Welcome to Playing Yourself: The Rhetoric of Games, a podcast series produced by students in David Morgen’s Play, Make, Write, Think class at Emory University. If, as Bernard Suits says, a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles,” then why do games continue to captivate our time, attention, and disposable income?

In each episode, we choose one game to play with a critical eye, analyzing its rhetorical situation, the sorts of obstacles it creates, the types of decisions players make in playing, the values or ways of thinking the game encourages, and the impact the game has. We’ll pay attention to the medium of games as well as their messages. And ultimately we come to the question: when playing a game, are you playing the game, or are you playing yourself?