read a story i didnt liek and it was published so publishing is dum". Yes, I have felt both these things before. No, they are not why I am posting on the subject of the publication industry.

Back to Basics: Why do people write? What's the point? Some people want a prize-- fame, and fortune, and that-- and write in a severely misguided attempt to achieve either or both of those. But most people do it because they have something to say, and they want you to hear it. Sometimes it's related to current events-- my playwriting prof. in Wales wrote a radio play on the 'subprime mortgage crisis' back when they were calling it the 'subprime mortgage crisis'. Sometimes it's about broader social issues like gender-identification, or the exportation (and subsequent dumping) of nuclear/toxic waste to unpatrolled waters/coasts, or post 9/11 discrimination against Arab and Muslim citizens. And still other times, it's all about the beauty a writer can squeeze out in a few well placed words. Always, always, though, it's to be read and heard.

The Problem: Here is the problem. Editors (not any editor specifically, but rather the whole class of editors) are greedy. They want not only the right to show your story as is their function, but they (almost always) want the right to show it first. Think back on your childhood-- the first kid to get a new type of action figure was always the coolest, right? Same thing, really. And that's fine. Sort of. I mean, it's their money, and they're giving it to you, so they should be allowed to ask for something fresh and exciting, right? Unfortunately, the product of requiring First Publication Rights (at least when 95% of markets are doing it) is that writers sit on their work. They submit their piece to a magazine (mags that don't accept simultaneous submissions only exacerbate the problem, by further restricting the number of people to read a manuscript), then the story is read by at most 9ish people (however big the editing staff is) and is rejected the vast majority of the time. Then, it goes off to 9 more people, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseam. Markets can have reply times of up to 6 months (as an average high)-- which means that a piece can keep going back through the cycle infinitely, in 6 month waves. For a piece written, especially about current events, this can have devastating consequences for its impact on the reader. There is nothing wrong with editors asking for First (world, north american, whatever) Publication Rights, except when it becomes common practice. At that point (see dictionary entry; The Distant Past), the written word society ceases to be a society of sharing and creating, and immediately shifts to one of withholding and ownership. The culture that's grown up around the "First Publication Rights" mindset is insane. If you post online-- a free, worldwide forum where anyone can read your work? What could be better?-- you're labeled amateur. If you submit a never-before-published piece to a mag. that accepts reprints, they send you very nice emails asking, roughly, 'What the hell?' The social pressures of publication culture mirror the perverse incentives system; not only do you not get paid for sharing your work without editorial approval, but you become the object of mockery from other 'serious' writers. I cannot think of a more psychotic way for writing as a culture to use instant, free, and world-wide distribution.

But Christian, Clearly You're an Idiot: Now, I know what you're going to say: But the whole point of editing (and the reason it's called that) is to let in only the best of the best. Why should we as readers settle for less? And I will rebut with 3 points:

1) The good will float and the bad will sink. Good things tend to hang around (unless they were shelved in Alexandria circa 50 BC), and bad things don't. Why? Because people are smart. Well, smart enough, at least, to stop reading when they're disappointed by the story, and to share awesome things with their friends.

2) Bad can be valuable. For example: A Midsummernight's Dream is bad-- look at the plotting, and the characterization. It's all piss-poor at best. Now! Look at King Lear. Or Hamlet. Holy balls, those plays are brilliant. Without A Midsummernight's Dream, Shakespeare never would have had the ability craft either of those plays. Not ever.
Similar to writing bad, reading bad can be valuable too. Don't believe me? If every 9th grader who wanted to write high-fantasy read the Eye of Argon, would we have such a plethora of cliche'd nonsense? I should say not!

3) Do you honestly think editors do a good job of letting in the good and keeping out the bad, now? Because I don't. Watership Down, the book with the single longest print-run (besides religious texts) in the world was rejected for publication 42 times before it was finally picked up. And it's fabulous literature. Conversely, I own a copy of a for-realz, published X-men/Star Trek crossover book. Yes. That happened. Seriously.

(A brief sidenote: I have done a little editing work, and believe me-- it's not the editor's fault! Reading through manuscript after manuscript tunnel-visions your perceptions, sometimes into expecting ludicrously high quality. It's not that editors are bad at their jobs because they're morons/blind/nutcases. It's that editors are bad because they posess the same frailties as any other human in their situation. Good Editors are simply the ones who can ground themselves better than the Bad Editors. It doesn't mean that Good Editors don't miss some great pieces, though).

4) Don't worry! Editors will still filter! Seriously, folks. Editors as a class of people, won't be going away anytime soon. If all editors cease requiring first publication rights, people will still go to magazines to see what the editors they've come to trust over the years consider good. Bad stuff won't make it into the magazines, mediocre stuff still will (at the same rate it always has) and good stuff will still be published there too. The only change will be that the good stuff will enter the light of day faster. The mediocre stuff will get feedback and review. The bad stuff will be forgotten, just the same way it always has (and hopefully the authors will get better from the experience).

