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You wake up to the sounds of chirping birds and early autumn chills. The grumble from your empty stomach reminded you that it was time to find some food. Following the odor left by a hare, you made your way forward and seemed to have foreseen the harvest. As you approached a bush, the smell suddenly became extremely strong. Now is the time, you thought, and with a powerful burst in your hindquarters, you rose into the air and pounced on the potential prey behind the bush.

You were disappointed. Behind the bush was just another clearing. But the strong smell didn’t dissipate, it intensified. Following your primal instincts, you cautiously moved toward the source of the scent. In your grayish-yellow vision, you saw a suspiciously shaped object that seems to be the source of the smell. As you got closer, the characteristic odor grew into an unbearable stench, and you finally confirmed that the thing in front of you was a horrible decomposed heap. While some simple nerve signals are conducted in your brain, a strong agitation emerged. Suddenly, you felt a pair of claws gently but irresistibly brush against your face. An array of colors you had never seen before immediately filled your vision. A noise shifting between a growl and a howl gradually occupied your mind, then swelled into an odd, indistinct scream. The earth and trees in front of you began to surge dramatically as if something is about to break out of the ground. Feeling threatened, you snarled back. As if in response to your snarl, the noise diminished to a shrill, annoying, indistinct sound that floats above your head. You felt something approaching, an alien-rhythmed rumbling came from all directions, just like something stepping on the ground. The overpowering footfalls with gentle movement created a paradoxical mystery. You somehow lost the ability to move and crouched on the ground, waiting for the thing to come.

– You don’t remember anything after that. Deep in your memory exists a tall, blurry, shimmering figure. You stop trying to remember more because an intuitive feeling warns you that uncovering any more information about that being could lead to horrific madness and harm.

At this moment, there are more pressing questions. After the strange experience, you begin to feel fanatical about that great, distant being, and you realize that all your intellect and spirit are subservient to it. You start to have a sense of glory and wonder, and the only way to find is to serve that being. You believe there are stupendous and unheard-of splendors awaiting in its basileia tou theou. Something alien entered your mind - knowledge that doesn’t belong to you. This knowledge is about serving and sacrifice. You do not understand it, and this fact makes you agitated and painful.

Suddenly, a strange creature appears right before you. It is about three times your height and is draped in a huge, peculiar robe. From the cuffs, you can see that it has pinkish skin. Seems that it’s simply shuffling along the ground as it moves. It started to generate a weird sound, like a mixture of croaking and bleating. You have never heard such noise before, but you immediately understand its intent. It hands you four drafts and helps organize the knowledge in your head into four points, generally involving the audience, sources, claims, and revision. The strange creature tells you that these are the skills necessary for communicating with the Great Old Ones, and that by using these skills you can effectively communicate with any audience, in any mode or combination of modes (linguistic, visual, aural, gestural, spatial). A successful communication is a delicate balance of all these points, and only such communication can accurately convey your true intent to below the ocean. You don’t understand the meaning of these sentences yet, but you affirm that linking these four drafts to each point and revising them correspondingly will help you to grasp the essence and understand the mystery of serving.

After a brief consideration, you made links with your paws —— SA1 for outcome 1, MP1 for outcome 2, MP2 for outcome 3, and SA2 for outcome 4.

Following the guidance of the strange creature, you try to sort out a way to make effective expressions from the knowledge in your head and relate them to the drafts before you.

The first question you must consider is who is it (or who are they)? By what tone and in what genre do you show your intention? It is vital to convey your intentions accurately, for even the slightest reward from the Great Old Ones could be overwhelming for one such as yourself. At the same time, you must be careful not to be misunderstood out of a lack of context. When your audience is among those great, mysterious, and powerful beings, a miscommunication could lead to spiritual and physical ruin. The same is true for composing.

The first outcome is to compose strategically for a variety of audiences and contexts, both within and outside the university, which is essentially asking the composers to be aware of the audience’s background while composing. By analyzing this element, the composer can figure out a way that best appeals to the audience and whether there is background information that needs to be additionally covered to make the whole text understandable.

