Details: Immediacy and Authenticity

The games—nearly all educational—that Schultz, Musgrave, and Dauterman recall playing at home fit into the narrative of educational computer play that Selfe and Ito describe: parents striving to help their children develop a familiarity and facility with technology that reinforces school-sanctioned technological literacy values. In Schultz’s, Musgrave’s, and Dauterman’s narratives, parents function as what Deborah Brandt calls “literacy sponsors,” people who “enable, support, teach, and model literacy” by providing resources with which their children cultivate technological literacies. In these stories, a middle class culture of educational computer games for children seems to be reflected in the narrators’ practice of listing programs they played as children. The narrators' use of these lists may be an example of what Bruner calls “culturally canonical accounts,” in this case of childhood technology experience (28). The lists of programs provide a level of realist detail that audience members recognize as part of the narrative of growing up computer literate in the 1990s. With these details, the narrators define themselves as computer-literate millennial young adults, members of a technologically adept age-cohort/cultural group that James Paul Gee calls “shape-shifting portfolio people” (105-106). The listing of computer games also helps the DALN narrators identify themselves as the technologically literate children (now grown up) of technological literacy-sponsoring parents.

Narrative techniques further suggest ways in which these speakers may be locating themselves within specific cultural accounts of childhood exposure to computers through educational games. The extent to which Schultz, Musgrave, and Dauterman simply list off the computer programs they remember playing—compared to describing or explaining the games—suggests that they are appealing to a familiar narrative of childhood computer game play. Schultz offers a brief explanation of the game she names—Putt Putt Goes to the Moon—but Musgrave and Dauterman list their games by title only, depending on audience familiarity with children’s computer games to enable viewers to imagine what computer activities they engaged in based on these titles. And even Schultz’s explanation of Putt Putt Goes to the Moon and Dauterman’s brief description of one game (Zoombinis) don’t provide explicit information about the goals of the game or the methods for playing them, which seems to suggest that they expect the audience will be able to fill in the details. For these lists of games to have meaning for the narrators—and for them to expect that their lists will mean something to their audiences as well—the narrators seem to be appealing to the culturally canonical narrative of childhood educational computer game play, implicitly situating their stories within the mainstream experiences of their generation which Selfe and Ito describe.