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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until September 01, 2025

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Writing with Video Games

Stinson, Samuel D.
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4059-1776
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1525803463021262

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, English (Arts and Sciences).
During the past twenty years video games have increased in notability in the discipline at large and within computers and composition discourse, leading to the occasional examination of games in composition curricula both as an object of study and as a means of further promoting student multimodal literacy. And although they are not widespread within composition courses, video games, like competing text-types literature and film, are a serious subject deserving of academic treatment, exploration, inquiry, and discussion (Bogost; Alexander; Vie; Colby and Colby). Yet little research so far has utilized video games in teaching composition courses to focus on student attitudes and responses through reflection. Throughout this dissertation, utilizing the work of Gee in the educational potential of video games, I have maintained that video games as procedural rhetoric (Bogost) provide a useful reflective medium for composition (Yancey), especially within first-year composition (FYC) curricula. And building on the work of Gradin, I coin the term network expressionism as a pedagogical position that synthesizes the digital subject position taken by players of video games with a complex network understanding of composition. I argue that knowledge of non-human actants affects the rhetorical awareness of human actants by making students aware of the greater complexities of the situation and providing a rhetorical savviness to students. To further explore network expressionism, I coin the concept algorithmic suture as a means through network expressionism to explain and explore how video game algorithms rhetorically make meaning through cooperation with players. I am here setting up the personal writing subject as the frame of the discussion of algorithms and reflection, specifically via experience and heuristics, while engaging a post-humanist network discussion. I review and discuss selections from the available relevant scholarship for conceiving network expressionism, and for creating a gamic pedagogy, as video games provide local network situated algorithms that may be studied in composition courses for their rhetorical affordances and constraints.
Sherrie Gradin, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Albert Rouzie, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Ryan Shepherd, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Edmond Chang, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Ofer Eliaz, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
286 p.
Composition; Mass Media; Pedagogy; Rhetoric; Teaching; Technology
composition; video games; multimodality; algorithmic suture; pedagogy; theory; conditional algorithmic rhetoric; interfaceability; network expressionism; English; rhetoric; technology; technologism; multimodal; computers; computers and composition

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Stinson, S. D. (2018). Writing with Video Games [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1525803463021262

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Stinson, Samuel. Writing with Video Games. 2018. Ohio University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1525803463021262.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Stinson, Samuel. "Writing with Video Games." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1525803463021262

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1525803463021262
© 2018, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.