One of the reasons I have my ICAP students do a rhetorical analysis of games is because of the rich visual/aural/mechanical languages games tend to use to convey meaning to their players. Because most games start with tutorial levels and are designed to scaffold information in an accessible way, games provide an interesting space in which students can quickly become privy to the design language being employed by the developers. Because the teaching of how to interact with a game is part of the game itself, analysis of how the game communicates with the user can be a great jumping-off point for having students critically examine other visual mediums that are not so inherently didactic. It’s also a great way to talk about internal design grammars among genres of games. If a game expects the player of a platforming game to run to the right and press A to jump, these are internal design grammars that are inherent to the genre. Students who are less familiar with games will recognize these assumptions as breaking points, where the in-game instruction fails to consider novice players’ lack of knowledge about these conventions. By talking about how designers make assumptions about what their players know, we can start to identify assumptions that designers in other mediums make about the literacy of their users.