ABSTRACT

This chapter describes how computer game modding, or modifying commercial games, can serve as the basis for what Dan Ding describes as a 'revelation pedagogy'. It describes how such a pedagogy might be realized by adapting the five-part grammar of gameworks that Ken S. McAllister proposes in his 2004 work, Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture. As McAllister writes, computer games are complex artifacts whose meaning is produced not only through the dialogical struggles between designers and players but also by a number of influences. Computer games are also implicated in a complex system of economic production that, as McAllister writes, 'extends far beyond the cost of games themselves'. Instructors can foreground the degree to which computer games and similar forms of digital media challenge the traditional, linear modes of communication that technical communication often privileges. It concludes by offering a brief sketch of how the pedagogy might be implemented in a semester-long technical writing class.