Computer Games and Technical Communication: Critical Methods and Applications at the Intersection

✍ Scribed by Jennifer deWinter, Ryan M. Moeller

• Publisher: Ashgate
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 335
• Series: Ashgate Studies in Technical Communication, Rhetoric, and Culture
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Taking as its point of departure the fundamental observation that games are both technical and symbolic, this collection investigates the multiple intersections between the study of computer games and the discipline of technical and professional writing. Divided into five parts, Computer Games and Technical Communication engages with questions related to workplace communities and gamic simulations; industry documentation; manuals, gameplay, and ethics; training, testing, and number crunching; and the work of games and gamifying work. In that computer games rely on a complex combination of written, verbal, visual, algorithmic, audio, and kinesthetic means to convey information, technical and professional writing scholars are uniquely poised to investigate the intersection between the technical and symbolic aspects of the computer game complex. The contributors to this volume bring to bear the analytic tools of the field to interpret the roles of communication, production, and consumption in this increasingly ubiquitous technical and symbolic medium.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
List of Figures and Tables......Page 10
Notes on Contributors......Page 12
Foreword......Page 18
Acknowledgments......Page 20
Introduction
......Page 22
Part I Connecting Professional and Technical Communication and Game Studies......Page 36
1 It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Pulls Out a Manual
......Page 38
2 Come Out Playing
......Page 56
Part II Industry Documentation and Procedural Guides......Page 74
3 Rendering Novelty Mundane
......Page 76
4 Just Playing Around
......Page 90
5 “It Wasn’t Intended to be an Instruction Manual”
......Page 108
Part III Getting the Player Involved......Page 128
6 Game Design Documents
......Page 130
7 Developing a Testing Method for Dynamic Narrative......Page 146
8 Psyche and Eros
......Page 162
9 Patching as Design Rhetoric
......Page 178
10 “You Are How You Play”
......Page 192
11 Working at Play
......Page 210
Part IV Games in the Professional and Technical Communication Classroom......Page 230
12 Inhabiting Professional Writing
......Page 232
13 How World of Warcraft Could Save Your Classroom
......Page 254
14 The Three D’s of Procedural Literacy
......Page 268
15 Questing through Class
......Page 286
16 From Realism to Reality
......Page 304
Index......Page 328
Games Index......Page 334