Exploring the rhetoric of gaming

My thoughts aren't very coherent this week, but there are a lot of things I really love about this book.  What a clever way to look at the communications patterns in a large section of society!  It would be easy to rely on stereotypes in this analysis, but McAllister avoids that.  Well, mostly, anyway.  There are large generalities that have to be dealt with in any societal observation, and gaming definitely has its share of those.  The demographic is overwhelmingly male and under 40, although there are large groups of outliers like women of any age and men over 40.  I have to admit a secret fondness for Guitar Hero myself, although I have not played it much.

Another thing I liked is that he covers a wide range of games, from GameBoy to air traffic control simulations.  His statement that all gaming is inherently instructional fits with a range of learning theories, from behaviorism to cognitivism:

• Any action that receives reinforcement is learned if there are enough repetitions of the action/reward cycle.  
• Collective fact-sharing helps learners construct realities that incorporate new knowledge.
• Socially negotiated schema help learners build cognitive links to new data.

I particularly enjoyed his analysis of the rhetoric in gamers' social negations: "exigent rhetoric is not always consciously suasory and in its unconscious capacity it is frequently made manifest in answers to questions that seek information…" (p. 79).   On the other hand, developers deliberately use rhetoric to manipulate the degree of reality that the gamer experiences.  On pp. 76-77, he discusses the choices developers have to make to create a reality that feels real, as opposed to what would happen if the game reflected actual conditions.  Targeting a laser, for example.  The firing time of a laser is so short that it happens almost instantaneously, eliminating the need for the shooter to aim in front of a moving target.  This reduces the "fun" factor of shooting, so laser weapons are intentionally given the response time of traditional guns.  In the air traffic control simulation, a choice was made to model only the frantic busiest times of a control tower in a major airport.  There is no modeling of "down" times when few or no flights are arriving or taking off. 

In my scrapbooks I have a photo of one of my oldest son's birthday parties.  It shows a dozen ten-year-olds sitting in a circle, all frantically playing their GameBoys.  That's all they wanted to do that day.  It was the weirdest party I ever hosted, but I got more compliments from that one than for all of the others put together.  The boys enjoyed being able to play "together," even though there was minimal interaction between any of them.  I appreciate a book that can help me make sense out of that day.