Reflection on CYOA | DR/CC 2021

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Reflection

1. What digital convergence topic did you choose for this project? Why?

I chose identity and fandom as the digital convergence topics for this project in order to try and put together a kind of presentation that would further a bit of the conversation I started in my digital identities project toward more of a brief, cohesive, argument-driven possible conference or symposium presentation. I wanted to clarify and expand a bit on what I thought the importance of this exploration could be, what it might be able to demonstrate, how it could carry forward into further work on identity and play. I also more explicitly looked for a couple of additional sources that I could potentially use to carry the argumentative part of the piece forward more (particularly, in the slides, the McNeilly dissertation on performance in RPGs, which also includes a tie-in to pedagogy that I would be really interested to explore more as well).

2. What genre and medium did you decide to use? Why?

I decided to create a brief slide deck on Canva because I really like how Canva lets you have a lot of freedom in customizing appealing slides while still being relatively straightforward to use—I also like that I can download or convert Canva designed slide decks to different formats easily, say if I wanted to add more information or supplemental graphics, or convert this to a recorded slide show where I zoom in on the details of particular slides. After we discussed how I might convert this project to a brief sort of conference or symposium presentation, I tried to keep the slides brief and short while still including some new information / argumentation that could be expanded on for an actual presentation.

3. Tell me a bit about the process you went through to complete this?

I tried to create a presentation that felt like the fun, bright excitement of actually creating a character, as I went through some of the details of the stakes and characters being engaged with. I wanted to add in elements of play and fantasy into the presentation throughout, beyond just the materials specifically related to campaign 3, in order to give viewers the kind of multimedia feel of excitement that a player might feel at the table as well, surrounded by the artifacts of play that help them immerse themselves in the experience. I tried to include elements specific to the characters and campaign (I even managed to find a holographic transparent image of a feline skull for Laudna after searching around for a while, which was so fitting I just had to include it), as well as elements generally related to playing Dungeons and Dragons (taking notes, rolling dice, naming the slides after portions of the character sheet everyone would play with, either digitally or in print). I tried to bullet out most of the general features I would go through in a presentation without overwhelming the slides with too much writing—the sole exception being the ‘Bonds’ slide where I tried to make an overarching statement to kind of articulate my argument explicitly, though I’m still torn on whether or not I would include it as is or try to edit it down to bullets even if I were to speak it right as it is on the slide at that moment.