Hello and welcome to the podcast series Ready, Set, Game: The Rhetoric of Games, a podcast created by Emory University students in David Morgen’s Play, Make, Write, Think class. Over the course of the series, we will approach games as operating within the larger media ecology and attempt to diagram the competing forces at work within that landscape. In each episode, we will play and analyze a specific game with an eye toward its rhetorical situation and the role it plays within the broader medium.

We’ll focus on the way these games encourage players to think in order to move through them and what sorts of decisions the games force us to make. As we probe the underlying rules of game systems and speculate about what’s going on underneath the hood, we’ll ponder where they are taking us and to what ends. How do these games encourage certain types of problem solving and learning? What sorts of values do they promote? What sorts of new perspectives do we gain in the playing?

So buckle up and come play with us.