Do you want to play a game?
[[Yes]]
[[No, I want to read an article]]Oh, good, you’re in the right place.
[[How to play this article]]Well too bad. This is a place where you play a game. It might look like reading an article, but I envision this more as a piece of interactive (non)fiction, which, if you aren’t a purist about definitions, qualifies it as a game. Don’t worry, you’ll still be doing lots of reading and thinking. Just also more clicking, and maybe decision-making.
[[How to play this article]]
If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve already figured out most of how to play this article/game. When you see a hyperlink, you click, and it takes you to a new screen with new writing and new choices. Sometimes you’ll be given a choice of different links, and you’ll need to pick which path to take. Don’t worry, though, you can always loop back around and try the other options later. There will also be links in the text to the sources I cite, if they’re open-access. Feel free to click on those and be redirected, if you want to go down a rabbit hole. [[Shall we get started?|What are we doing here?]]
For this special edition of <i>Computers and Composition Online</i>, we’re discussing the intersections of games and materiality, but you probably already knew that. While there’s going to be a set of literature-review-oriented questions here in a minute that you can choose to click on so you can get a sense of exactly how I’m grounding myself and my work in the theory surrounding materiality and embodiment, I’m actually not very interested in retreading the ground of asserting that games are material objects. That work has been done very well by many others, encapsulated in things like Apperley and Jayemane’s (2012) literature review of the material turn in game studies. So, I’ll talk briefly about what theories I’m using to think about games as material, but as for staking the claim that the connection should be made in the first place, I think you’d be better served going elsewhere, since I’ll consider it somewhat of a given for my [[purposes.|Alright, so then what is the purpose of this?]]
If we accept the premise that games are material, then that opens up a myriad of avenues for discussing, thinking about, playing with, composing with, and designing games. This could be an incredible boon for us as teachers, scholars, and community participants, since this will get people thinking about the rhetorical import of their play experiences differently. However, the theory of materiality and embodiment, as with a lot of critical theory, is often thought of as intimidating, complex, or obfuscated, even for graduate students and early-career scholars. The theory as written can be dense, and despite its obvious connections to our lived experience, there are sometimes gaps in the works where they could be demonstrating how these theories can shape and alter our daily lives. Simply put, to work in material theory means you have to put up with a very high bar for entry into the conversation. But it doesn’t have to be like this.
[[So what are you proposing?]]
My goal with this piece is to create an accessible framework to get people – whether that’s students in the classroom, scholars who want an overview before diving in themselves, or anyone else who wants it – to learn about materiality, and more specifically, the materiality of interactive digital media, since I think considering this media is both one of the more pressing and one of the more common daily tasks asked of us in the 21st century. I present the somewhat convoluted story of this article's origins [[here|How'd you come up with this idea?]].
While this article/game will contain all the normal parts of an article, like a literature review, some exemplars, and a final section with implications for the future, my goal here is to make this as clearly understandable as possible, and to give readers a solid framework with [[concrete tools|What are these concrete tools you’re talking about?]] they can use to start assessing the relationship between a game and its own material existence.
So, if you’re new to materiality as a field of study, I hope you’ll find this piece to be a helpful introduction to some of the big thoughts, as well as presenting a useful tool for you to start doing your own analysis. I’m trying my best to create the work I sorely needed when I was a first-semester PhD student, taking a seminar on material rhetorics.
And if you’ve already done the legwork and reading to be a part of this conversation, welcome! I hope that, even though you might not need these concepts worked through again for your own benefit, that you can see what I’m doing here as being useful to you in other ways, like as a teaching tool for your own students or your communities.
On a pragmatic level, this article/game presents a tool for analyzing the materiality of digital games through a heuristic, which takes the form of four questions anyone can apply to any game or interactive experience, and upon answering them, have a better understanding of that game’s material existence. Each of the four questions deals with a different aspect of material existence, so you can apply these questions as a set or more selectively, if there’s a particular issue of concern. I hope these questions can provide a meaningful starting point for thinking about materiality, while also allowing for more nuanced questions to arise from the initial analysis.
[[How this work will look]]
In terms of structure, this article/game will follow a simple format. First, I’ll give you the option to go to the literature review where I’ll cover some of the basic questions behind the theory I’m using, like “Why a Heuristic?” and “How are Games Embodied?” If you want a sense of how I’m grounding myself or you’re new to the theory yourself, here’s where you should start.
After you’re done with the lit review or if you feel versed enough in the theory to get right to it, you can view the questions of the heuristic. Clicking on each question will take you to a more in-depth explanation of why I decided this was a question worth asking, as well as why this question is important to an everyday lived experience.
Finally, inside each question there will be an exemplar, where I show how asking the question works in terms of a specific game. For these purposes, I’ve chosen <i>The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim</i> as my exemplar game, since it has a lot of cultural grounding and purchase, and also can be experienced in a variety of ways. At the end of my explanation for each question, there will be a video, where I show off functions of <i>Skyrim</i> and explain how I’m applying the question to my understanding of the game.
[[Okay, take me to the lit review]]
[[I want to see the heuristic questions]]
Here are four big questions. Understanding my answers will help you situate this work.
[[How is Matter Rhetorical?]]
[[Why a Heuristic?]]
[[How are Games Material?]]
[[How are Games Embodied?]]
[[Okay, take me to the heuristic questions|I want to see the heuristic questions]]
Okay, here you are! The four questions of the heuristic.
[[How Does the Game Communicate via its Material Existence?]]
[[How Does the Game Stay Relevant in the Digital Age?]]
[[How Does the Game Communicate with Other Objects?]]
[[What Does the Game do to/with/against the Play Environment?]]
[[Actually, I’d like to see the lit review|Okay, take me to the lit review]]
[[Okay, I think we’re done here]]
So, before we can get into why the materiality of games is important or even how games are material, I need to briefly outline how I see matter writ large as being rhetorical. This is a really big question, and it can get kind of in the weeds of abstraction, but I think we can answer it simply with: matter is rhetorical because our material conditions impact the things we can do.
My understanding of the importance of materiality is encapsulated well by <a href="http://journalofmultimodalrhetorics.com/2-2-mcintyre">Megan McIntyre</a> (2018) in her article for <i>The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics</i>, where she sets up the relationship between physical matter and rhetorical production as mutually constitutive: matter is both "physical and discursive" in that matter can make suasive arguments that impact human agents -- Latour's famous example of the speed bump as a material argument for slowing down comes immediately to mind. Additionally, matter is rhetorical because it is a necessary condition for rhetorical production - I can't make this argument without a laptop to type it on. Similarly, you cannot play/read it without some kind of computing device of your own. This is important for [[several reasons]].
