Games in Technical Communication

Recently, research into the intersection of computer games and technical writing has been increasing, with more conference presentations and publications interrogating communication within the computer game complex. As Greene and Palmer (2011) argued, the “rich history of documentation and enormous growth in gaming” means that “technical communication and game documentation belong together” (pp. 7–8). More broadly, Mason (2013) noted that technical communication and games overlap in the areas of interface design, information management, and systems development (among others). And in the recent edited collection Computer Games and Technical Communication, deWinter and Moeller (2014) collected 16 essays that examine workplace production, fan production, manuals, testing, and teaching within this intersection.

The call for more research is clear, and technical communication is well positioned to interrogate these systems and create new texts because the field already works at the intersection of the technical and the symbolic—and games are both. The gaming industry pushes technological innovation through complex dialectics among large and small game developers, hardware developers, distributors, consumers, hackers, members of Congress, journalists, Entertainment Software Rating Board raters, parents, intellectual property lawyers, and many others. Further, computer games are symbolically communicative, relying on written, verbal, visual, algorithmic, audio, and kinesthetic information to convey information. In 2004, McAllister proposed a dialectical approach to studying the computer game complex, putting into conversation five forces of games: mass culture, mass media, psychophysiological, economic, and instructional (pp. 50–55). Twelve years later, the industry exerts even more force in these domains. Projected to be a $107 billion global industry by 2017 (Sinclair, 2015), computer games have become ubiquitous in our quotidian lives, from mobile and Facebook games that mediate social networking experiences (see Vie, 2014; Vie & deWinter, 2016) to corporate training games and games for educational purposes (see Bogost, 2006; Fanfarelli & Vie, 2015; Rice, 2012).

Games provide frameworks for interaction. They are rule systems that are teleological in nature. However, games themselves exist within complex cultural and economic structures, which require scholars to interrogate the actors and discourses that influence game creation, consumption, and deployment in game- and non-game-like arenas. And in this, technical communication methods—actor-network theory, humanistic approaches to technical communication, genre ecologies, to name a few—illuminate games as a form of technically mediated communication and also technical systems with human actors. What we hope to explore in this special issue is the broad range of technical communication that occurs in games, from game production practices to game play itself and the multiple ways that players interact within these systems.

In “Developer Discourse: Exploring Technical Communication Practices within Video Game Development,” Rudy McDaniel and Alice Daer employ a single-case case study method with a representative group of employees at n-Space, a game development company, to explore cross-disciplinary, localization, and design and technical challenges within a specific workplace ecology. What emerges in these featured interviews are specific communication tools and strategies that enable a multidisciplinary/skilled workforce to respond to and develop within highly technical environments for global consumption. Further, by focusing on one studio, McDaniel and Daer are able to provide insight into formal and informal structures and motivations that shape communicative strategies and tactics within a process that, at least from the outside, looks chaotic and messy.

Following this article on game development, Luke Thominet’s “10/10 Would Review Again: Variation in the Player Game Review Genre” examines the ways in which player game reviews differ from professional reviews. In exploring emergent genre variations, Thominet links reviews to players’ desires to not only build communities but also to inform and (sometimes more importantly) entertain those communities. In these practices, then, player-generated game reviews oftentimes reflect the playfulness of the games themselves. The very playful nature of the game reviews sparks debate within the user community about the purpose of the genre and the role of the platform for mediating the genre. In this, we see a broadening of genre ecologies (Spinuzzi, 2003; Spinuzzi & Zachry, 2000) from genres in organizational networks (such as McDaniel and Daer’s article in this special issue on developer discourse) to genres formed and contested within much larger networks of production and recursive consumption.

In addition to production and consumption practices, games provide frameworks for social activities, which provide scaled and sometimes intensified versions of sociocultural practices—in this issue, those would be leadership practices and griefing. For example, in her article “Look Before You Lead: Seeing Virtual Teams Through the Lens of Games,” Joy Robinson looks to World of Warcraft to examine how leadership works in virtual teams. Using an empirical method, Robinson analyzes emergent leaders in online guilds and finds that collaborative play in raids—task-based activities—conditions players to understand leadership and follower dynamics. Such studies not only enable researchers to understand online game activities, but also have implications for business settings where a model of distributed work toward task-specific ends is becoming normalized.

Such models of online gaming for productive ends seem “good”; however, gamers and players are rarely interested with productive “good.” Thus, when deWinter (2014) analyzes how game designers teach players how to play, the assumption in this piece is that players want to play the game well. However, as Matthew Beale, Megan McKittrick, and Daniel Richards rightly point out in their article, “‘Good’ Grief: Subversion, Praxis, and the Unmasked Ethics of Griefing Guides,” technical communication scholars must attend to subversive documentation with the same care in critical inquiry that traditional documentation receives. To investigate subversive documentation, Beale, McKittrick, and Richards use genre field analysis to analyze griefing guides for Minecraft. These guides teach aspiring griefers how to enter social situations, gain trust, and then make people angry and disrupt game play for the spectacle and benefit of the person doing the griefing. The player-produced documents provide a sometimes-disturbing look into ideological values and praxis. In other words, these guides formalize and transfer the theories and values of a player community for informed action within seemingly overdetermined systems.

The majority of the articles in this collection analyze technical communication and discourse within complex networks; however, the final article, “Game Design as Technical Communication: Articulating Game Design Through Textbooks,” by Michael Anthony DeAnda and Carly A. Kocurek, looks to three game design textbooks for classroom use. DeAnda and Kocurek draw attention to the fact that game design processes are reliant on technical practices, such as iterative design, rapid prototyping, and user-testing—all key concepts in technical communication. Indeed, the game design process may ask technical communicators to draw more heavily on their humanistic training to design systems that prioritize human/player experiences.

