The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom

This book explores ethos and games while analyzing the ethical dimensions of playing, researching, and teaching games. Contributors, primarily from rhetoric and writing studies, connect instances of ethos and ethical practice with writing pedagogy, game studies, video games, gaming communities, gameworlds, and the gaming industry. The collection's eighteen chapters investigate game-based writing classrooms, gamification, game design, player agency, and writing and gaming scholarship in order to illuminate how ethos is reputed, interpreted, and remembered in virtual gamespaces and in the gaming industry. Ethos is constructed, invented, and created in and for games, but inevitably spills out into other domains, affecting agency, ideology, and the cultures that surround game developers, players, and scholars.

1. Introduction: Playing with the Rules.- 2. Crash and Burn.- 3. From Actuality to Possibility: Reckoning with the Ethics of Failure in Pedagogy.- 4. Waiting for Players: Rooms, Lobbies, and Hosting Experiences.- 5. Playing Games with Our Lives: What Critical Pedagogy Can Teach Us About the Ethics of Games in the Writing Classroom.- 6. Procedural Ethics and a Night in the Woods.- 7. "To See You Made Humble": Agency and Ethos in The Stanley Parable.- 8. Dromopoeia: Teaching Ethopeia, Prudence (Phronesis), and Ethics (Well-being) with Avatar.- 9. This Isn't Supposed to Be Fun: Using Game-Based Writing Projects as a Form of Pragmatic Ethical Inquiry in the Composition Classroom.- 10. Procedural-Relational Power Analysis: A Model for Deconstructing and Intervening in Everyday Games.- 11. Surfacing Values in Difficult Conversations: Game-based Training to Lower the Stakes on Challenging Topics.- 12. The Hardcore Gamer is Dead: Long Live Gamers.- 13. Ethos and Interaction in The Elder Scrolls Online.- 14. Writing for Gaming Audiences: A Case Study.- 15. The Ethics of Treating Online Gaming Forums as Research Data.- 16. So, You Want to Start a Research Archive? Ethical Issues Researching and Archiving Video Game History.- 17. Toward a Broader Conception of Theorycrafting.- 18. Using World of Warcraft for Translingual Practice: Teaching Recontextualization Strategies.