The SA1 discussed an anime clip that showed the death of a major character, trying to analyze why it was effective in terms of creating the vibe of grief and anger. The context of the analysis involved the relationship between the characters, the past of the dying character which justifies its movement, and the previous plot to show why the character had no choice but to die. As the audience can be anyone anywhere, the composer had to assume that they have no background knowledge of it. As a result, the composer elaborated much on the context (world setting, plot, character relationships) before delving into the central claim.

You begin to grasp the importance of considering the audience’s background in the real world. If SA1 did not include any explanation of context, the whole claim would be so pale and unjustified. However, you also noticed that the draft is not appealing enough to the audience, and the elaboration of the central claim is not strong enough, too. So you made the following revisions to SA1: 1). Reorganized the content and placed the part with the strongest dramatic conflict - the character’s fate - at the beginning; 2). Added further elaboration to the central claim.

Now you have learned what to say and how to say it. You are one step closer to exposing your heart to the Great Old Ones, and the prospect fills you with excitement.

Click here to view Revised SA1, and Draft SA1.

The strange creature made an annoying scraping sound and shook its body back and forth to congratulate you on your progress. At the same time, you realized that the great being does not casually set its eyesight on creatures on the ground and that the only way to gain its attention is to serve it remarkably. The most effective way you can think of to demonstrate your faithfulness and ability is to spread its evangel. In telling others about the great being and convincing them to convert, you must find a way to make yourself sound as credible as possible. This can be achieved by quoting much external information. The draft labeled MP1 might be a good sample to learn from, you thought.

The second outcome is to work strategically with complex information in order to generate and support inquiry. This in fact imposes a requirement on the creator to construct their argumentss and to extract and summarize support from multiple external sources. This is vital when making any communication because the creator cannot rely on the audience’s trust to build the whole logic. An opinion that lacks or has little support from external sources will be considered weak or even invalid. On the other hand, obtaining support from external sources does not necessarily mean simply piling them up without consideration. “Strategically” requires that composers must use sources in carefully to connect them to their arguments. Therefore, it is not just a matter of choosing as more sources as possible, instead, a single well-connected source can provide more support for an argument than a combination of multiple random sources.

MP2 conducted genre analysis on open-world games as a whole. In the analysis, the composer cited several external sources, including web sources, academic sources (publications), and official releases from a company. The purpose of the citations can be broadly classified as follows:

• providing a factual basis for a certain claim (e.g., sales score of GTA V);
• directly using others' work to justify the composer’s claim (e.g., the citation of Duncan in the analysis of Minecraft’s strategy of getting rid of “boredom”);
• providing the audience with a visual summary of the content they’re reading (e.g., a bird’s eye view of the game).

The forms of these citations vary from direct quotes to image insertions, and are properly documented with MLA.

One thing you noticed is that in MP1, it seems more autonomy is always better. Where is the limit? It occurred to you, as a game providing unlimited autonomy would certainly make players feel lost. In the revision, you added a new section to discuss the affordances of autonomy in open-world games, and cited external sources accordingly.

Click here to view Revised MP1, and Draft MP1.

You have now learned how to effectively use external sources to generate and support your ideas. You luckily found two other witnesses of that miracle and made them join your cause. Full of confidence, you brought them to a nearby human village to make your speech. However, you got disappointed - although people were so impressed by the fact that you were speaking, no one took what you said seriously. As you stood on a stump talking, more and more people gathered, firstly ones carrying a hoe or other farming tools, but later some with nets came and surrounded you. They wanted to catch you! Realizing this, you quickly fled away and left your newly-made friends behind.

You sat in front of that strange creature, dejectedly asking what went wrong. It only made that odd, annoying noise to mock you, then extended a slimy, pink-purple tentacle from the bottom of its large robe, pointing at the draft in front of you, labeled MP2.

You remember you connected MP2 to outcome 3, which is to craft persuasive, complex, inquiry-driven arguments that matter. You get what it means immediately. Despite the external support, your argument was still like madness to a wider audience. You must hone your skill to make your argument more coherent and logical in order to be more convincing. You are going to explain to those who have never heard of the Great Old Ones how those beings will eventually come down to us, to build a splendor palace, a realm, a kingdom; how they will reward those who provided tributes they craved; how when that day comes the rewarded will be granted the honor to serve permanently while the ignorant on the ground will reach their ending.

