Inspired by games such as the various Tycoon titles, DESPAIR (Department of English Simulated Problematic Adjunct Instructor Relations) puts players in the role of a Writing Program Administrator (WPA) in order to shed light on the plight of contingent labor in the writing classroom and within the larger institutional framework. The game's alternate mode, UPLIFT (Utopian Potential for Life with Instructors at Full Time), provides an example of a way academics might use simulation games to advocate for change in an affirmative manner by demonstrating how alternatives might work.

Grounded in a series of local accounts, this webtext examines complex issues facing pre-tenure writing program administrators as they enter the professoriate while negotiating hybrid identities as teachers, researchers, and administrators. Developed out of a roundtable at the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication, the project also emphasizes contemporary alternatives to roundtable design that regard openness, accessibility, and persistence as priorities for delivery and circulation.

For writing instructors and technical support staff, our informal collaborative experiment suggests the potential value of stepping outside one’s comfort zone—one’s domain—to forge institutional relationships that either don’t exist or that lack dialogue and depth. For writing program administrators, our experience might serve as a reminder that innovation often happens at the margins.

In this webtext, we discuss one powerful way that writing program administrators (WPAs) can start to reshape their basic rhetorical situation, potentially shifting the underlying premises that external audiences bring to discussions about writing instruction. We argue that digital video, when used strategically, is a particularly valuable medium for communicating how writing courses promote student learning.