ENG 225 Rhetoric and Gaming

Thesis/Purpose: Bour explores how some existing game developers claim that the full extent of potential that can be made out of video games has not been touched on, players are already presenting evidence of significant impact and daily effects in their lives due to video games; therefore, video games contribute to the “social institutionalization (Stöber, 2004: 484–485) of gaming.” Sometimes it can become evident that a game is seen as “a site of struggle (McAllister, 2004).” To build on the matter further, media scholars should separate themselves from the norm and take on a different perspective where they can better understand rhetorical positions in a game. Methods: The study was conducted by looking at games that were on forums that were ranked the most popular using Alexa.com. Each individual forum was scanned using Google search. Google search was used by typing in a variety of keywords that had any sort of connection towards the impact of video games. The very first 100 words...

Giannakos provides examples of design methodologies for mathematics education in games. The following is my annotation of the paper. This article establishes a system of design rules that create simultaneously educational and serious video games then provides examples of games designed with these methodologies in mind. It uses a wide array of papers related to serious video game design to arrive at the conclusion of 4 different design principles. For serious games to succeed in mathematics education, they must: 1) engage students with a narrative. 2) engage students with familiar game mechanics. 3) allow error to be an opportunity to try again. 4) engage students with collaborative learning. While the experts behind this paper performed no experiment or meta-analysis, they implemented its design rules in a series of games based off of classic video game titles. They first designed a game with narrative that was based off of side scroller video games. Then, they developed a dif...