When I was getting my B.A. at the University of British Columbia in the early 2000's, the English professors there assigned primary text readings almost exclusively. There are things to recommend this approach, but one result was that students were left to discover and master literary criticism, theory, and history (or not) on their own. Professors used their expertise to fill in the blanks and keep class discussions focused and productive, but a lot of my papers were kind of unfocused and wandering.

So my Banned Books E314 class is wrapping up the ARIS project described in my recent lesson plan post, and as I reflect on the experience I find myself fending off the complaints of a reasonable (if imaginary) skeptic: Sure, games are rhetorical, so it makes sense to analyze them in a rhetoric class. And sure, procedural rhetoric is an important mode of argumentation, so game design makes sense – in a rhetoric class.