Stepping away from your passionate fantasy, you set your gaze on MP2. This draft claims that it would be effective and beneficial to incorporate some of the fundamental concepts from the widely-tested and long-evolved open-world games into other game genres. Particularly, MP2 focuses on Japanese Role Play Games (JRPGs). It summarizes the classic features of JRPGs and blends them with the non-negotiable conventions of open-world games through an attempt to produce a game prototype. The prototype presents the potential for such mixing up to be successful and discussed how such incorporation could make the game experience more immersive and engaging.

While reading the composer’s memo of MP2, you noticed that the analysis part lacks concession, which undermines its credibility. For revision, you added that part by citing others' viewpoints and pointing out the negative consequences of unthoughtfully introducing an open-world design.

Click here to view Revised MP2, and Draft MP2.

Since the last time you fled away, you’ve been hiding from human, honing your skills, and looking for opportunities. Eventually, you found a way to break through when you met a mentally disturbed desperate man - you told him about the deeds of the great being whenever you had a chance, and finally one day, he converted. With him as your foundation, you began to expand the faith rapidly, from a family to a village, a town…… the great being’s name gradually got recited in a broad area, and you, as the messenger and interpreter, were honored “Fox the Living Saint “. Despite your great success, you’ve never forgotten your ultimate goal - to meet the great being and to express your endless admiration and faith.

As your followers grow, you feel that the day to achieve this goal is getting closer and closer. You wrote down the words you wanted to confess to that being. Every day after your chanting and prayers, you spent all your solitude time revising them. You’ve written hundreds of drafts, then two hundred and three hundred…… You felt that each attempt helped you to solve the last puzzle of the left knowledge in your mind: to practice composing as a recursive, collaborative process and to develop flexible strategies for revising throughout the composition process. You’ve come to realize the necessity of revising through hundreds of times of rereading and editing, which allows you to break out of your original mindset and rethink what you’ve written, to make sure it’s clear in structure, logically sound, and appropriate for all your audience. After countless days and nights of revision, the version in front of you is completely different from the original draft, but you don’t mind because you know that no matter how much effort you put in, you’re not perfectly prepared to face that great being. Although the room for improvement has narrowed to nearly none, you still don’t dare to imagine really calling that being.

Another night spent gazing at the yellowed paper, the strange creature that has been absent for so long suddenly reappears in front of you. This time, however, it’s accompanied by an unbearable stench. It pulls out the draft labeled SA2 and pokes it with the spikes from the tips of its sticky liquid-covered tentacles. “Tomorrow ……” You don’t know what’s that supposed to mean, but you suddenly realize that now you have something to do.

You carefully examine the draft in front of you. It’s a proposal for building a game prototype to support the idea of combining open-world game designs with classical game genres. Next to it are a few lines of handwriting suggesting that it might be more effective to focus on just one genre. You immediately understand that this is an instruction to make revisions. You started the work right away, deleting two of the three prototypes initially proposed, and expanding on the first with more details.

The strange creature seems very satisfied with your work. Its tentacles under the wide robes gently tapped on the floor and made a strange, hissing sound. “Hustur,” it suddenly disappeared, leaving behind an obscure syllable.

Click here to view Revised SA2, and Draft SA2.

Today is the day. After the strange creature left, you decided not to hesitate any longer. A sudden surge of courage drives you like a moth to a flame. You gathered your vast followers to build an altar. You sought out a wise diviner to point out the direction. You placed your claws on top of the draft, which you have revised countless times. You silently repeated the last syllable the strange creature left behind:

“Hastur.”

You thought back on all the steps you have taken to get to where you are today, from a beast wandering and foraging in the wild to a “Living Saint”, spreading the belief of the great being, all thanks to its bounty. And, perhaps, thanks to that strange creature.

