While video games have been much maligned in the popular press, a number of scholars have begun to explore the positive side of these games, especially in terms of learning. Some critics have analyzed video games and the act of game play as complex, cultural texts. In college courses, such as composition, in which one goal is the development of…

This article examines the common genre of the usability study in technical communication courses and proposes the incorporation of computer and video games to ensure a rhetorical focus to this genre. As games are both entertaining and educational, their use in the technical communication classroom provides a new perspective on multimodal…

This article addresses three questions. First, what is the deep pleasure that humans take from video games? Second, what is the relationship between video games and real life? Third, what do the answers to these questions have to do with learning? Good commercial video games are deep technologies for recruiting learning as a form of profound…

This article documents the design and development of an online tutorial for student and practising teachers at York University, Canada, that familiarizes them with the ethical and legal aspects of teaching. In particular, it focuses on the key design decisions that were made, emphasizing how these were also deeply "pedagogical"…

Digital or computer games have recently attracted the interest of education researchers and policy-makers for two main reasons: their interactivity, which is said to allow greater agency, and their inherent pleasures, which are linked to increased motivation to learn. However, the relationship between pleasure, agency and motivation in educational…

This article asks how good video and computer game designers manage to get new players to learn long, complex and difficult games. The short answer is that designers of good games have hit on excellent methods for getting people to learn and to enjoy learning. The longer answer is more complex. Integral to this answer are the good principles of…