Paul's Draft: Great Stuff. Needs Some Work.

Paul has been writing on a topic close to my heart, and I've been following his paper somewhat closely. Frankly, I wasn't sure he could pull it off--but he did, and did it well.

Great argument, Paul!
Thumbs and Ammo.

However, I felt that his paper suffered from some organizational issues, which I will detail below the jump.

Paul generally had great ideas and a compelling argument, but not always in the right order. The two places I noticed this were his introduction, and his section about the definition of the word "art." In both cases, he jumped straight into his argument without telling me what he was arguing. Once I finished reading and he'd made his point, everything became clear, but Paul needs to make that connection clear immediately.

To fix the introduction, I would blend the paragraph about Ebert (starting "In a follow-up reconciliation post") with the very first paragraph--or, perhaps, put it immediately afterwards. In either case, as soon as Paul establishes the power of video games, he can start giving us examples thereof.

To fix the "art" section, I would move the conclusion of that paragraph to the introduction. The conclusion tells us that Shakespeare plays with the definition of "art"; without that sentence, I have no idea what Paul trying to prove in these couple paragraphs. If he puts that up front, however, this section ceases to be a tangent, and becomes a powerful part of his argument.

Finally, Paul needs to keep his audience in mind. the one time I noticed a problem was when he was talking about scenes from the play, specifically, he referred to a scene without explaining it further. If he's writing for a non-academic audience (i.e. video gamers), he needs to explain these scenes further. On the other hand, if he's writing for academics, not video gamers, he may need to explain concepts about video games in greater detail.

I also noticed a number of small errors, but these will undoubtedly come out in the editing process.

Once again, good job Paul! I'm looking forward to seeing what you can do with it from here!