Video/Games

Overview

Over the past decade, video-game players, critics, fans, and creators have integrated games and digital video in a variety of remarkably inventive ways. Video/Games will build upon this inventiveness, exploring the ways that digital video can function in tandem with video games in order to advance and contribute to rhetoric and writing pedagogy and scholarship.

Goals

While past iterations of DWRL gaming groups have focused on building games, this group will explore ways of remediating games to critical and rhetorical ends. Its goal will not be to write games criticism, but rather to invent critical and rhetorical arguments at the intersection of video games and digital video. To this end, group members might use digital video to critique games (as Anita Sarkeesian does in her Tropes vs. Women video series, for example). Group members might also remediate video games to illustrate and support critical rhetorical arguments, or create tutorials for instructors interested in incorporating games in the classroom. Bearing in mind the lab’s focus on rhetoric and pedagogy, the group will not simply engage in games studies; members will explore ways in which video games and videos about games can be read and repurposed by teachers, scholars, and students of rhetoric and writing.

Responsibilities

In the Games Group, members will familiarize themselves with the remediation of video games both practically and theoretically, for both scholarly and pedagogical contexts. Members will also become familiar with a variety of digital video software (including video editing and screen-capture programs) and with the large variety of games and gaming consoles owned by DWRL. Members will explore these and a range of other games (mobile, console, computer, board, etc.) and will work to develop their critical, theoretical, and pedagogical uses. Finally, the group will use digital video to present their findings to teachers, students, and scholars of rhetoric and writing.

Deliverables

As a new project group, Video/Games will need to outline a clear project and deliverable early on in the academic year. The group will not create a game, nor produce traditional long-form games criticism. Rather, the group might decide to initiate a video series on intersections between rhetoric and games criticism. In any case, members will explore the pedagogical uses of video games and produce video tutorials relevant for instructors who want to use video games and digital video in their classrooms.