Embracing discord? The rhetorical consequences of gaming platforms as classrooms

Gaming culture and platforms are becoming more popular for educational use, a trend that has been amplified during the massive migration to online education and conferencing across institutions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Among these repurposed tools, one of the most popular is an unassuming social platform originally associated with guild meetings and gaming communities: Discord. Using a combination of software studies and design thinking, and drawing upon the authors’ experience designing and participating in Discord communities for academic purposes including conferences and classroom usage, this work examines the rhetorical disruption this games-designated platform potentially presents to institutional spaces and expectations. These disruptions and rhetorical disconnects manifest throughout the platform, involving choices in aesthetics, logistical elements of organization and threading (or the lack thereof), and assumptions in visual communication and available rhetorics. Even without greater gamification intention, such design elements and platform affordances can offer significant potential impact on the classroom, conference, or academic organization occupying this space. These changes are not without risks: gaming platforms carry with them mechanisms for decontextualized and intertextual racism, misogyny, and the transference of toxic community norms back to the classroom.