Hello Bloggers!  The text I I’m going over today is “Gender and Gaming in a First Year Writing Class” by Rebekah Shultz Colby.  It seemed interesting because it mentioned World of Warcraft, an online video game with millions of players.  That will soon be a subject I will study in a digital diversity course I’m taking so I thought the text would make a good introduction.

The text was essentially a study of a class involving this game and writing.  The students would study this game, and find subjects within that they found interesting to investigate further; like “why high level player like to combat low level players” or things like that.  Colby began a case study on her female student and their experiences with games and how that affected their ability to participate in the class.  She found that many of them lacked “gaming literacies” which restricted their ability to fully explore the game and limited their scope of writing on the subject, as a result.  This game is built upon what would have been learned in previous games.  The female students tended to have fewer experiences with video games than their male counterparts, and thus a higher barrier to entry for this one.  This is theorized to be due to video games traditionally being designed and marketed exclusively to a male audience.

So what can we learn from this in the field of rhetoric and composition?  This teaches us a lot about catering to our audience and making it accessible to others.  As seen in this article, World of Warcraft fails to teach “gaming literacy” to groups unaccustomed to gaming in general.  Similarly, a writing or speech could be ineffective to a general audience if it fails to provide a background or context necessary for the audience to understand the subject matter.