Lucid Sense of Action

I know, I know- not many updates as of late, and I apologize!  There is a lot of work to be done at my actual job, and I hope the thesis does not suffer as a result of it.  I am currently reading a few different books, and promise to reflect on them in upcoming posts. 

But the point of this post is to refer back to what James Paul Gee called a Lucid Sense of Action, meaning that players don't really pay attention to the narrative of a game, but can understand why the character must complete whatever his or her objective is.  I argued against this fully, pointing to sites like fanfiction.net, and to games like WoW which have a huge amount of lore, or RPGs like the Final Fantasy series that are driven entirely by the storyline.  While I am not going to go back on my word that stories are of the utmost importance, I have finally experienced what Gee is talking about here in the form of Call of Duty:  Modern Warfare 3.  As I play along the single player campaign mode, there are jaw-dropping cinematics, intense gunfights, and a great overarching story that keeps the action coming at a insanely fast speed.  However, when I control characters like Yuri or Frost, I don't really think about the story of the game at all.  Instead, I am thinking mainly about the various mission objectives, how to meet them, and appreciating (aka shouting out in shock) the game's impressive visuals and explosions. 

This doesn't change much for my argument, but I thought it would be smart to at least acknowledge that Gee does have a point.  There are games that are experienced in this fashion, where you can lose sight of what's going on quite easily.  But I don't know if Gee ever played Heavy Rain, where the storyline is the game.  With the player making major decisions for the four protagonists, driving the plot forward in the process, you as a player are not afforded the luxury of forgetting what the narrative is, even during the most intense scenes of the game.   I think for the sake of the thesis, I would have to point to not only using good games in the English classroom, but also those that do enforce theme, narrative, and strong/memorable characters.