For my digital literacy narrative, I plan on talking about how getting into competitive Super Smash Bros. changed my life from a digital communication perspective. Before becoming a competitive Smash player as a seventh grader, my only source of casual digital writing came from texting my friends from school ever since my parents bought me my first phone for my twelfth birthday. During this period of time, this is where I learned how to write in ways that were more similar to real life conversations rather than academic essays that were meant to be seen by a teacher. Common expressions found in text such as “XD” and “lol” were weird to get used to at first because using them in school essays would be asking to have points get deducted off your grade, but over time, not only did I recognize the digital writing habits of my friends, I also incorporated their habits into my own digital writing. Once I was able to get past the point of being unfamiliar with the intricacies of texting, it seemed like the amount of new terms to learn would gradually become smaller and smaller.
But upon entering my first Super Smash Bros. tournament, I soon realized that I was wrong, and there was more to digital literacy than I ever imagined. Going to my first tournament was the point in my life where I was introduced to the first form of social media that I would start using, Discord. My experiences using Discord taught me more about how a new community of people in my life expressed themselves through digital writing and I was soon able to learn about voice calls, specific servers, and other websites and apps the Smash community would communicate with, twitter being the other main source of growth for me in regards to digital writing. I want to use this narrative to tell my story about how the role a single video game played in my life was significant in my own growth as a writer and a digital citizen. These experiences made me feel even closer to technology and it opened my eyes to how the Internet can be divided so much to the extent that a video game community can communicate amongst each other about topics that a large population of the world knows nothing about.
I am also thinking about adding visual examples of my digital literacy experiences within the Smash community such as memes, tier lists, or anything else that was made possible by the digital age we live in today. For the most part, I plan on creating my narrative through writing since that is the best way I can effectively express my ideas about this topic.