Making Games Matter: Games and Materiality Special Issue Introduction 

In turn, the popularity of these conversations on materiality has prompted pushback from indigenous and cultural rhetorics perspectives. Respondents have raised the question of which epistemic traditions get to define this new—if, indeed, it is even new—interest in the aleatory behavior of matter and for what political purposes? The Eurocentric roots of Graham Harman’s (2005) object-oriented ontology (OOO) serves as a cautionary tale for those who would use OOO rhetorically (Bogost, 2012; Barnett and Boyle, 2016; Brown & Rivers, 2013). Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, Jacqueline Rhodes, Malea Powell and Melanie Yergeau’s (2016) Cultural Rhetorics Conference panel noted among other issues that we should be suspicious of any Eurocentric starting place for a renewed interest in materiality that neglected to include or acknowledge prior or current work by non-Western traditions on the agency of matter. As Mark Houston (2021) and David Grant (2017) have recently argued in College Composition and Communication (CCC), we need to acknowledge the work of Indigenous scholars as concepts from Indigenous culture, while predating Eurocentric theories of materiality, explain how materials have a vital force with which we are all intra-actively connected (Haas, 2007; Tallbear, 2015; Arola, 2018; Ravenscroft, 2018). For instance, Zoe Todd (2016) argues that the Inuit conception of Sila, which means both breath and climate, shows how we are all interconnected and attuned to our environments.

We are not the first to raise these issues. Feminist, non-white, and queer responses to related concepts about materialism and embodiment in posthumanism have given similar warnings. Donna Haraway (2016), Sara Ahmed (2006), Rosi Braidotti (2013), and Carey Wolfe (2010) have highlighted a need to account for the ways materiality and embodiment affords and forecloses human agency, which inherently co-constructs our rhetorical political agency. In doing this, we need to especially trace how we have historically used human bodies that were other than white male as material objects. Braidotti (2013) opens her book, The Posthuman, with “Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that. Some of us are not even considered fully human now, let alone in previous moments of Western social, political, and scientific history” (p. 1). With these lines, Braidotti poignantly brings to the forefront the fact that only white men have been considered fully human for much of the history of Western humanism; the rest were considered subhuman creatures and, more often than not, relegated to laboring objects. In fact, we have a rich Eurocentric tradition of materiality because this perspeciive has been historically materially privileged. As Ahmed (2006) cautions, Edmund Husserl could be oriented materially toward his writing desk because of his privileged, white male position as he was afforded time, a place, and a desk to write, privileges few women or people of color possessed during that time period.

Sadly, within many facets of global capitalism such as factories, mines, and farms around the globe, this is still the case today. We get cheap material goods at Walmart (such as games) at the cost of even cheaper human labor: when we purchase and consume products, we become assembled with these laboring bodies through these things. As assemblages of embodied labor and materiality, we also often get cheap games because game developers work ridiculously long hours during crunch periods, often for weeks on end—a practice which prohibits many women from entering the industry (Consalvo, 2008) and, consequently, partially contributes to the toxic masculine gaming culture Anastasia Salter and Emily Johnson discuss in this special issue. 

Simply put, how we define and discuss matter matters. Our overview of work in new materialism and rhetoric and related conversations is in no way offered up as comprehensive or complete. Others in the field have already offered fuller discussions and, indeed, several of our contributors to this special issue will also offer more detailed engagement. Instead, our goal is to establish that our exigency starts from the observation that rhetoric and writing studies’ engagements with games have yet to fully reflect the energy and insights of the material (and nonhuman or posthuman) turns. At a very basic level, our challenge to our contributors was to extend past work on materiality both inside our fields and outside in the broader terrain of game studies work on materiality by drawing on ideas like agential realism and new materialism. In this way, we hope to continue to demonstrate the theoretical and methodological relevance of games in rhetoric and composition by connecting it to ongoing and contemporary conversations that are occurring outside of this area of study. 

One thing we want to emphasize in this introduction is that how we define and understand materiality matters profoundly. As our contributors will show, it is harder to actually feature materiality in play than it might seem. Consider, for example, that Bogost (2007) specifically excluded the role of embodiment in the work of BJ Fogg from his definition of procedural rhetoric. Bogost wrote, “Perhaps [Fogg’s concept of persuasive technologies] offer valid ways of using technology to alter behavior. But not one of them deploys rhetoric (p. 60). From this perspective, Bogost finds nothing rhetorically or persuasively worthy in the world of the nonhuman in as far as rhetoric is concerned. Ironically, he would go on to write about the world of nonhuman objects and, in particular, about videogames that simulated the lack of human control or knowledge as part of demonstrating what he called “alien phenomenology.” However, because he bracketed materiality from rhetoric, those who would seek to use procedural rhetoric would not be directed to consider the role of materiality as anything rhetorically significant. 

By contrast, contending with the role of ambient material forces involves more radically decentering and distributing agency with the design and play of games but also within the study of the worlds of meaning and writing that surround play such as player communities and streaming. Beyond mere scholarly exigencies, we see more and more in the world of play that compels us to want to center materiality as a rhetorical analytical lens. While countless examples exist, we can offer gamification as one compelling illustration. Beyond scholars who study games, games are often seen as mere diversions even as, with smart phones, they play an increasingly ubiquitous role in our lives. For instance, even when we are not playing games, we often use apps and social media spaces that use game logics to gamify their use. While Ian Bogost (2011, May 3) has famously coined the term “exploitationware” to refer to the corporate use of badges and points to lure customers into using their products, arguing that accruing points is the least interesting part of any game, these gamified digital spaces and apps still play a rhetorically material force in our lives. 

For this reason, it remains vital to assess the ways in which the materiality and embodiment of games function as types of philosophical (Bogost, 2012) or rhetorical carpentry (Rivers & Brown, 2013) as well as by connecting these insights to contemporary work on politics and ethics with regard to materiality. In this way, the embodied material multimodality of games also affords Greggory Ulmer’s (1994) invention technique of writing the paradigm or performing the very thing being written as a way to further examine theory on an embodied and material level. However, by also following Bogost’s (2007) logics of procedurality, we argue that games are materially embodied multimodal systems that can make rhetorically powerful arguments about processes and other materially ideological systems. For instance, with procedurality, Bogost (2007) has argued that game procedures, their mechanics, rules, narratives, and graphics materially position players into specific ideologically laden embodied subject positions and, therefore, offer embodied critiques of these systems. Furthermore, Steve Holmes (2017) has argued that games create procedural habits that construct a specific materially embodied ethos for players within these ideological game systems.