I enjoyed reading this article that concerns the overlap between game designers and composition instructors and between spaces of play and spaces of learning. I like how the author emphasized the importance of theory in the design process, which is something that comp/rhet studies--I'm thinking particularly of Ann Berthoff--has also encouraged: let theory serve as the foundation of your praxis, which makes sense. 

I appreciated the question of what games "do for us" and I am very interested in ramification, although I haven't had to time to read too much about it yet. As an avid gamer myself, I've noticed for many years the parallels between the gaming experience (thoroughly immersive, interactive, and entrenched in literacy) and what I do in the composition courses or even as a professor (reading, playing, taking risks, making cost-benefit analyses, etc.). I like how Robison emphasizes that "games are just as much about process as they are about product" (360). The game rules encourage the "reader" or player to think critically and pay attention to the processes involved in such play and how those processes might adapt to different situations in the game. 

I liked how the author mentions that designers and developers write collaboratively, which is something that more and more composition instructors are doing: working collaboratively to create learning modules and strong course design to meet the needs of our students, to create content that is student-centered in a way similar to how Chris Novak's "goals are strongly player-directed." Without getting student "buy in" at the process level, chances are that the ultimate product may fall short of expectations. 

I found this article to be very interesting, although I must admit that I need to read it again really to grasp the full benefit of the piece. I was also glad to see that this was written by a community college professor, which from my experience is a bit more rare (most English CC professors I know aren't too active in publishing). I found the article to be very well done, especially the beginning that starts as a ruse of sorts, drawing our attention to issues of place, "not only the place of writing but also the writing of place" (303). 

I had never really thought before about how mobile technology has changed the environments in which we write and how that has an impact on the writing itself (beyond more typos, text messages that don't make sense, and the like). The idexicality of digital writing was very interesting and not a feature of semiotics I was very familiar with (305). I never thought of Prezi as a mapping software, although now it seems rather obvious. I have often thought about the visual arrangement of items and paths in Prezi and how that is itself a composition of sorts, but I never connected this with maps (even despite working with some maps of South Africa in a project I was working on several years ago).

The "rhetoric of maps" as Schmidt refers to it (307) has great potential in the classroom, and I look forward to revisiting this article, perhaps over the winter break to do something with maps and mapping technologies in my new Brit. Lit. II course that I'm working on.