As the editors of this special issue, we see this collection of articles focusing on actors and agency within complex technical systems. However, this is not the only approach to video games and technical communication. Questions concerning production, game culture and documentation, user and play testing, research methods, and ethics abound. We look to game culture writ large and see a number of emergent research questions that technical communication scholars are well positioned to address. Foremost, the rampant misogyny in gaming culture, best exemplified in #gamergate, indicates that sexism in games is not isolated to local events but is rather a symptom of larger cultural trends in the industry, the player communities, and online activities. These trends have far-reaching consequences outside of gaming communities, in many ways giving visibility and credence to distributed yet targeted harassment. The activities work within technologized systems, such as social networks and live chats in games, and horrifyingly rely upon traditional stalking techniques—all in an attempt to protect technologized space from the encroachment of women.

We see, also, opportunity to look to articulated research questions, such as studying games within socially networked technologies or games within science writing, for example. Computer games are not played in disconnected, a-contextual spaces. Rather, they are integrated into the practices of our everyday life, from playing the McDonald’s Monopoly game to playing Candy Crush on Facebook. Further, game designers are pairing with content experts to translate scientific and technical information into game spaces to teach information in interactive structures, such as games that teach coding or games that teach mitosis and meiosis. Yet even here, scholarly activity needs to attend to the ethics of these quotidian games. For example, what types of data are being collected when we linger on certain websites or social media platforms playing games? How do games work as part of a larger technological system to compel us to submit to certain activities and subjectivities? How do the underlying ideologies of society inform game structures, thus undermining the message in favor of “winning?”

For example, Monopoly was originally The Landlord’s Game, which was developed to show the gross inequity between landlords and tenants—there is no way to “win” as a tenant. Yet the game is fun because we can “win” at capitalism by instead taking the subject position of a capitalist. Similarly, The McDonald’s Videogame, created by Italian group La Molleindustria, is a computer simulation game meant to underscore the fact that it is impossible to be ethical in a major transnational fast food company. As an anti-advergame, The McDonald’s Videogame is meant to serve as a critique of the company’s practices and ethics. Yet players often become so caught up in trying to win the game that this activist message is lost. Such persuasive games have long been part of our culture, dating back to as early as 1790 with games meant to teach morals and virtues to small children (Ruggiero, 2014, p. xx). However, as intentional critiques of technical systems, these games frequently fail. As technical artifacts of ideological systems, these games illuminate systems of power and activity that might otherwise be largely invisible.

Even within familiar technologies—for example, social networks such as Facebook or mobile devices such as tablet devices and smartphones—games help illuminate these often-invisible networks of power and surveillance. The rise of casual and mobile gaming in the past decade has helped bring to light compelling issues regarding user privacy and data mining that technical communication scholars are well poised to address. Millions of individuals play casual video games such as Fruit Ninja, Candy Crush Soda Saga, and Plants vs. Zombies, and the Electronic Software Association (ESA, 2016) offers research illustrating that 48% of the population playing games choose to play casual and social games. Despite their popularity, however, casual mobile game players often fail to consider the convergence of networked game play and game algorithms that mine our own data as well as the data of individuals in our network. These games feature quick and easy “match three” or similarly engaging gameplay mechanisms; they also feature the ability to connect us to friends and family via leaderboards, chat functions, and reciprocity. Their candy-colored game characters and chirping tunes may seem frivolous and unworthy of academic attention, but underneath the shiny surface is serious and ongoing algorithmic analysis that segments players, mines their data, and uses that data to constantly refine and reshape the gameplay system—all generally without the player’s awareness beyond what’s laid out in the terms and conditions, end-user licensing agreements, and privacy policies that few people read.

Each of these examples illustrates the ongoing potential for future research on games within the field of technical communication. Data mining and analysis as well as studies of privacy policies and licensing agreements will remain extremely important as we live more of our lives online and engage in play using our mobile-networked devices. Player-generated game paratexts like gaming guides, walkthroughs, training manuals, and so on provoke essential questions regarding the impact of these documents on gaming literacies in the 21st century. Further analysis of the role of nonhuman agents such as software agents and nonplayer characters connects to ongoing research in the field that draws on posthuman philosophies. In addition, serious games such as medical and educational simulations will offer compelling case studies for technical communicators to consider the role of gaming in workplace contexts. Our special issue invites readers to consider how they might take up some of these exciting opportunities for continued research in the intersection of games and technical communication. Now, we invite readers to engage with these articles and to consider games as technical systems, ideological systems, and yes, even systems for play and fun.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer deWinter

Jennifer deWinter is associate professor of rhetoric and interactive media and game development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she researches computer production and global circulation. deWinter is particularly interested in the cross-media vampirism of entertainment media, with a focus on computer games and Japan. She is the coeditor of a book on the intersection of technical communication and games as well as a book about video game policy.

Stephanie Vie

Stephanie Vie is associate professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. She researches social media’s impact on literate practices and is currently conducting several grant-funded national surveys of faculty members’ attitudes toward social media in composition. She is the managing editor for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Her work has appeared in journals like First Monday, Computers and Composition, Technoculture, and Computers and Composition Online, and her textbook, E-Dentity (Fountainhead Press, 2011), examines the impact of social media on 21st century literacies.