Asking me why I decided to create this tool in the way I did is a fine question, and I’ll answer it in two ways: One, I created a heuristic because a heuristic presents an interactive and ontological way of learning about something, which is one of the ways I think you can best learn about big concepts like materiality; and two, because someone who came before me already demonstrated that this was a fruitful path to learning and discovery. I’ll talk about the second thing more in-depth first.
My heuristic that I’ve created for this piece takes notes for its groundings from Carole Blair's 1999 new materialist heuristic, wherein she uses public memorials as a site of analysis to demonstrate the rhetorical presence of material objects. Blair shows through her heuristic that rhetoric as we know it is inherently material, and that "no text is a text, nor does it have meaning, influence, political stance, or legibility, in the absence of material form" (p.18). A book has an inky material presence, a speech has material conditions surrounding its oration, and a game has a controller that you physically hold and manipulate to alter the state of the world on-screen. Beyond her claims that all rhetoric is at least in part material, Blair makes [[further important claims]] about the state of rhetoric as the paradigm of the field used it at the time of her writing.
If you’re versed in the theory of materiality (or read the question on the matter), then I feel like I can safely move forward with this premise: we can't ever really privilege our own thoughts and actions, or the thoughts and actions of other humans, over the literally material facts of our surroundings. But how does this relate to videogames, specifically, since they are by nature a digital product, whose assets exist not in the physical world but within lines of code interpreted by computers?
The connections between videogames and materiality can be made in several ways, but all of them hinge on the fact that videogames require what <a href="http://gamestudies.org/1301/articles/karhulahti_kinesthetic_theory_of_the_videogame"> Veli-Matti Karhulahti (2013) </a> calls a "kinesthetics" of the medium, or the non-trivial "psychomotor" effort needed to engage with them (Karhulahti). Put a little more simply, someone has to play the game in order for there to be an experience. Without expending the effort needed to play, the content of the game remains barred from the players, which makes videogames an entirely different digital experiences from films and television, which only require passive consumption. This idea has gotten a little more complicated in recent years with the advent of let’s plays and Twitch streaming, where people can watch someone else play the game and still experience something – whether they’re getting a full or even meaningful experience is a source of great debate. But regardless, in order for the content to be accessed, someone has to undergo [[the labor of play]].
Embodiment is a complex subject, since it’s not just about the raw data you get from inhabiting a physical form - it's all tied up in affect, which is the sum total of your emotions, habits, and frames of mind, as well as the inherent politics of existing in a body that society views a certain way. So, in thinking about embodiment, it benefits us to pare down our variables by considering it rhetorically: scholars like Michael Mendelson (1998) refer to embodiment as proving an argument through demonstrating it in yourself – his example comes from Cicero, who argued for eloquence by displaying eloquence in his speeches (p.30). And if we’re thinking of the body as a rhetorical object, then we also have to think of it as material , since as Anne Frances Wysocki (2012) points out, the body is material because it is a [[medium itself|EG 2]] - a way of experiencing the world via sensory data (2012).The term Rickert uses, "relationality," comes up elsewhere in the literature on rhetoric and helps us to solidify an understanding of the lens that scholars are using. In the introduction to their edited collection <i>The Rhetoric of Everyday Things</i>, Scott Barnett and Casey Boyle (2016) use relationality to explain how materiality acts as a paradigm shift in rhetorical thought. Rhetoric is often thought of as an epistemological issue, or one that arises from how we create and understand our systems of knowledge. This makes sense on its face, since we often think of rhetoric as a way to communicate meaning and knowledge between parties. But as Barnett and Boyle point out, rhetoric as epistemic overdetermines particular discursive elements, such as the written or spoken word, when it is clear that things that do not produce verbal discourse still have [[rhetorical import]] (images, nonverbal sound, and speed bumps).
To further expand our understanding of rhetoric as ontological, we can turn to a scholar that people well-read in games studies are maybe already familiar with, for his contributions to the field: Ian Bogost. In his book <i>Alien Phenomenology</i> (2012), Bogost discusses his own framework, which he calls "object-oriented ontology" or OOO and that he insists is pronounced "triple-O" (but I won't tell if you say it the fun way, like a ghost). What OOO does, according to Bogost, is to de-center humans in whatever framework you happen to operate in, so in our case, rhetorical. "We humans," Bogost says, "are elements, but not the sole elements, of philosophical interest" (p.6). Instead of considering ourselves as the apex of a given rhetorical situation as the originator and/or receiver of a message, OOO entreats us to consider a more distributed view of message formation, where our ability to communicate is no more or less important to the rhetoric being produced than the comfiness of the shoes we’re wearing, or the weather outside.
These ideas are echoed and built upon by Jane Bennett (2010) in <i>Vibrant Matter</i>, with her idea of "thing-power," or "the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle" (p.6). According to Bennett, all things, including humans AS things, have thing-power, which exists in a flat hierarchy; the agentic power of humans is not superior in either value or ability to the agentic power of a bottle cap (one of her examples). This idea, that humans and things actually exert the same sort of rhetorical influence upon the world, is also discussed by Laurie Gries (2015) in <i>Still Life with Rhetoric</i>. In the book, Gries terms the relationship between humans and things to be a part of an "ontological hybridity," that cannot allow for "any bifurcation of humans and things, culture and nature, object and subject" (p.5). This means that we can never meaningfully separate the act of communication from its [[material conditions]].
Rhetoric being about doing and not meaning also means that Blair takes a similar stand for rhetoric as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200419132326/http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes">Roland Barthes</a> does for literature in 1967's "The Death of the Author": we cannot impose a single interpretation onto a text based on an understanding of the author's goals and motivations. Rather, if we examine rhetoric's potential for consequence, as Blair puts it, we come up with a multiplicity of lived experiences, unique to those who participated in the text, each equally valid as the next. This idea is easily translated into thinking about videogames, since one of the largest draws of the play experience (and a marketable selling point for several large titles) is how individualizable a game can become, based on player input and choice. Thus, instead of searching for singular morals or symbolic meaning within the body of a game, the more important question becomes "what is the game doing to/saying back to/enacting upon each player?" While Blair wrote in 1999, and several scholars of materiality have done meaningful work to expand how we think about rhetoric materially, traditional meaning-laden interpretations of rhetoric still abound in the field and are particularly present in first-year-writing classrooms through the continued not-always-so-critical teaching of things like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_situation"> Lloyd Bitzer's (1968) rhetorical situation </a>. Thus, pieces like the one you’re reading right now are necessary to continue pushing back against a particular rhetorical paradigm.
