The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom

by Richard Colby (Editor), Matthew S.S. Johnson (Editor), Rebekah Shultz Colby (Editor)

Overview

This book explores ethos and games while analyzing the ethical dimensions of playing, researching, and teaching games. Contributors, primarily from rhetoric and writing studies, connect instances of ethos and ethical practice with writing pedagogy, game studies, video games, gaming communities, gameworlds, and the gaming industry. The collection’s eighteen chapters investigate game-based writing classrooms, gamification, game design, player agency, and writing and gaming scholarship in order to illuminate how ethos is reputed, interpreted, and remembered in virtual gamespaces and in the gaming industry. Ethos is constructed, invented, and created in and for games, but inevitably spills out into other domains, affecting agency, ideology, and the cultures that surround game developers, players, and scholars.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030633134
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	01/28/2021
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	338
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Richard Colby is the Assistant Director for First-Year Writing and Teaching Professor for the Writing Program at the University of Denver, USA. He co-edited the collection Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games (2013) and has published several articles about video games and teaching.

Matthew S.S. Johnson is Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA. He specializes in rhetoric and composition, digital literacies, and video game studies. He is Reviews Editor for the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. His scholarship focuses on dismantling boundaries between work and play.

Rebekah Shultz Colby is Teaching Professor at the University of Denver, USA. She examines how video games inform digital literacies and digital rhetoric. She co-edited Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games (2013).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Playing with the Rules.- 2. Crash and Burn.- 3. From Actuality to Possibility: Reckoning with the Ethics of Failure in Pedagogy.- 4. Waiting for Players: Rooms, Lobbies, and Hosting Experiences.- 5. Playing Games with Our Lives: What Critical Pedagogy Can Teach Us About the Ethics of Games in the Writing Classroom.- 6. Procedural Ethics and a Night in the Woods.- 7. "To See You Made Humble": Agency and Ethos in The Stanley Parable.- 8. Dromopoeia: Teaching Ethopeia, Prudence (Phronesis), and Ethics (Well-being) with Avatar.- 9. This Isn't Supposed to Be Fun: Using Game-Based Writing Projects as a Form of Pragmatic Ethical Inquiry in the Composition Classroom.- 10. Procedural-Relational Power Analysis: A Model for Deconstructing and Intervening in Everyday Games.- 11. Surfacing Values in Difficult Conversations: Game-based Training to Lower the Stakes on Challenging Topics.- 12. The Hardcore Gamer is Dead: Long Live Gamers.- 13. Ethos and Interaction in The Elder Scrolls Online.- 14. Writing for Gaming Audiences: A Case Study.- 15. The Ethics of Treating Online Gaming Forums as Research Data.- 16. So, You Want to Start a Research Archive? Ethical Issues Researching and Archiving Video Game History.- 17. Toward a Broader Conception of Theorycrafting.- 18. Using World of Warcraft for Translingual Practice: Teaching Recontextualization Strategies.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“As rhetoric and writing studies’ engagements with gaming has evolved, we are less in need of projects that argue only for the inclusion of video games as a subject matter. Instead, our field needs exactly what this book provides: substantive and persuasive scholarship that refines our conceptual starting places to chart new pathways toward where we need to go. The scope of case studies in this collection is outstanding.”
—Steve Holmes, author of Procedural Habits: The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice (2017) and Rhetoric, Technology and the Virtues (2018)