Video game rhetoric: Narrative, cultural, and multimodal perspectives

The course outlines how computer games can be understood and analysed as rhetorical and cultural texts in a broad sense. Computer games are prominent and popular cultural expressions with technical, aesthetic, and social dimensions. Games communicate in themselves, players communicate within games, and there is also extensive communication about games, for example in game journalism and criticism, in cultural sections of newspapers, and online. The course addresses different types of computer games and game-related rhetorical materials, from journalism, marketing, social media and so on, and examines them through rhetorical, narrative, literary, trans- and intermedial, as well as multimodal perspectives. The course thus offers several overlapping approaches to games and gaming culture, providing students with tools to understand and study these complex and multifaceted cultural texts.