[[So why not just use Blair’s heuristic? Why make a new one?]]
While Blair's original heuristic is useful for examining the rhetoric of physical material objects, it fails to capture the necessary intricacies of examining a digital interactive experience that often (but not always) includes a narrative or narratives. The original heuristic has several questions which are only of passing importance to an understanding of videogames, such as a question about the durability of the text. While literal durability is of great importance to many physical objects, since videogames exist digitally and the destruction of their physical apparatus such as a disc does not, in fact, destroy the game itself, a question about the material hardiness of a game does not expand our critical understanding of it in the same way it does when asked of a statue.
Instead, the new heuristic understands Blair's question more broadly as of being one about the longevity of the object, and asks a question pertaining to the longevity of a game: namely, how it continues to assert its relevancy in a rapidly shifting digital environment, with new technologies constantly emerging. Similarly, a question about how the game interacts with the environment of play was added to the new heuristic, since the situation and material conditions of play are important to an understanding of how play happens, while a question from Blair about the "possibilities of reproduction or preservation" of the text was removed as largely irrelevant in an era where games can be archived, emulated, and endlessly reproduced digitally (though the preservation of older games made for obsolete systems is a fascinating study in materiality in itself). Some others of Blair's questions, however, proved to be useful to an examination of the materiality of games, such as the final question, "How Does the Text Act on Persons?" (45). An understanding of how an interactive medium such as a videogame is not only acted upon, but acts back upon its players, is invaluable to getting at the heart of games' materiality.
[[Now, back to the first thing you said]]
While Blair was the inspiration for this piece, and I owe a great debt to her work, I also think I can justify using the framework of a heuristic on my own terms. This piece is intended to be a teaching tool. I want the people who play-read this game to leave the experience feeling like materiality is something they can tackle, either as a scholar in their own right or as something that they can effectively communicate to their students.
This heuristic, since it’s in the form of a list of questions, is also something that anyone can pick up and use more simply than if they were attempting to do materialist work from scratch. So, it is my hope that this heuristic is a springboard for students and scholars to navigate the theory of materiality by asking these questions, seeing what answers come forward, and then start asking their own, probably much smarter questions. By working with these ideas through an interactive webtext, and thus not so much passively receiving knowledge as interactively being with the knowledge, I’m also practicing the materiality that I preach by creating an ontologically grounded experience.
[[Back to lit review|Okay, take me to the lit review]]
[[To Heuristic|I want to see the heuristic questions]]
Many scholars have turned specifically to the language of embodiment to further explore how games are material. Bryan Behrenshausen (2007), looking specifically at the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution, which as it sounds, has players move their whole body and press pads with their feet to mimic on-screen dance moves, describes gaming as a form of embodied performance, because not only is the body the key framework through which you engage with the game, but the physical act of play is a type of public performance, seen and judged by bystanders and other players. While this is especially true for arcade games, the prevalence of online multiplayer means that the performance of play is often judged even when a player is in the comfort of their own home.
Building on the idea of our acts of play as embodied, scholars have looked at specifically how games tap into the affordances of embodiment, as well as how they are constrained by how technology can interact with the human form. Both <a href="http://enculturation.net/glitch_taxonomy_kit"> Nina Belojevic</a> (2019) and Graeme Kirkpatrick(2009) talk about controllers for consoles as means of embodied play, since to push a button is an embodied action that forms the basis of modern console gaming. James Ash (2016) takes a bit of a broader lens with his concept of the "interface envelope," which he describes as "generated through relations between non-human object and human practices" (P.9). It is through our particular technological interfaces that we both act as players of games and are impacted by games in turn. Thus, an embodied understanding of ourselves as players and an ontological understanding of the material things acting upon us come together to form the basis of how we can see games and play experiences as rhetorical beyond the narratives they present.
[[This experience doesn't feel very embodied. Is this even a game?]]
[[Back to lit review|Okay, take me to the lit review]]
[[To the Heuristic|I want to see the heuristic questions]]
The first and maybe biggest question that this heuristic seeks to answer brings the relationship between the evaluated game and its materiality into focus. While there are a couple lit review questions about how games at large are material, embodied experiences, this does not mean that all games are material or embodied in the same way. Thus, an examination of a particular game's relationship to the physical world and the physicality of the player are important.
While I'm going to get more into discussing the literal environment of play in Question 4, this question is actually more about the material components of communication -- how the game acts suasively as an inanimate object. This is a slightly more complicated question than if I was dealing with the suasive force of Latour's speed bump because games are not simply non-discursive rhetorical artifacts: they often contain narratives and lengthy pieces of both written and spoken language. It is not uncommon in the field of rhetoric and composition or other relevant fields to treat games as texts that you can read and analyze like a book or a film. So, the rhetorical ability of games is multifaceted, because a game can work to persuade its players and communicate values through things like dialogue, narration, and plot. But what is important to realize is that this is not where the suasive potential of games [[ends|Q1.2]].
When we think about the material existence of something, it’s important to consider its longevity. The rhetorical power of a plastic spoon in a landfill is vastly different from that of a reusable metal one in someone’s kitchen, or a biodegradable bamboo utensil. How long things stick around, and in what condition they age, is an important consideration when we’re trying to determine how something acts on its surroundings.
Games are funny this way, though, because despite possessing physical accoutrement like discs, and needing a physical computing hub for play like a console, the disc and the console are not the totality of the game. Much of the game exists digitally and destroying a disc or even a console will not destroy the game itself, though it might destroy a single player’s save file and play history. So when I talk about a game’s longevity, I’m not talking about its physical decay, but rather how the game as a digital-material artifact remains relevant in a rapidly shifting digital environment.
Technology develops rapidly, and with new growth and invention comes the inevitable idea of obsolescence. As newer machines and software appear, older versions stop seeing content produced for them, and eventually, companies stop servicing these products or shut them down entirely. This poses an interesting problem for gaming, in particular on dedicated consoles. A new console cycle happens around every seven years, where new versions of each brand debut and games begin to be made to those specifications, which means they cannot be run on older hardware. If the new console is also not “backwards compatible,” then games made for older hardware cannot be played on new hardware, either: each console generation is siloed to its specific catalog. This obviously poses [[issues|RAD 1.5]] for study and preservation of games.
Since the whole point of an ontological understanding of rhetoric means that humans are not centered as the primary recipients/senders of rhetorical messages, a scholar must think not only about how the material world is communicating with them, but how these objects are in communication with each other. This question seeks to establish the relationship between a given game and the cultural environment surrounding it, in addition to the player. This is, yet again, not about the environment of play - that's for Question 4 - this question is thinking more about the communities and ecologies of play that spring up around gaming.
