Creating Space: Building Digital Games

Studies of games, rhetoric, and pedagogy are increasingly common in our field, and indeed seem to grow each year. Nonetheless, composing and designing digital games, either as a mode of scholarship or as a classroom assignment, has not seen an equal groundswell. This selection first provides a brief overview of the existing scholarship in gaming and pedagogy, much of which currently focuses either on games as texts to analyze or as pedagogical models. While these approaches are certainly valuable, I advocate for an increased focus on game design and creation as valuable act of composition. Such a focus engages students and scholars in a deeply multimodal practice that incorporates critical design and computational thinking. I close with suggestions on tools for new and intrepid designers