Introduction: Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games

Abstract

By researching video games and gameplay practices, scholars have the opportunity to understand gamers’ complex learning and literacy development strategies, practices that carry significant implications for education in general, and for our purposes more specifically, writing instruction. Rhetoric/Composition/Play emerges at the moment when three academic conversations seem to be productively merging: the study of games as games, digital games studies, ludology; composition-rhetoric, writing studies, writing pedagogy; and discourse analysis, literacy studies. Our collection, we hope, identifies and explores productive overlaps in these conversations. Specifically, after exploring theoretical and applied dimensions of gaming in and in relation to the writing classroom, contributors to this collection offer innovative ways to enhance composition-rhetoric scholarship and pedagogy through studying games, gamers, and gaming culture.