Much like literature, film, and other art forms, games do not exist in a vacuum. Every game owes a debt to the games that came before it, since those earlier games set up expectations for themes, mechanics, and ways to successfully play, so that each game a player picks up is not an entirely new learning experience, but something they can reasonably expect to understand, if they’ve played other things before. In more traditional rhetorical terms, games are always part of a larger [[genre conversation]], since both players and developers are expected to have an understanding of how a particular game works once it is identified as a type or genre of game, such as a first-person shooter, a roguelike, or real-time strategy.
All of the questions prior to this one, if you’ve been reading them in order, have dealt with how we can conceive of the digital trappings of a game and the ways we play as still material and embodied, because they are. With this question, we’re finally getting into some of the most tangible aspects of a game’s materiality: the physical environment of play.
Play, even when the consequences are enacted in a digital world, always occurs in physical spaces, and physical spaces have material conditions. These material conditions work to either constrain or afford play in various ways – if you don’t have a hoop, it’s harder to play basketball, and if you don’t have a television to display the console’s output or a couch to sit on, video gaming becomes more difficult or entirely impossible. So, in order for play to take place at all, players must attend to the material conditions of their surroundings—they should have a place where they can sit or stand in front of a television or computer screen that is hooked up to a computing device doing the work of rendering the game and responding to input. The player’s physical location must be in a specific proximity to the visual display so that their input devices (a controller or a keyboard) can successfully get player input to the computing device. If any one of these conditions is not met, the act of play can be made inconvenient, uncomfortable, or even impossible. This is further complicated by new and innovative [[gaming technologies]].
When brought together, the questions and theory of this heuristic start the important work of making new materialist theory and its intersections with digital media more accessible. Students and scholars can use the tools of the heuristic to investigate particular games and to develop good critical habits surrounding the relationship between games and materiality. Through this heuristic, much more generative critical thought can occur, a lot of it from people who may not traditionally be invited to the high-theory conversation.
This heuristic, while intended to be a starting point for people not incredibly versed in materiality, does not fully address the intersections of digital gaming and materiality. In particular, a fifth question, “How Does the Game Act on Players?” might very well be a fruitful addition to this line of inquiry. Such a question was not included in this version of the heuristic because the depth it would take to fully situate it theoretically would easily double the length of this already sizable article/game. However, this presents a good avenue for expansion on this work by future scholars.
Another avenue for picking this work up would be a classroom or community study of how this heuristic is used by students and players, since it was unpublished prior to this and has not yet seen a lot of public or scholarly attention. A dedicated look at how this tool serves the communities for which it is intended would allow for more growth and development of the heuristic to [[even better serve our classrooms and communities]].
Across games scholarship, people have to contend with the fact that while games are authored and scripted systems who can convey lots of knowledge to the player via spoken or written language, games also possess other means of communicating. Mary Flanagan (2013) describes this in her book Critical Play as the idea that:
<blockquote>Games carry beliefs within their representation systems and mechanics. Artists using games as a medium of expression, then manipulate elements common to games - representation systems and styles, rules of progress, codes of conduct, context of reception, winning and losing paradigms, ways of interacting in a game - for they are the material properties of games, much likemarble and chisel or pen and ink bring with them their own intended possibilities, limitations, and conventions. (Flanagan, p.3)</blockquote>
These attendant affordances, as well as the constraints and concerns of genre, have an impact on how we conceive of games as [[conveying their content to us]].Thinking about procedural rhetoric lets scholars dig in and understand the specific suasive capacity of a given game, since they are no longer examining simply discursive rhetorical elements found in a piece of writing, repackaged for the 21st century: procedures necessitate an agent to enact them, and thus procedural rhetoric engages embodiment differently than traditional discursive work. The vast number of game genres and types that exist also indicates that procedural rhetoric can be used to achieve many different rhetorical ends: the explicit goals, not to speak of the values and belief systems, of a game like the peaceful slice of life simulator Animal Crossing are very different from a scifi shooter like Halo, though both are played with a controller on a television via a console. Steve Holmes (2017) specifically addresses that procedures in games can lead us to the creation of “procedural habits” or modes of being with distinct embodied and material components.
What all of this means is that procedural rhetoric gives an in to better consider specifically how the game acts on us as players in several ways. For one, we can be impacted by the implicit values of a procedure on an emotional and intellectual level (“if the game wants me to do this to win, it must be the right thing to do”). Additionally, we can also see how the game’s privileging of specific psychomotor or kinesthetic abilities like hand-eye coordination and reaction time lends itself to the idea that specific embodied or physical skills are valuable and should be prized. This gets us into the much murkier issue of accessibility and disability in gaming, since the very nature of a lot of games preclude a subset of potential players by requiring physical movements that are not sustainable or achievable for some people.
[[So how is this useful in my life?]]
Thinking about games as interactive values system using procedural rhetoric turns games into powerful argument makers. Since games communicate their values by having the player enact them to win or progress through play, the rhetoric of games is actually embodied, much like Cicero arguing for eloquence by making an eloquent speech. Thus, using games as educational tools can be incredibly powerful, since they not only get players to consider the arguments they’re putting forward, they make them enact the logical conclusions of their values.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m a big advocate of using games in the classroom for exactly this reason. When my students play a game, they’re dealing with the concepts put forward by the game differently and more holistically and a traditional reading-and-then-discussion classroom model. But that’s not all that procedural rhetoric is good for: teachers can also use the concepts of procedural rhetoric to open up new avenues for composition for students; students can make games, and get experience not only with procedural rhetoric, but with multimodal composition more broadly.
This[[example|Example 1]] takes us through how our exemplar game, <i> Skyrim</i>, uses procedural rhetoric to reward the player for making different choices.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjpjBrDqI3s"> This video </a> demonstrates some of the procedural rhetoric present in the narrative/mechanical choices the player can make in <i>Skyrim</i>. Since the video is a little lengthy (but well worth the watch to see the full context and depth of storytelling involved), I'll summarize here:
The player character has been framed for a crime and thrown into a prison that doubles as a mine, and in order to move the story forward, you must find a way out. There are multiple paths to escape that revolve around whether you choose to aid or kill a character named Madanach. If you help Madanach escape, he presents you with enchanted gear as a reward. He then re-establishes his band of rebel fighters and you can encounter them later in another location. If you kill him, you can escape on your own and are greeted at the exit by the man who framed you, who rewards you with different gear for taking care of a bothersome political prisoner. A third option is to help Madanach escape up until the final fight, where you can turn on him and kill him, thus ensuring you get both sets of reward gear.
