This article provides a framework for using digital game spaces in college writing classrooms to help students develop environmental awareness. Drawing on a range of relevant theories, the author argues that digital game play offers simulated experiential learning opportunities that allow students to locate virtual representations of the environment that potentially mirror, critique, or even promote new ideas regarding material-world environmental concerns. By mapping critical, rhetorical, and ethical literacies onto digital gaming practices, this article advances a creative pedagogical approach to engagement with environmental rhetorics, narratives, and ideologies. Through an extended example of the popular mobile app The Sims Freeplay, the author brings together the disciplines of rhetoric and composition,
environmental studies, and game studies in a productive conversation about the ways gaming can increase students’ rhetorical and ethical engagement with both writing and the environment.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric