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:
Contents: Foreword, Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister; Introduction: playing the field: technical communication for technical games, Jennifer deWinter and Ryan M. Moeller. Part I Connecting Professional and Technical Communication and Game Studies: It’s all fun and games until someone pulls out a manual: finding a role for technical communicators in the game industry, Jeff Greene and Laura Palmer; Come out playing: computer games and the discursive practices of gender, sex, and sexuality, Marc Ouellette. Part II Industry Documentation and Procedural Guides: Rendering novelty mundane: technical manuals in the goden age of coin-op computer games, Carly A. Kocurek; Just playing around: from procedural manuals to in-game training, Jennifer deWinter; `It wasn’t intended to be an instruction manual’: revisiting ethics of `objective’ technical communication in gaming manuals, A.V. Luce; Part III Getting the Player Involved: Game design documents: changing production models, changing demands, Anthony T. Sansone. Developing a testing method for dynamic narrative, Alex Tilley, Carmen Blandino, and Jennifer deWinter; Psyche and Eros: rhetorics of secrecy and disclosure in game developer-fan relations, Josh Zimmerman; Patching as design rhetoric: tracing the framing and delivery of iterative content documentation in online games, Lee Sherlock; `You are how you play’: privacy policies and data mining in social networking games, Stephanie Vie; Working at play: modding, revelation, and transformation in the technical communication classroom, Kevin Moberly and Ryan M. Moeller. Part IV Games in the Professional and Technical Communication Classroom: Inhabiting professional writing: exploring rhetoric, play, and community in Second Life, Jennifer L. Bay and Samantha Blackmon; How World of Warcraft could save your classroom: teaching technical communication through the social practices of MMORPGs, Melissa Bianchi and Kyle Bohunicky; The three D’s of procedural literacy: developing, demonstrating, and documenting layered literacies with valve’s steam for schools, Jason Custer; Questing through class: gamification in the professional writing classroom, Jennifer Grouling, Stephanie Hedge, Alyssa Schweigert, and Eva Grouling Snider; From realism to reality: a postmortem of a game design project in a client-based technical communication course, Christopher Ritter, Sameer Ansari, Scott Daner, Sean Murray, and Ryan Reeves. Indexes.