What this branching narrative indicates is that the game rewards specific styles of play differently through procedural rhetoric. A player interested in continuing narrative experiences would benefit most from never killing Madanach, so that they can encounter him later in the game. A player interested in the most material gain for their play experience would obviously choose the path where they get both sets of rewards, but would then be locked out of the later narrative events. Thus, the game makes the player weigh and engage with a cost-benefit analysis that takes into account preferences for the play experience.
[[Back to Questions|I want to see the heuristic questions]]
While games exist as digital artifacts, attending to the real material consequences of obsolescence can help us as educators in working to bridge the infamous “Digital Divide” of Selfe and Hawisher et al (2004). Students, who some might erroneously think of as “digital natives,” come to the classroom with disparate levels of technological literacy due to many factors, including access to updated hardware and software. Gaming as a subset of technological literacy, or maybe as a separate literacy theorized by Arduini (2018), means that even students who are versed in things like internet search engines may come into the space with very little understanding of how play works. Thinking about obsolescence and relevance as impacted by material and economic conditions will help structure classrooms to be more equitable for students coming from different literacy backgrounds. These differences can come through gaming culture in the form of mods to games, emulating games for obsolete systems, or through commercial [[updates to software|Example 2]]
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulfr_D9cMXE">This video</a> demonstrate the graphical differences between launch versions of Skyrim in 2011 and remasters done in 2016. While these differences may not seem to effect the material conditions of play for the player, they are nevertheless reflective of the game being adapted to new material conditions (ie, new console hardware and software) as a means of keeping itself as an option for play well beyond the technological limitations of its release.
The significance of this lies mainly in the fact that these changes demonstrate the significant amount of labor necessary in order to bring games forward to meet the advancement of technology. Game graphics are not only some of the most time-consuming portions of game development, but they are often the very thing that determines whether a player will pick the game up -- if a game does not look visually appealing, players are less likely to engage with it, so it behooves older games to engage in graphical updates to maintain longevity and attract new players. Additionally, graphics are often the largest user-end consideration in terms of whether or not they are capable of playing a game; most ready-built home computers do not come with graphics processors strong enough to render contemporary gaming graphics, and so users must retrofit or build entirely new computers with high-dollar external graphics cards.
[[Back to the questions|I want to see the heuristic questions]]
Since games exist as part of a genre ecology and foster the growth of communities around their play, games can be both excellent teaching and community outreach tools. Inside of classrooms, teaching with a game can include using paratexts as composing assignments, like Rebekah Shultz Colby and Richard Colby do with World of Warcraft (2008). Outside of classrooms, composing with paratexts is a valuable way to gain entrance into gaming communities, which people can use to spread information not just about the game, but about other issues or causes they wish to promote.
[[Example 3]]
These links are to some of the most popular paratexts surrounding Skyrim. Even just briefly looking through these genres, which include walkthroughs, guides, and forums, the ways in which these genres build a community of play are apparent, as well as how these genres contribute to knowledge that will change materially the ways players engage with the game. Please note that these forums, as publicly generated and moderated content, may contain strong or inappropriate language.
These paratexts, and the hundreds of other documents like them, are important to think about because they demonstrate the level of engagement that players have with the game, and the amount of time that they are willing to dedicate outside of direct play. Time commitments are some of the most common material engagements we have with our media, since choosing to spend time on something involves a set of choices about how to situate our embodied selves and our physical spaces. Thus, a set of documents like this, that show a continued investment in something for hours beyond literal play, is another way we can continue examining the material impact of the game.
<a href="https://www.ign.com/wikis/the-elder-scrolls-5-skyrim/"> Game Guide and Walkthrough </a>
<a href="https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=794662707"> Community-built crafting guide </a>
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/"> Community chat forum </a>
[[Back to questions|I want to see the heuristic questions]]
This is a short video, made by Holonautic, that describes how the material conditions of play are important to safety in VR experiences. If the environment is not properly attended to, property damage or injury may result. While this is not an example specific to Skyrim, the game does have a VR version, where players must use a headset and motion controls to do things like cast spells and swing weapons, so the safety measures of the video are applicable to playing a game like Skyrim in VR.
Virtual reality is one of the easiest entry points into thinking about the material conditions of the play environment, because of how consciously it must be curated for safety. However, once we start thinking about these things, considering the material conditions of all play becomes easier: even if you're playing on a normal screen instead of a headset, do you want to stand for the several hours of play, or do you want a chair? How closely should that chair be positioned to the screen (which becomes an issue of player vision and screen size)? Is the way you control the game, via keyboard, controller, or some other mechanism, wired to the computing device? If it is not, how far away can you be before the device loses signal connection? Thinking about these things is key when considering how we construct our play spaces for comfort, safety, and efficiency.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEpcIx_lodk"> VR Safety Video </a>
[[Back to Questions|I want to see the heuristic questions]]
Aarseth, Espen.(1997). <i>Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</i>. JHUP.
Apperley, Thomas H., and Jayemane, Darshana. (2012). Games' studies material turn. <i>Westminster Papers</i>, 9(1), 5–25.
Arduini, Tina. (2018). Cyborg gamers: exploring the effects of digital gaming on multimodal composition. <i>Computers and Composition</i> 48, 89-102.
Ash, James.(2016). <i>The Interface Envelope: Gaming, Technology, Power</i>. Bloomsbury Academic.
Banazek, Kerry. (2018) Carpentry in context: what does it look like to be an ethical materialist composer? <i> Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture </i>, np. http://enculturation.net/carpentry-in-context
Barnett, Scott, and Boyle, Casey. (2016). <i> Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things,</i>, 2nd Ed. University Alabama Press.
Barthes, Roland.(1977)The Death of the Author. <i>Image, Music, Text</i>. Fontana.
Behrenshausen,Bryan.(2007). Toward a (kin)aesthetic of video gaming. <i>Games and Culture</i> 2(4), 335-354.
Belojevic, Nina. (2019). A glitch taxonomy kit, or how to read videogames with your hands. <i>Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture</i>. http://enculturation.net/glitch_taxonomy_kit
Bennett, Jane.(2010). <i>Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things</i>. Duke University Press.
Bitzer, Lloyd.(1968). The Rhetorical Situation.<i>Philosophy and Rhetoric</i> vol 1, no 1. PP. 1-14.
Blair, Carole. (1999).Contemporary U.S memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric's materiality. In J. Selzer and S. Crowley (Eds), <i>Rhetorical Bodies</i>. University of Wisconsin Press.
Bogost, Ian. (2012). <i>Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing</i>. University of Minnesota Press.
Bogost, Ian. (2010). <i>Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames</i>.MIT Press.
