Category Archives: Uncategorized

Developmental Writing, the RPG

Students in Frank Crocco’s Developmental Writing class know that they’d better show up, and on-time, lest they run out of hit points and fail the adventure that is English 095.

Frank has created a D&D-style student-progress sheet that he has experimented with in a few iterations of his Developmental Writing course. We’re going to get him to blog about his thought about gaming up writing using the tools of role-playing in a future post, but for now, we offer up the following tantalizing tidbit: the “player” sheet he gave to all of his students. Enjoy!

Frank Crocco’s Experience Point Sheet

Science Fiction, The Game

The CUNY Games Network’s own Joe Bisz offered up this photograph of his students playing the Battlestar Galactica Board Game (known affectionately by its fans as “BSG”) at the end of his course in Science Fiction literature. To my mind, science fiction instruction could never be complete without including games, for two reasons: 1) Science Fiction is a genre that is devoted to the idea of world-building–that is, system building–and watching those worlds develop and play out; 2) Science Fiction is among the top genres that games use to skin their mechanics (with perhaps only Fantasy topping it).