WORDPLAY: REBRANDING THE RHETORIC OF GAMES?

摘要

Christopher A. Paul's Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games: Analyzing Words, Design and Play makes a compelling case for games researchers to take rhetoric seriously. Part of the Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture series, Wordplay provides both a strong overview of areas where rhetoric can provide better insight into games and several excellent case studies of specific games. It is well suited to scholars with a rhetoric background who wish to see how their discipline can be applied to games and to qualitative researchers seeking to analyse the role of discourse in games. While B. Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play (1997) discusses the rhetorical roles play and games occupy in culture at large, and I. Bogosf s Persuasive Games (2007) underscores how procedural rhetoric gives games their special persuasive power, Paul's contribution balances both cultural and formal analysis in addition to teasing meaning out of texts created by player communities. Wordplay offers rich, qualitative rhetorical analysis that opens the realm of meaning created in the nexus of gaming culture to outsiders; it can be fruitfully paired with A. Ensslin's recent The Language of Gaming (2011), which provides a more systematic (and generalizable) approach that suggests how the results of both books may be adapted by other scholars.