Colby, Rebakah Shultz. and Colby, Richard (2008). A pedagogy of play: integrating computer games into the writing classroom. <i> Computers and Composition</i> 25, 300-312.
<i>The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim</i>. 2011. Bethesda Softworks.
Flanagan, Mary. (2013). <i>Critical Play: Radical Game Design</i>. MIT Press.
Gries, Laurie.(2015). <i> Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for VIsual Rhetorics </i>. Utah State University Press.
Hawisher, Gail, Selfe, Cynthia, Moraski, Brittney, and Pearson, Melissa.(2004). Becoming literate in the information age: cultural ecologies and the literacies of technology. <i>College Composition and Communication</i> 55(4), 642-692.
Hayles, N. Katherine.(1999)<i>How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</i>.The University of Chicago Press.
Holmes, Steve. (2017). <i> The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice: Procedural Habits</i>. Routledge.
Holonautic (2019 May 1). <i>VR Safety Rules</i>. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEpcIx_lodk
IGN (2017 November 16). <i> Skyrim Graphics Comparison: Nintendo Switch vs. Original vs. Remaster.</i> Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulfr_D9cMXE
Karcher, Mary. (2021). So, You Want to Start a Research Archive? Ethical Issues Researching and Archiving Video Game History.<i> The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom</i>. Eds. Colby, Richard, Johnson, Matthew S.S., And Rebekah Shultz Colby. Palgrave Macmillan.
Karhulahti,Veli-Matti.(2013). A kinesthetic theory of videogames: time-critical challenges and aporetic rhematic. <i>Game Studies</i> 13(1), np. http://gamestudies.org/1301/articles/karhulahti_kinesthetic_theory_of_the_videogame
Kirkpatrick, Graeme. (2009). Controller, hand, screen: aesthetic form in the computer game. <i>Games and Culture</i> 4(2), 127-143.
McIntyre, Megan.(2018) Video evidence and virtual nonhumans. <i>The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics</i>, 2(2), np. http://journalofmultimodalrhetorics.com/2-2-mcintyre
Mendelson, Michael.(1998). The rhetoric of embodiment. <i>Rhetoric Society Quarterly</i> 28(4), 29-50.
Rickert, Thomas. (2013). <i>Ambient Rhetoric: the attunements of rhetorical being </i>. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Salter, Anastasia, and Moulthrop, Stuart. (2021) <i>Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives</i>. Amherst College Press.
Teston, Christa. (2016). Rendering and reifying brain sex science. In S. Barnett and C. Boyle(Eds), <i> Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things</i>, 2nd Ed. University Alabama Press.
Wysocki, Anne Francis.(2012).Drawn together:possibilities for bodies in words and pictures. In K. Arola and A. Wysocki (eds), <i>Composing Media Composing Embodiment</i>. Utah State UP.
[[Author Bio]]My very first semester as a PhD student, which also happened to be my first semester at a research institution in any capacity, I took a seminar on material rhetorics. As you have probably surmised by the premise of this work, the readings and ideas in that seminar knocked me on my ass, and I struggled greatly to work with dense high theory for the first time. And while there's something to be said about being thrown in the deep end of the pool (you're going to have to read Deleuze and Guattari <i>eventually</i> if you want to do this work), I found myself wishing there was some kind of accessible primer on these ideas, especially one that I could tie to my own as-then greatly underdeveloped research interests in digital and interactive media. [[Thus, my idea.]]
I was so excited about finally grasping the theory that I ended up creating the sort of text that made grasping the theory in the first place so difficult. The original article was rejected by a senior editor for not adequately demonstrating why games were an appropriate subject for the lens of material work. While this might have been meant unkindly as a dig at the subject I had decided to devote myself to, I took it to mean that I was simply doing the wrong kind of work. Instead of further entrenching my work in theory, I needed to be thinking outward, about the consequences of these ideas for the spaces I inhabited.
So, I pivoted into creating this [[concrete tool|What are these concrete tools you’re talking about?]]. By the time the original article had made its way through to the editor who would seal its fate, I was in my third year of my PhD, had passed doctoral exams, and had a couple tentative other publications under my belt. This meant I felt slightly more confident in my positionality as a scholar, and also that I was more familiar with the amazing work in webtexts that a lot of publications were doing. I had done work with the [[Twine engine|Tell me more about why Twine, specifically]] before, because I found it fascinating on a personal level; it let me explore some light coding in a non-intimidating way, and I had used it for another publication in <i>OneShot: A Critical Journal of Games and Play</i>. I could see the applications of Twine for creating a project that let me demonstrate some of my ideas about the intersections of interactivity and materiality even as someone was reading about them.
So then the call for this special issue came out, and the rest is [[history|What are these concrete tools you’re talking about?]] .
The onus for this project comes out of a single reading we did in that seminar, and is in many ways a tribute to how the work helped me get my critical theoretical foot in the door. I explain the work and how it has inspired me [[here|Why a Heuristic?]]. Despite the whole class ostensibly being about the real, tangible, material world, that reading is actually the only one I can point to and say "okay, I have a sense of how to use this idea in my daily life" instead of just cocking my head and going "oh, that's neat." Humanities scholars, in the depths of their great thoughts, tend to forget that the connections between those great thoughts and the world in which we live are not immediately apparent to others.
And lest you think I'm speaking out of turn, know that I too was once one of those humanities scholars. This webtext has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of an entirely theoretical article about the material properties of digital games, which made it through several rounds of revision before being cruelly rejected right before final proofs at another journal. While at the time I was devastated (needing those publications for the impending job market), I took a hard look at the paper and realized two things:
[[1. I was part of the problem]]
[[2. It didn't need to be a paper at all]]
As Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop put it in their book <i>Twining</i>, Twine is an engine that can be "the destination" in itself "as well as a tool for making the journey" (1). When you compose in Twine, you are not simply making a document for readers to passively consume, but something that requires a certain degree of interaction with the text beyond simply turning a page, or scrolling and clicking "Next" (though I will admit to there being some of that in here; old academic writing habits die hard). As evidenced by you being here, in this passage specifically, Twine opens up the door for their to be a greater degree of choice in the content the reader opts to engage with - you can forgo certain pathways if you want, or dig deep into certain rabbitholes, whatever suits your fancy. I found this way of presenting a [[teaching tool|What are these concrete tools you’re talking about?]] in particular, which is something that a lot of teachers will inherently retrofit it for their purposes anyway, to be a good means of organizing this content.
