Ludic Rhetoric: How Games Enhance Rhetorical Theory and Pedagogy

Electracy and Transmedia Studies

Edited by Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes

LUDIC RHETORIC: HOW GAMES ENHANCE RHETORIC AND WRITING PEDAGOGY uses a qualitative study examining the game-based pedagogy of twenty-two rhetoric and writing teachers to show how games invent rhetorical theory, writing, design, and pedagogy through the multimodal, performative interplay of materiality and discourse. Rebekah Shultz Colby draws from Gregory Ulmer's heuretics, Judith Butler's theory of the constitutive outside, Karen Barad's theory of intra-active performativity and an Indigenous philosophy of environmental inter-relatedness, and Julia Kristeva's semiotic rupture to examine how the process of gameplay and game design constructs a way into the chora by creating a performative, multimodal semiotic rupture that reinvents argument, social discursive theories, and writing pedagogy for social justice.

In Ludic Rhetoric, Colby explores how the game avatar teaches the dual logics of electracy: flash reason and algorithmic logic. She also illustrates how games construct spatial arguments. While the avatar can create resistance by placing students in uncomfortable, embodied ideological positions, games also create space for negotiating resistance through empathy games, critical emergent play, and dialogue. Ludic rhetoric examines game design as a maker pedagogy, showing how students can design social justice games that use the multimodal materiality of games to performatively interrogate the social theories and problems informing social justice issues, as well as the writing process. Finally, Colby explores how games materially embody the circulation of writing, especially online, showing students how research is constructed and circulated, and how games invent pedagogy or create courses through gamification.

REBEKAH SHULTZ COLBY is a Teaching Professor at the University of Denver. She has co-edited The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom and Rhetoric/Composition/Play Through Video Games and published articles on rhetorically theorizing games and teaching rhetoric and writing with games in Computers and Composition, Communication Design Quarterly, and Technical Communication Quarterly.