What is it? Why did it help? You recalled everything it brought to you:

• Attention to the audience’s background and context. This is an important preparatory step before composing. Lacking understanding of the audience and context, you can never make effective arguments, and may also cause misunderstandings;
• Complex and strategic use of external sources. This is necessary for any form of composing, and arguments that lack support from sources can not be persuasive. Keeping the awareness of external sources during composing will ensure that the content does not become self-righteous conjecture;
• Constructing complex statements and ensuring that the statements have stakes to support them. This ensures that all texts are driven by logic, and the composers know exactly what they are creating;
• Taking the opinions of others and making revisions. This is the essential path to learning from experience and progress. It also tells that composing great work is a long-term process, no one achieves the best on the first try.

All the knowledge is crucial to your achievements. Without any of them, you could never stand on this altar, and when you do any future composing, it will certainly be there to help.

But the identity of that strange creature still confuses you.

Forget it, you shook your head. Courage steadily flew in, allowing you to drop any concern. It doesn’t matter, you are about to meet the great being.

“Hastur.”

You suddenly realized that you don’t understand the meaning of this syllable, nor did you know why you are silently repeating it. It seems to have magic, and as you stand here, facing that direction, with all the knowledge in your mind, it becomes natural to recite that word. Why not shout it out loud? You suddenly felt that silently repeating is strange, and if you want to call something, of course you should shout out. You took a deep breath and, with your head raised towards that star cluster in the sky, shouted with all your might:

“Hastur!”

Seemingly in response, the crowd below became noisy. Though initially had some chaos, the sound gradually evolved into a stacked wave of shouting:

“Hastur!”

“Ia! Ia! Hastur!”

You watched the crowd shouting in unison and suddenly felt a tremble in your soul. You’re so touched, so shocked by the harmony of life.

“Hastur!”

You joined them.

Suddenly, your ears recognized a muttering. You stopped shouting and tried to figure out what it was saying, but it was like thin smoke floating above your head - as soon as you look up, it dissipates. Then you saw a black-plumed hearse coming towards you from the sky, from the direction you were facing. Seeing it, you got a sudden, definite feeling - as if your life was a rushing river, already accelerating towards the sea, never to return.

Thick white fog rose up, and you knew it was coming. It’s Hustur, the Unspeakable. The hearse produced a crunching sound and then stopped. Then you felt it, gently approaching. You tried to find a figure of it, but there’s nothing in your sight. Its movement was so gentle that it didn’t leave any footprints on the muddy road.

“Ia! Ia! Hastur!”

The crowd was still shouting, but a faint unease had disrupted the rhythm. Suddenly, the people standing at the front began to fall in a row. People could no longer stay calm and started fleeing in all directions.

The loud shouting turned into panicked cries and screams. You watched the horrors around you, not running away. You felt your body urgently wanting to escape, but somehow you didn’t. You remained squatting there, trying to distinguish its figure from the fallen bodies.

You didn’t succeed. It was like a horizon gradually approaching, and people fell down whenever it swept through, no matter which direction they ran in. And now that line is getting closer and closer to you.

Only a dozen or so steadfast followers were left by your side. Unlike the fleeing people, their eyes were shining with fanaticism, as if they take the great being’s coming as a blessing and the impending death as a long-awaited sacrifice.

It’s here. One person in front of you falls down as if getting struck hard in the face.

Two more people fall. You still can’t trace any of it, and in this final moment, you suddenly realized how obsessive the motivation that has driven you here is. You are not a faithful believer, you just want to see the true face of which created that miracle. And even now you don’t know if Hastur is the same being as the one who changed everything that day.

You felt its cold soft grasp. You couldn’t see it, but it’s here. You opened your eyes wide, though you knew it was useless. A gentle but irresistible force came, and your body got divided into five or six parts. Your sight fell along with your head, landing on the draft you’ve revised hundreds of times:

there was nothing but a yellow sign.

I, Shanli Xing, hereby give my consent to Instructor Christina Shiea to use my electronic portfolio submitted for English 182 during Fall Quarter 2022 for purposes of instructional training and modeling, programmatic considerations, and academic publications and presentations. I understand that granting or not granting this release will not affect my grade in this course.