[[Well, now hang on. Can't someone also treat a regular article that way?]]Of course you can also interact with most traditional print, and even other digital media, in this nonlinear way I’ve set this webtext up in - everyone has fastforwarded through something, or skipped to reading just the conclusion of an article. For a dedicated or perhaps particularly nondedicated reader, a traditional print article can be an ergodic text in the vein of Aarseth. And that this piece in some ways actively prevents the same amount of nonlinearity without considerably more friction, since you can’t randomly hop to a passage in the middle, in the way you would with an article or book chapter.
I think the key difference here lies in the idea that most games, and perhaps even this one, take as a given that players are NOT going to interact with 100% of their content. This is not the assumption of a book or film, which are intended to be read/watched all the way through. It’s why “completionists” are a separate category of gamer – most games are built with the expectation that gamers will see just a fraction of the potential content, and yet still have experienced something meaningful and fulfilling that communicates the message of the developers. The reason for this is [[quite simple]].
Isn't that the million-dollar question?
There has been lots of very heated debate, cataloged aptly by Salter and Moulthrop, about whether or not Twine experiences can fit under even an expansive definition of "games." Rehashing that debate would take far longer than we have space for here, as well as it getting us well off into the conceptual weeds. So instead of trying to convince you that this is a "game" or even "gamelike," let's think about what this experience is doing that deals with some of the same rhetorical and material trappings as games and other interactive digital experiences.
First, this article you're play-reading seems to pretty clearly rely on some of the more basic facets of Ian Bogost's procedural rhetoric, more clearly outlined [[here|conveying their content to us]]. The idea that I'm authoring a text that nudges its readers toward the kind of nonlinear engagement I had hoped to inspire is the case for most games. This is also directly opposed to traditional print texts, wherein nonlinear engagement is most often an unintended or even undesired method of reading.
[[But how does this medium have anything to do with materiality?]]I can answer this question in one of two ways.
The more theory-laden answer, which deals with concerns of posthumanism, can be found [[here|RDA 2]]
And the more practical, logistical one can be found [[here|RDA 3]]The whole of our existence, to get a little grandiose, is just us constantly being bombarded with signals and messages that we are different degrees of prepared for. When those signals come from another human, or when we are putting our own signals out towards another human, there is a certain amount of predictability in terms of the potential outcomes. While we can never be absolutely sure how someone is going to respond, it's a fair bet that when they do respond, it will be with words in a shared language, or some other form of mutually intelligible discourse.
With nonhuman agents, however, there are aleatory (or, random-chance) impacts on the rhetorical situation that we cannot account for in the same way we can account for the different measures of human response. This seems to be because we cannot exert our own rhetorical will on nonhuman agents in the same way we can other people: you can yell at the printer all you want, but it's still going to jam. It is these aleatory occurrences that provide much of the content of nonhuman agency, and so although we must think of them differently than a linguistic response, we still have to [[take them into consideration]] when thinking about a given rhetorical situation.
The seeming rift between the digital and the material is one that many scholars have commented on, particularly as it pertains to the concept of the posthuman, or humanity's continued worries about the ascendance of machines into sapience. While separating "digital" and "material/embodied" into a binary is something that a lot of people do naturally in small ways across their daily lives, such as a preference for paper books instead of ereaders, scholars such as Katherine Hayles point out that the distinction has never been that simple.
In her book <i> How We Became Posthuman</i>, N. Katherine Hayles (1999) discusses how somewhere along the way, our idea of what data was lost its connection to the material world, or as she puts it "information lost its body" (p.2). Things like the Turing test boil our fundamental humanity down to how skillfully and naturally we can manipulate the symbols of language; if a computer can do these things indistinguishably from a human, then the computer can think. And if the computer can think as well as we can with its circuits and wires, then[[what is the importance of embodied sensation?|RDA 2.5]]
Of course, beyond the theory of Hayles and why we SHOULDN'T separate our bodies and the world from our data, there are also logistical reasons why we can't ever truly do that anyway.
Even if data isn't housed within the human mind, it still has to be housed somewhere, and that server has to have a physical material presence -- a hard drive, a flash drive, etc. Even with the advent of the cloud, those things don't actually live in the ether, just on remote server banks. The vessel might not be flesh and blood, but it is still very much material.
Further, these material apparati for gaming and other digital media come with their own set of embodied and affective issues. The first issue is spatial: finding places for everything to go. This can be an issue on the micro level, such as not having space on your television stand for your new console; or at the macro level, with cities needing to lay miles and miles of fiber cable in order for internet signals to travel.
With spatial concerns of course come the environmental. Miles of server databanks don't just take up real estate, they also consume massive amounts of energy that can put a strain on the power grid and has ramifications for the carbon footprint of corporations and nations, since we still largely generate power via fossil fuels. Powering a single server thus necessitates an extended digital/material ecology that ranges from a far flung oil field or coal mine to urban infrastructure. Additionally, all computer hardware is made from componentry that has to be mined, which brings to bear not only environmental but also human rights concerns, since the physical bodies of the miners are often put through considerable hardship in their labor.
[[So why does this matter?]]This is done because interacting with a game is a much more intensive process in an embodied sense – while a book takes a few hours to read and a movie might not even take two hours to watch, most AAA games are built with over twenty hours of narrative content, and some games like <i>Skyrim</i> have literally hundreds of hours of potential play options. The toll it would take, physically and temporally, on a player to engage with all of that is massive and exhausting, so games are designed for breadth and not depth, generally, a very different MO from other forms of media. In this way games function almost less as singular artifacts/texts and more as assemblages, since they contain interrelated but discrete packets of content/experience that are all helpful in building a larger holistic sense of the game but can be in large part nonessential to “winning” in the traditional sense.
Now, clearly, this is not a multiple-hours level experience of a webtext, but I think retaining some of that gamey ethos, of knowing and furthermore respecting that the reader is likely not going to engage at maximum capacity with every single bit of your [[work|What are these concrete tools you’re talking about?]], is meaningful to respecting the embodied investment and effort of your audience. What this means is that to consider rhetoric at all, we need to consider the material conditions within which rhetoric occurs, or as Thomas Rickert(2013) puts it, "Rhetoric can no longer remain centered on its theoretical commonplaces... Rather, it must diffuse outward to include the material environment...our own embodiment, and a complex understanding of ecological relationality."(p.3). We’ll get to embodiment in its own question, but for the purposes of this article/game, I’m thinking of matter as a fundamental consideration for all rhetorical production, because in order to be rhetorically effective, rhetors also probably need to be warm, and safe, and fed – all things that come from their material surroundings. But this is an incomplete picture, because that example still sets up the human rhetor as the center and apex of the rhetorical situation, which is something material scholars [[push against|HMR 2]].
