ABSTRACT
Games have a complex and nuanced relationship with language and persuasion. While working with language can be viewed as a form of play, play can be viewed as discursive, rhetorical, and cultural work. The author describes the work that goes into playing games as producing situations in which language and discourse have meaning, and situations are shaped by various constraints, including the rules of the game. Such constraints contribute to the rhetorical affordances that games possess, including their capacity to foster identification, generate rhetorical situations, persuade through processes and procedures, and provide players with the language, skills, and knowledge needed to participate in various ludic and discursive communities. In this way, games put language into play, demonstrating both the potential to inform, educate, and empower, but also to coerce, deceive, and manipulate. At the same time, by their procedural nature, games can provide players with the very literacies needed to examine and critique various social and cultural systems, including how those systems afford and constrain language and discourse.
