From Course Creation to Final Examination: Using Video Game Concepts to Inform the Writing Classroom

Despite the amount of negative media regarding video game play, young people between the ages of 8 - 18 spend on average 90 minutes per day playing them. The saturation of this game-based knowledge presents opportunities for what Gavriel Solomon and D.N. Perkins call high road transfer to composition. By first introducing faculty to a new way of perceiving video game play by re-conceptualizing games as texts, this presentation draws upon a synthesis of relevant literature to communicate the breadth of cognitive processes involved in game play and to describe ways of integrating this prior knowledge into the writing classroom. The presentation will conclude with a review of literature detailing methods to facilitate this knowledge transfer and ways to incorporate game-based cognitive skills into various course components using examples from practice