While online games may not be seen as a platform for professional development initially, the ever-evolving gaming industry provides environments lush with technical communication based interactions between more than just the games and the players themselves. Dr. Douglas Eyman's adapted definition of technical communication and communicators' work as "a comprehensive network of activities, knowledge, and skills that help technologies be useful, usable, learnable, enjoyable, memorable, marketable, competitive, and of high quality" (Eyman, 2008, p. 244-245) can be applied perfectly to the development and usage of online games. Online games' provision of a rhetorical space of interactions between users, interfaces, and tools, is well within the discipline of technical communication. Best said by Jennifer deWinter, "computer games are symbolically communicative, relying on written, verbal, visual, algorithmic, audio, and kinesthetic information to convey information" (deWinter, 2016, p.151). To fully understand the deep relationship between online gaming and technical communication, it is important to understand not only the uses of technical communication in online games but also how online games apply to technical communication itself- both of which will be explored in the summary page.
Tags: technical communication, online games, gaming, game development