Tech Comm Videogame Discourse

or Digitally Enhanced Technical Writing Classrooms" (discussed further in Discourse on Games), Anne Richards and Adrienne Lamberti offer two specific plans for integrating writing about discourse communities into a technical communication classroom. They title these suggestions "Gaming Discourse Analysis" and "Gaming Rhetorical Analysis" (Richards 20-21).

Gaming Discourse Analysis

In the Gaming Discourse Analysis, students would select three noticeably different styles of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) and then make a post to the forum dedicated to each game (Richards 20). Subsequently, the student would be asked to analyze the feedback and the popular topics of the forum in an essay that compared the three games (Richards 20). The goal of this exercise is to help students notice differences between smaller communities and to "connect writing with the perpetuation of [the community's] values" (Richards 20).

Gaming Rhetorical Analysis

The Gaming Rhetorical Analysis would follow from the discourse analysis. In this assignment, students would change their focus from forums to blogs and would analyze the ways arguments are made in popular blog posts about each of the games (Richards 21). The goal is to have students become aware of how different strategies are successful in relation to different material (Richards 21).

Richards and Lamberti openly admit that these assignments would require the teacher to spend a lot of preparing the students (21). I would extend the criticism however. Because the students are not being asked to actually play the games, but are rather asked only to look at writing about the games, it might remove some to of the greatest strengths of a gaming centered pedagogy. Not only are these assignments inherently no more engaging than the analysis of any other discourse, but they also exchange most of the active learning involved for a focus on removed analysis. The part of the first assignment where students make a post on a forum helps to lean towards the development and meta-awareness of a more active knowledge, but it also seems to be short-circuited by the drive to get to more serious writing tasks. The impetus behind this reduction of approaches to gaming might be in the definition of the class as Technical Communication, a class traditionally more concerned with teaching form and style than with developing critical reasoning, but this model for Tech Comm classes has long been criticized by writers like Carolyn Miller. For that matter, Richards and Lamberti's very focus on discourse communities suggests a humanist perspective on teaching.

Overall, the focus on creating a sequence of assignment and on tying games to serious academic papers is commendable, but the assignments seem to simplify the use of games down to a single purpose. Similar methods are explored and expanded upon in later lessons like: WoW Composition Class, I Wish I Were the Moon, and L.A. Noire.