Video Games

This assignment gives students a chance to make their own (very elementary) argumentative, flash game. By actively engaging in the process of game design, students will have to think through their intentions and the process of piecing together visual, aural, and verbal rhetoric.

This assignment pushes students to recognize the layers of rhetoric and propaganda embedded in something as visual and auditory as a flash game.

This assignment is geared toward getting students to begin thinking, talking, and writing about how writing is a deeply embodied practice.  I ask students to play two games (QWOP and GIRP) that reconfigure how we engage the keyboard as a material object. 

This lesson plan uses the interactive video game Mass Effect 1 (BioWare, 2007 for XBOX 360) to teach students about making situated speech acts that effectively address a certain audience in a particular rhetorical situation.

Using procedural, verbal, visual and aural rhetoric, students work in teams on a multimedia presentation that outlines a video game prototype and the ways it makes arguments.

In this assignment, my students used a game-authoring platform called ARIS (Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling) to create augmented reality games based on scenes or passages from novels studied in our course.

This activity asks students to practice rhetorical analysis with reference to Ian Bogost's understanding of "procedural rhetoric." This mode of rhetoric focuses on the ways that procedures, processes, logics, and rules can be expressive and persuasive.

My students had been studying communities of their choice all semester. For the last unit, I asked them to contribute their perspective on their communities in two ways: first, in a more traditional editorial-length argument, and then through an interactive, procedural text using Inform7.

Even though we use enthymemes in our everyday speech, teaching the concept presents difficulties. By making enthymemes in the interactive fiction design system Inform7, students develop a deep understanding of implied reasoning.