Let's Play: Vernacular Video Game Criticism and the Composition Classroom

Kevin Rutherford

Extended Abstract

Remixing has long been a hallmark of Internet culture, and more recently that spirit has been co-opted into gaming culture via efforts like Little Big Planet, Spore, and developer recognition of active modding communities. The "Let's Play" genre of videos, consisting of a screen recording (or image capture) of a video game alongside an ongoing narration/explication/commentary, are yet another iteration of remixing media content. However, LPs also have the potential to be a form of vernacular critique and an inlet to learning via video games.

Arising from the forums of website Something Awful, Let's Plays (hereafter LPs) are a sort of after action report that examine video games through the eyes of individual players, frequently in ways that acknowledge the contributions of community members in authoring the experience of play, and in ways that critique and situate games within larger social and cultural contexts.

Steven E. Jones (2008) argued that video games and their fan communities are specific instantiations of paratextual meaning-making, relying on a larger media ecology and on production of fan content to understand video games. Similarly, Henry Jenkins (2006) used the term "transmedia storytelling" to describe intellectual property that "unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole." While LPs are part of this transmedia fan culture, they are also critical works that, through displaying actual game play, function as something beyond a simple review or demonstration of experience.

LPs subvert and displace the immersion of a video game interface in favor of productive awareness; they imbricate creators and audiences in a complex critical enterprise. LPs are a way of understanding the unit operations (Bogost, 2006) of video games through in some way exposing the properties of the dynamic systems of meaning that drive them. In form, they resemble directors' commentary tracks found in most DVDs. In style and content, however, LPs challenge and complicate games in new and interesting ways. They shift the play experience to a new collaborative and communal space outside of sanctioned or semi-sanctioned spaces such as games themselves or official forums.

As an instructor of composition courses, my interest in LPs is mostly pedagogical. This paper, drawing from research in introductory composition courses and interviews with members of LP communities, makes three claims about LP videos: they are an important cultural touchstone in gauging interest and involvement in video games through direct fan response; they resituate critical work partially outside a classroom space and acknowledge the power of vernacular rhetoric and vernacular criticism; and they encourage students to adopt more expansive views of the role of composition in negotiating semiotic systems.

Currently, LP video creators have active, tight-knit communities on YouTube, various forums, and in some stand-alone websites. Community members view and comment on each others' videos in a collaborative effort to understand and respond to video games. Similarly, students in my composition courses have watched and commented on, and then created, their own LPs as a way to underscore their own procedural literacies (Bogost, 2007) and in order to supplement their skills as readers and writers.

In addition to advancing viewers' procedural literacy, LPs encourage viewers to see the playing activity reflectively and consider larger ramifications of game messages and mechanics by positioning them in a community of users, each with potentially different experiences. They also situate video games and their mechanical and narrative messages in a broader personal and media context. Ultimately, students and LP authors understood LPs in terms of creating, managing, and understanding meaning in ways that result in more critical, engaged learning.