Okay, Smartass. What's the Fix, You're So Clever:
Pretty darn simple, to be honest. Editors don't even have to change their practices. One thing, and one thing alone. Are you ready?

Posting stories/essays/poems online does not constitute publication. The end.

Right now, if I were to throw up a story online, it immediately becomes toxic to any editor whose magazine requires First Pub. Rights. Unless it takes off Scalzi-style (which is lightning-strike rare), that story is dead in the water.

The two reasons editors like being the first to publish something, as far as I can tell, is that it differentiates their magazine from their competitors, and that it bottlenecks traffic of people reading the story through said magazine.
If half the point of being the first editor to be able to show a given piece is that it differentiates your magazine from everyone else's, redefining self-posting online as 'not official publication' does not affect magazine's differentiation at all.
What's more, the in-print precedent of self publication was the following: If you print it out and hand it to random folks, guess what? It's not published. I honestly don't know why we departed from this, other than, as said earlier, editors are greedy.

So, that's it. We've reached the end of my rant. I hope you've been persuaded. And if not, that's okay. I would invite you to post comments, but that functionality seems not to work on my blog, for one reason or another... Hmm, I shall have to remedy that.

Cheers.

So, at Ghost Comma today, I said something amounting to "I think the ability to edit is more important than the ability to write." Naturally, everyone jumped on the ZOMG WTF CHRISTIAN IS WRONG bandwagon. Meh. It happens.

Here is what I was trying to express.

I see the fundamental difference between Writing and Editing as this: Writing is inherently a creative process (inasmuch as it can be-- we all know the "Nothing is truly original" spiel). Editing is a process of refinement. (I believe this semantic difference is where most GC people held difference with me).

Writing is building a house. Hollowing out and cementing out the basement; erecting walls and injecting insulation and laying drywall; figuring out which internal walls will be load-bearing; and then roofing the whole thing. You're not *actually* creating anything-- just rearranging existing materials into what you want.
Editing is renovating it. There's the basics for a plumbing system, but they lack faucets. There needs to be furniture everywhere, and paint, and (if it's meant for kids to play in) those little covers over the light sockets.
Same thing with stories. Writing is making something someone can live in. Editing is making it somewhere people want to live.

Now, let's say, the room needs a half-wall to tie it together. No problem, right? You get to work setting it up, and yes. You're building something. But no one would say it's on the same measure as building a whole house. It's construction with the end of refinement, rather than with the end of creation.
Same thing with writing a story vs. writing a scene for a story. It's not necessarily that the magnitude is different, but rather that they're two different processes-- someone writing a story is concerned with theme and characterization and plot; someone writing a scene is concerned with the clarification of said theme, characterization, and plot.
Honestly, it's just equivocation on the word 'writing'. One is cap-W Writing (as in, creating a new environment) and the other is lower-case-w writing (the physical act of stringing words into sentences, in a to-be-read medium). So yes, writing is sometimes required in the editing process, but never Writing.


Now that we can move past the semantics, my actual argument is this:

1) First-draft writing is rarely (if ever) as good as it can be.
1.a) Writing, barring major overhaul of a piece, is only really an applicable skill to the first-draft of a piece.
2) Editing is the process of altering an existing work.
2.a) Knowledge of how to edit well is knowledge of how to alter it to a given purpose effectively.
2.b) The (typical) goal of editing is making the existing work better (in some definition).
3) Good writing is better than bad writing (ohh, I'm living on the edge with that comment).

Therefore, Since knowledge of how to Write very well will yield a few good pieces, and many mediocre pieces; and Since knowledge of how to edit very well will yield pieces of generally higher quality: A highly capable Editor will yield better pieces than a highly capable Writer.


It should be noted that yes, pieces need to be created before they can be edited.
Now. I have never been arguing that people should only learn how to edit, and have no skills whatsoever in creating their own stories-- I don't see how I could possibly stand behind such a position. I'm simply saying that a focus on the ability to edit and revise will yield higher quality manuscripts than the ability to Write.

To sum-up:
Someone who knows how to make a gun and no idea of how to use it can still kill people with it. But someone who practices his/her aim is going to kill a lot more people.
Killingest of all, is someone who knows how a gun operates-- understands the mechanisms and principles behind it-- and concentrates on knowing how/where to shoot it. Even when the gun breaks, that person can fix it and just keep shootin folks. That's what I'm advocating. Let's all know how to make guns, but know how to shoot them better than that, so we can get the maximum killing... Potential... You know what I'm trying to say.

(Daaaaaamn, that analogy got grim).