WPA Desk

WPA Desk puts you in charge of a first-year writing program, or close to it. You’re a PhD student in rhetoric and composition who has just become the assistant director of first-year writing at Midland State University. Midland is fictional, but its program looks real: sixty sections a term, a budget already in deficit, and a lot of people who want things from you.

I’m building it as two things at once. It’s a strategy game, the kind where every choice costs something and the bill sometimes arrives a year later. It’s also a training tool for anyone interested in writing program administration: graduate students in a practicum or a WPA seminar, new administrators, and people who want to know what the job is actually like.

Play it in your browser → It’s free, with no account, and your progress stays in your browser.

How it plays

A playthrough runs three academic years, six terms. Each term, documents land on your desk. The dean wants to raise class caps to close a budget gap. A full professor won’t use the common syllabus. A grade complaint is headed for the chair. Spring sections have no instructors. The provost’s office wants you to pilot AI-detection software.

You don’t have time to do everything well. Each term gives you a limited number of admin hours, and every hour you don’t spend goes to your dissertation. In your third year, your director goes on sabbatical, you become interim director, and you go on the job market at the same time.

You respond the way a WPA would. You choose a course of action, and often you write the memo that makes the case. Whether a memo persuades someone depends on the evidence you attach and how much they trust you, not on a grade for your prose. The dean responds to local numbers about budget and retention, and other people respond to other things.

The tools are real tools

To make that case, you use the same tools a working WPA would. The class cap calculator shows what happens to sections, staffing, cost, and D/F/W rates if caps change. The staffing planner shows who will teach every section and what happens when there aren’t enough people. The results you get can go into a memo as evidence.

The numbers behind the model are labeled with how confident they are and where they come from, and projections are shown as ranges, not single numbers. Midland is fictional, but the relationships it runs on aren’t.

Consequences

After each decision, you see what happened, how people read it, and what changed in your relationships and your program. Some consequences don’t show up until a later term. The game never tells you there was one right answer.

At the end of each year you contribute to the annual report. In your third year you write the whole thing, and it becomes the capstone. The ending looks back across all three years, your program’s results, your relationships, the commitments you kept, and your dissertation, and it explains where you land on the job market and why.

For instructors

Students can export their sessions as files, and an instructor review mode opens a whole class’s files at once, read-only. It shows a class overview you can download as a spreadsheet, how students chose in each scenario, and each student’s case file: memos, reflections, drafting history, and reports. Reports are for reflection and discussion, and the game never scores them.

Where it’s going

WPA Desk is early and changing quickly. I plan to keep adding scenarios, tools, and features. Next on the list are settings an instructor can make for a class (which scenarios, how hard, different starting conditions), comments that students can see in their case files, and characters who remember what you told them last year.

Further out, I’d like WPA Desk to become a tool for real WPA work: the same calculators and planners running on your own program’s data instead of Midland’s. That’s the reason the training tools are built as real tools in the first place.

Borrowing it

You’re welcome to use WPA Desk in a course, fork it, or adapt it, with credit. The code is under the GNU AGPL 3.0. The scenarios, characters, and other writing are under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, the same license as my teaching materials. If you want to use it in a way those licenses don’t cover, get in touch.

Your progress saves in your own browser, and nothing you write in WPA Desk is sent to me or anyone else. Export a copy from the Saves tab to keep one or to hand it in.

Log

• September 27, 2026: First version: the program model, the standard three-year arc, twelve scenarios, the cap calculator and staffing planner, annual reports, endings, and instructor review.
• September 30, 2026: Gave the cast cartoon portraits.
• October 3, 2026: Licensed the project, added reminders to export your saves, and wrote this page.