Alberti.+The+Game+of+Reading+and+Writing

=Alberti, John. "The Game of Reading and Writing: How Video Games Reframe Our Understanding of Literacy."= //Computers and Composition// 25.3 2008. 258-269. Print//.//

**Abstract** This essay focuses on how video games both highlight our traditional assumptions about reading and writing and suggest alternative paradigms that combine the new and the traditional:
 * Play. Video games reveal how pleasure and desire are inherent to the reading and writing process. This dimension of gaming helps explain why video games can produce resistance in terms of approaches to writing instruction grounded in maintaining the cultural distinction between play and work.
 * Authority. The interactivity of video games complicates questions of who authors and authorizes meaning in a discourse community. Video game players are simultaneously readers and writers whose gaming decisions are inscribed within a certain horizon of possibilities but not predictability. The video game is an inherently dialogic discursive space that problematizes the institutionalized distinction between "reading" and "writing."
 * Return to the visual. The case of video games not only helps restore the understanding of writing as a visual form of communication but also challenges the apparent static quality of the printed text, emphasizing the temporal quality of all communication. In so doing, the study of video games promises to fundamentally rewrite the conceptual binary of process and product in composition pedagogy.

**Argument** Alberti argues that the use of video games in educational settings can re-envision writing pedagogy and the mindset with which people typically understand writing, reading, and playing. Instead of the traditional view of writing, reading, and playing as distinct and separate, Alberti believes that they are interconnected and operate as part of a larger set of cultural practices. Because of this, gaming should not simply be viewed as a trivial distraction to students but as a valuable tool that provides students with a purpose or motivation to write. In addition, gaming challenges traditional views of authorship over a work due to the inherently interactive and collaborative nature of many video games. Furthermore, Alberti discusses how the visual nature of video games aids in individuals' comprehension of material and challenges the belief that writing cannot have a visual dimension.

**Key Passages** "Games really are potentially a far more powerful medium than film, aren’t they?. . . In films you play a more passive role. You’re sitting back looking at something. Because of the roleplaying aspect, games literally take the level of our participation to a whole other level. You are actively engaged in the outcome of your actions. Games are going to affect us in different ways, in ways we don’t fully understand yet," (Chaplin, 2007, as cited by Alberti, 2008, 259).

"[...] this anxiety about reading and writing is neither new nor unique to gaming. From the concern with the ethical use of rhetorical power that motivated classical theory to the worries over the vulnerability of young minds lost in silent (and therefore internalized and unmonitored) reading that greeted the rise of the novel, the issue of the listener/reader’s “’level of participation”’ and active engagement—in short, issues of autonomy and agency—have formed the cultural and ideological context for formalized instruction in reading, writing, and rhetoric," (259-60).

"[...] video gaming (and the verbal form of “gaming” emphasizes the dynamic process of the discursive transactions involved) challenges our institutionalized understanding of the writing process not just by championing creativity but more so by undermining the neat division between “writing” and “reading," (261).

"[...] there are “many different ways of reading and writing” and [...] each different way is embedded in “a lived and historically changing set of discursive practices” (Gee, 2004, pp. 14, 21). Trying to separate reading and writing as technical skills apart from these discursive practices means losing an understanding of the motivation and purpose that drives the development of literacy," (262).

"[...] “play” both returns the motives impelling literacy acquisition to the student writer and undermines external efforts to contain those motives within binary categories of “important” versus “trivial,” “productive” versus “wasteful,” and even “safe” versus “dangerous.” [...] Games by definition challenge the utilitarian concept of productivity that emerged in the transition to market capitalism: they combine pleasure and pain, leisure and work, a dedication to achieving goals that have no ends beyond themselves," (263).

"[...] the inescapably visual dimension of gaming equally challenges orthodoxy by helping to return to our sight as writing teachers the inescapably visual dimension of writing. The return to the visual in digital culture forces us to confront the radically dynamic, temporal, and context-situated aspects of writing and reading. In short, the visual historicizes writing," (264).

**Selected Works Cited** Chaplin, Heather. (2007, January 28). Video game tests the limits. The limits win. //NY Times// (Electronic version).

Gee, James Paul. (2004). //What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy.// NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ledonne, Danny. (n.d.) //Artist’s statement: a meditation on Super Columbine Massacre RPG!// Retrieved June 26, 2008, from @http://www.columbinegame.com/statement.htm.

Rouzie, Albert. (2001). Conversation and carrying on: play, conflict, and serio-ludic discourse in synchronous computer conferencing. //CCC, 53//, 251–299.

Rouzie, Albert. (2005). //At play in the fields of writing: a serio-ludic rhetoric//. Creskill, NJ: Hampton P.