Computer Games and Technical Communication

Introduction; I: Connecting Professional and Technical Communication and Game Studies; 1: It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Pulls Out a Manual: Finding a Role for Technical Communicators in the Game Industry; 2: Come Out Playing: Computer Games and the Discursive Practices of Gender, Sex, and Sexuality 1; II: Industry Documentation and Procedural Guides; 3: Rendering Novelty Mundane: Technical Manuals in the Golden Age of Coin-Op Computer Games; 4: Just Playing Around: From Procedural Manuals to In-Game Training; 5: "It Wasn't Intended to be an Instruction Manual": Revisiting Ethics of "Objective" Technical Communication in Gaming Manuals; III: Getting the Player Involved; 6: Game Design Documents: Changing Production Models, Changing Demands; 7: Developing a Testing Method for Dynamic Narrative; 8: Psyche and Eros: Rhetorics of Secrecy and Disclosure in Game Developer-Fan Relations; 9: Patching as Design Rhetoric: Tracing the Framing and Delivery of Iterative Content Documentation in Online Games; 10: "You Are How You Play": Privacy Policies and Data Mining in Social Networking Games; 11: Working at Play: Modding, Revelation, and Transformation in the Technical Communication Classroom; IV: Games in the Professional and Technical Communication Classroom; 12: Inhabiting Professional Writing: Exploring Rhetoric, Play, and Community in Second Life; 13: How World of Warcraft Could Save Your Classroom: Teaching Technical Communication through the Social Practices of MMORPGs; 14: The Three D's of Procedural Literacy: Developing, Demonstrating, and Documenting Layered Literacies with Valve's Steam for Schools; 15: Questing through Class: Gamification in the Professional Writing Classroom; 16: From Realism to Reality: A Postmortem of a Game Design Project in a Client-Based Technical Communication Course