Digital games are always laden with values: they make assumptions about players’ bodies and beliefs as well as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability. Games invite their players to identify with these assumptions in order to succeed. But players can also resist a game’s procedural rhetorics, sometimes learning more from the resulting friction than from winning. In the Games research area, staff members consider how these frictions may represent useful sites of research and pedagogy for digital rhetoricians.
Researchers in this area not only look at and write about games, but also investigate and experiment with technologies that allow students and researchers to create games. In so doing, staff members in this area consider games as technologies of composition and investigate the uses of these technologies for undergraduate students, digital activists, teachers of rhetoric and writing, and advanced researchers in the field.
