Can a game help us know ourselves?
Even after five years of teaching writing using games, I am always surprised when seven weeks into the semester we are still able to find new ideas and stories inspired by games. Currently, my first year writing students are preparing to write rhetorical analysis essays with games as the text they will analyze. We dug into the definitions of rhetoric, analysis, and text as we began our work but most of our writing focused on what is a game and how can games help humans communicate, learn, and/or develop knowledge? We began with these simple sentence stems:
- A board game I know well is…
- A card game I know well is…
- A sport I know well is…
- A video game I know well is…
- A party game I’ve played is…
- An electronic game I play is…
Then wrote a description of the game and the community that plays and values the game.
I also shared excerpts from three podcast episodes for further inspiration:
We wrapped up our writing for the week with Quest by Carrie Williams Clifford and the question: What game can help us know ourselves?
