This book explores ethos and games while analyzing the ethical dimensions of playing, researching, and teaching games. Contributors, primarily from rhetoric and writing studies, connect instances of ethos and ethical practice with writing pedagogy, game studies, video games, gaming communities, gameworlds, and the gaming industry. The collection’s eighteen chapters investigate game-based writing classrooms, gamification, game design, player agency, and writing and gaming scholarship in order to illuminate how ethos is reputed, interpreted, and remembered in virtual gamespaces and in the gaming industry. Ethos is constructed, invented, and created in and for games, but inevitably spills out into other domains, affecting agency, ideology, and the cultures that surround game developers, players, and scholars.  

Richard Colby is the Assistant Director for First-Year Writing and Teaching Professor for the Writing Program at the University of Denver, USA. He co-edited the collection Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games (2013) and has published several articles about video games and teaching.  

Matthew S.S. Johnson is Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA. He specializes in rhetoric and composition, digital literacies, and video game studies. He is Reviews Editor for the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. His scholarship focuses on dismantling boundaries between work and play.

Rebekah Shultz Colby is Teaching Professor at the University of Denver, USA. She examines how video games inform digital literacies and digital rhetoric. She co-edited Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games (2013).