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.

Gamification is an up and coming popular trend in all levels and types of education, including public and private schools, higher education, the military, the private sector, and elsewhere. Gamification introduces aspects of game design like teamwork, competition, rewards and prizes, storytelling, and more into lesson plan units. In many cases, actual games, whether it be Scrabble, Hangman, Candy Crush, Dungeons & Dragons, and many others, are adapted into educational tools. This chapter collection will specifically look at the use of gamification techniques in Freshmen Writing courses and related Composition, Writing and Rhetoric classes. Each chapter will provide sample gamified lessons supported by relevant scholarship in both Gamification Theory and Writing Studies.

Higher education, further education, vocational education and continuing education all refer to progression to a third educational step. That is, a step beyond secondary education, which itself is a step beyond elementary or primary education. While optional, continuing beyond secondary education most often suggests some form of need ‘to acquire advanced knowledge’. But advanced in what way? Advanced in focus? Advanced in depth? Advanced in application? Advanced in the range of knowledge of those who teach in it? Advanced in expectation? Honors education, which is present globally and is highlighted in the United States through a distinctive 100-year history, has reflected on, and continues to reflect on what ‘advanced’ higher education might entail. Consequently, here in Advancing Honors Education for Today and Tomorrow contributors consider some of the interests that strike them as significant in the present and future of advanced learning.

The open world role-playing Assassin’s Creed video game series is one of the most successful series of all time, praised for its in-depth use of historical characters and events, compelling graphics, and addictive gameplay. Assassin’s Creed games offer up the possibility of exploring history, mythology, and heritage immersively, graphically, and imaginatively. This collection of essays by architects archaeologists and historiansexplores the learning opportunities of playing, modifying, and extending the games in the classroom, on location, in the architectural studio, and in a museum.

This dynamic collection offers a breadth of expertise and informed pedagogies on teaching multimodal and digital creative writing in the college classroom. This book gives clear guidance with lesson plans, online resources, sample student work, and adaptable assignments.

An unexpected take on how games work, what the stakes are for them, and how game designers can avoid the traps of optimization. The process of optimization in games seems like a good thing—who wouldn’t want to find the most efficient way to play and win? As Christopher Paul argues in Optimizing Play, however, optimization can sometimes risk a tragedy of the commons, where actions that are good for individuals jeopardize the overall state of the game for everyone else. As he explains, players inadvertently limit play as they theorycraft, seeking optimal choices. The process of developing a meta, or the most effective tactic available, structures decision making, causing play to stagnate. A “stale” meta then creates a perception that a game is solved and may lead players to turn away from the game. Drawing on insights from game studies, rhetoric, the history of science, ecology, and game theory literature, Paul explores the problem of optimization in a range of video games, including Overwatch, FIFA/EA Sports FC, NBA 2K, Clash Royale, World of Warcraft, and League of Legends. He also pulls extensively from data analytics in sports, where the problem has progressed further and is even more intractable than it is in video games, given the money sports teams invest to find an edge. Finally, Paul offers concrete and specific suggestions for how games can be developed to avoid the trap set by optimization run amok.