Improving Writing Literacies through Digital Gaming Literacies: Facebook Gaming in the Composition Classroom

• Gaming in composition teaches engagement, collaboration, and critical thinking.
• Gaming develops community building and collaboration that are professionally useful.
• Gaming motivates students to expand their literacies.
• Engaging in writing processes is similar to mastering jobs in Mafia Wars.
• Collaboration-type writing connects interactions in gaming to those in composition.

Composition continually evolves as new technologies emerge and newer generations transform digital literacies. As the concept of literacies is being defined and redefined by the technologies our students use, we as instructors can tap into this resource to engage students in the excitement of writing. Through digital literacies, students are networking and learning to match social mediums to the information they generate and audiences they address. I propose the integration of gaming and composition as a way to develop students’ writing practices. In this article, I show how areas of composition—such as engagement, problem solving, collaboration, and audience—connect to the Facebook gaming world. Through the use of gaming in composition instruction, we can build bridges between students’ interests and help them develop scholarly purposes of writing. Mafia Wars functions as a vehicle to further enhance students’ writing and as a way to demonstrate how gameplay contributes to what students learn in composition. Additionally, I suggest assignments that exemplify how Mafia Wars is applicable to the development of writing. By including gaming in composition, students can learn how the skills they already use in gaming are relevant to writing and develop an awareness of how they are cultivating these skills.