Good computer and video games like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Pikmin, Rise of Nations, Neverwinter Nights, and Xenosaga: Episode 1 are learning machines. They get themselves learned and learned well, so that they get played long and hard by a great many people. This is how they and their designers survive and perpetuate themselves. If a game cannot be learned and even mastered at a certain level, it won't get played by enough people, and the company that makes it will go broke. Good learning in games is a capitalist-driven Darwinian process of selection of the fittest. Of course, game designers could have solved their learning problems by making games shorter and easier, by dumbing them down, so to speak. But most gamers don't want short and easy games. Thus, designers face and largely solve an intriguing educational dilemma, one also faced by schools and workplaces: how to get people, often young people, to learn and master something that is long and challenging--and enjoy it, to boot.

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What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

Part 1: Social Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Text Analysis 1. Introduction 2. Texts, Social Events, and Social Practices 3. Intertextuality and Assumptions Part 2: Genres and Action 4. Genres 5. Meaning Relations between Sentences and Clauses 6. Types of Exchange, Speech Functions, and Grammatical Mood Part 3: Discourses and Representations 7. Discourses 8. Representations of Social Events Part 4: Styles and Identities 9. Styles 10. Modality and Evaluation 11. Conclusion

http://disciplinas.stoa.usp.br/pluginfile.php/270695/mod_folder/content/0/ii.%20Norman_Fairclough_Analysing_discourse.pdf?forcedownload=1

Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (2nd ed.

Since the late 1980s, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has become a well-established field in the social sciences. However, in contrast with some branches of linguistics, CDA is not a discrete academic discipline in the traditional sense, with a fixed set of research methods. The manifold roots of CDA lie in a myriad of disciplines including rhetoric, anthropology, philosophy and cognitive science, to name a few. This four-volume set brings together seminal articles on the subject from varied sources, creating an invaluable roadmap for scholars seeking to consolidate their knowledge of CDA, and of its continued development. Sculpted and edited by a leading voice in the field, this work covers the interdisciplinary roots, the most important approaches and methodologies of CDA, as well as applications in other disciplines in an updated and comprehensive way. Structured thematically, the four volumes cover a wide range of aspects and considerations: Volume One: Histories, Concepts and Interdisciplinarity Volume Two: Theoretical Approaches and Methodologies Volume Three: 'Doing CDA' - Case Studies Volume Four: Applications and Perspectives - New Trends in CDA

https://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/18225/1/94pdf.pdf

Critical Discourse Analysis

Introduction 1. The Semiotic Landscape 2. Narrative Representations: Designing Social Action 3. Conceptual Representations: Designing Social Constructs 4. Representation and Interaction: Designing the Position of the Viewer 5. Morality: Designing Models of Reality 6. The Meaning of Composition 7. The Materiality of Meaning - Surface and Inscription 8. The Third Dimension

Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design

1. The futures of literacy: modes, logics and affordances 2. Preface 3. Going into a different world 4. Literacy and multimodality: a theoretical framework 5. What is literacy?: resources of the mode of writing 6. A social theory of text: genre 7. Multimodality, multimedia and genre 8. Meaning and frames: punctuations of semiosis 9. Reading as semiosis: interpreting the world and ordering the world 10. Some items for an agenda of further thinking

Literacy in the New Media Age

Multimodal Discourse outlines a new theory of communication for the age of interactive media. Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen provide students with a wide-ranging analysis of the various communication styles and the ways by which text is now understood as the interaction of sound, music, vision, colour and language.

Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication

1. Multimodality: A New Approach to Questions of Meaning 2. Signs 3. Modes and Materiality 4. Texts and Messages 5. Media, Messages, Texts 6. Design and Production 7. Doing Multimodal Analysis 8. Thinking and Looking Ahead

Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication

Gunther Kress argues for a radical reappraisal of the phenomenon of literacy, and hence for a profound shift in educational practice Through close attention to the variety of objects which children constantly produce (drawings, cuttings-out, 'writings' and collages), Kress suggests a set of principles which reveal the underlying coherence of children's actions; actions which allow us to connect them with attempts to make meaning before they acquire language and writing This book provides fundamental challenges to commonly held assumptions about both language and literacy, thought and action It places these challenges within the context of speculation about the abilities and dispositions essential for children as young adults, and calls for the radical decentring of language in educational theory and practice

Gunther Kress

Papers

Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design

Literacy in the New Media Age

Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication

Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication

Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy