not having dates on these chapters made it a little hard to situate them in what little I know about the history of games studies. I figure that Gee was pretty foundational. he certainly spends lots of time carving out a place for games and pedagogy and all that in these books.

the problem of content Gee points out in the Semiotic Domains chapter seems so familiar to rhetoric, right? from Socrates it’s been debated–what are we really learning when we learn to rhetoric? there is no “content” to it– no unique substance– unless we say that the content is everything, which isn’t always useful to say.

maybe it’s that as Gee points out, “Critical learning, as I am defining it here. involves learning to think of semiotic domains as design spaces that manipulate us (if I can use this term without necessary negative connotations) in certain ways and that we can manipulate in certain ways.” (43)

I think that’s what we are hoping to keep learning about and teaching about as rhetoricians. so it’s okay for us to not have our own content…

and as people in the world, we can make a difference in whether this critical learning happens for everyone around us, not even just students. this snippet was sort of encouraging (though I do recognize that not everyone is into the endless picking-apart-of-things that we academics so often are): “If these people encourage reflective metatalk, thinking, and actions in regard to the design of the game, of video games more generally, and of other semiotic domains and their complex in­terrelationships, then this, too, can encourage and facilitate active and critical learning and thinking” (46-47)

how we do that is another question, and I imagine we all have our own ways.