How World of Warcraft Could Save Your Classroom: Teaching Technical Communication through the Social Practices of MMORPGs

Collaborating with Dr. Melissa Bianchi, this article examines the writing practices around guild management and recruitment in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft. We discuss the genre overlaps in writing produced for these contexts and those found in technical and business settings to consider how these spaces might be adapted to classrooms for pedagogical purposes. If I had the chance to add to this article, I would introduce a Marxist perspective that considers how concepts like "employability" and "value" are codified into and expressed through MMORPG communication practices. Through these writing genres, guilds and their leaders express a capitalist view of the activities and behaviors of other players that seeks to extract greater and greater amounts of play as labor.