Reelly Serious Games

Announcing a Special Interest Group at CCCC in New Orleans on “Serious Games.”

Session: FSIG.22 on Apr 4, 2008 from 6:30 PM to 7:30 PM

This special interest group will focus on the study and application of serious games relative to communication, rhetoric, and creative expression. 'Serious games' is defined by a variety of game platforms, designs, and purposes. While the obvious 'serious' application of games is for education (and training), many games are studied rhetorically as a means of critiquing broader cultural phenomena. Thus, this SIG is designed to concern both theoretical and practical aspects of 'serious games,' and build a community of rhetoric and composition game studies scholars, designers, and users. As a new SIG, we aim to build this community through collaborative and open source social technologies that support both game play and enable teaching and communication practices. Our combined experience with such systems over the past 13 years, and our connections with both U.S. and international game studies scholars and journals gives us an important basis for forming this group. We developed Lingua MOO in 1995 and the enCore system on which many MOOs are still based. Most recently, we have organized the Serious Games Colloquium of the new Rhetoric, Communication, and Information Design PhD program at Clemson University (Directed by Victor Vitanza). And we recently spent a year teaching in the Computer Game studies research center at IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. We are also on the editorial board of both GameStudies e-journal and the Sage Publication journal, Games and Culture. We plan to form this SIG as a research collective studying various serious games such as America's Army, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and other massively multi-player games.

During the first Serious Games SIG there will be a demo by Jason Helms (Clemson University PhD candidate) of his interactive fiction game based on Jacques Derrida’'s essay, "“Structure, Sign, and Play.”" In addition, Cynthia Haynes will demo an excerpt from her talk, “muddy waters/serious games,” also based on Derrida’'s essay and delivered inside World of Warcraft.

Hope you can join us!

Best wishes,

Cynthia Haynes and Jan Holmevik