Thus, scholars of materiality propose moving from rhetoric as epistemic to rhetoric as ontological, a branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of being more fully. Barnett and Boyle describe ontology as "an ongoing negotiation of being through relations" and therefore see an ontological understanding to be about "the pervasive relationality of all things" (p.8). Moving our understanding of rhetoric from "knowing about stuff" to "being with/in/around stuff" opens up an incredible realm of possibility for the rhetorical import of non-humans, from animals and plants to non-living things such as trash or minerals. But this delineation is necessarily messy - both Christa Teston (2016) and <a href="http://enculturation.net/carpentry-in-context"> Kerry Banazek</a> (2018)separately use the word "entanglement" to describe how they see ontology functioning with rhetorical materiality, though they are referring to different things. Banazek sees the issue at hand as not one framework or the other, but a jumble of both epistemic and ontological ideas, and Teston refers to rhetorical ontologies themselves as "entanglements of devices, disciplined bodies, and discursive practices that co-construct phenomena"(p.48). In any event, ontology presents a paradigm shift for how we conceive of rhetoric, that de-centers human intervention and gives the stuff of our surroundings a platform for [[suasive potential|HMR 3]].So, to sum up: in order to consider matter as rhetorical, we need to shift our thinking of “rhetoric” from being about the formation and translation of verbally coded knowledge, and to be more about, well, being: being in the spaces we inhabit, being aware of the objects we interact with, and being more aware of how we are moving as objects ourselves and not owners of a given material sphere. And as the rest of this text will demonstrate, an ontological understanding of something like play can greatly impact the ways in which we understand the games we interact with.
[[Doesn't the lack of intent in nonhuman agents lead to lots of randomness?]]Why do we care about the aleatory nature of nohuman agents? And further, how can we conceive of these things as still being rhetorical, since not only do they not come with cognitive agentic motives, but we cannot even reliably predict the circumstances that gave rise to them or their attendant consequences?
There are some people who, because we cannot assign motive or clear causality to aleatory occurrences, believe that this removes them from consideration as rhetoric. But what we need to remember is that rhetoric can never occur within a closed system - the situations in which we engage with the world are inherently infused with contexts, both human and not. And these contexts have great impact on the affective ways we respond, by impacting our emotions and our physiology - I'll have less fun at an outdoor concert if it's raining because I'll probably be cold. This is in no way directly caused by the actions of the band, but the receipt of their message is still being altered. So even though we cannot ever truly predict some of the outcomes of non-human agentic action, neglecting to consider them in the rhetorical situation flattens our understanding into something reductive.
[[Back to the lit review|Okay, take me to the lit review]]
[[I’m ready to see the heuristic|I want to see the heuristic questions]]In her article, Blair asserts several things not just about the suasive potential of objects, but also about the very nature of our field of study:
1) Communication is a motive for the creation of rhetoric, but not a defining characteristic of what rhetoric is at its core; and
2) Rhetoric is not about what something means, but about what it does.
When taken together, we can see that Blair is operating under an ontological understanding of rhetoric, same as many other materialist scholars (see “[[How is Matter Rhetorical?]]” for some grounding on the terms in this paragraph). Rhetoric can be created for the purpose of communicating knowledge (epistemology), but that’s not all it can do, and the intended explicit or implicit meaning of rhetoric – so, any reading of a given thing as a text - is less important than its [[literal impact on its surroundings|WH 2]].
The inherent interactivity of a game as described by kinesthetics, similar in significant ways to games studies forbear Espen Aarseth's (1997) idea of the "cybertext,” means that games are material objects in different ways than even the physicality of a paper book, which also has a material life and requires motor effort to hold and turn pages. To play a lot (though not all) videogames, there are expected skill thresholds for things like hand-eye coordination and reaction time and failing to meet these skill thresholds bars continued progress through the game. What this means is that games have material portent not just as existing on physical objects like discs and hard drives and being interacted with through the material interfaces of controllers and keyboards: Games are material because engaging with their content is an embodied act.
[[How are Games Embodied?]]
What this means is, that while games can communicate via story, narration, and dialogue, they also communicate through the very act of play itself - through the beliefs implicit in the rule systems and the values entrenched in what the game rewards as successful play, as well as what it punishes as failure. Ian Bogost, progenitor of [[OOO|HMR 3]] from the lit review, also has a term for this: procedural rhetoric, as outlined in his book <i> Persuasive Games</i>. According to Bogost, games are constructed not only of discursive elements like the articulations of rules and story, but of procedures, like a computer program (2010). Games are authored experiences, but the experience is not about passively receiving a narrative experience—it’s about interacting in appropriate ways through completing sanctioned actions to achieve pre-established goals. Games are themselves a series of procedures that, if completed correctly, will lead to a predicted successful outcome. And so the unique rhetorical import of games lies also in the ways that games tell you to play them.
[[Next|Q1.3]]This becomes a problem when thinking about the curation and archiving of video game history: if a game was made for a console that stopped being serviced fifteen years ago, how many working consoles still exist upon which the game can be played? This is also a problem for PC games, since operating system updates can render older software just as unplayable as a new console. So, in order to continue existing and being played, a game must maintain a certain level of relevance, not just as a cultural artifact, but as a piece of software. And the way that some games have managed to do that is through fundamentally transforming the experience of play across time.
Games in the current digital climate often retain relevance through remastering their software for release on newer systems. These remasters or, if significant design and content changes occur, remakes, can give a decades-old game new life by introducing it to a new generation of players who might not have access to older machines. While swapping code and improving graphics might not seem inherently material, it is, because the games themselves are being altered to reflect the changing and developing material conditions of play. As the physical apparatus of gaming changes and new hardware becomes available, games must [[adapt|RDA 1.75]] in order to remain relevant.
This also, naturally, comes with material concerns for the nature of play. Mary Karcher's (2021) example of <i>Ms. Pac-Man</i> seems most relevant: is a game meant to be played in an arcade cabinet with a joystick actually being preserved if the only way you can play it is with a mouse and keyboard on a PC? So even as games must maintain relevance as software, the continued obsolescence cycles of hardware [[present a different level of challenge|RDA 2]] for the continued material existence of games.
One of the ways that games have adapted to a continually changing technological landscape is actually through the actions of dedicated players who dive into creating new code for the game. These new pieces of code, called "mods" (short for modifications), can do anything from change visual aspects of the game, to alter game mechanics such as changing how combat works, to even providing new narrative content and storylines. While modding was at first something that players did without the consent or involvement of professional developers, running certain games with mods has become so common that some companies, like Bethesda, have officially sanctioned repositories of player mods that can be easily added to games like <i>Skyrim</i>. Hayles describes the posthuman thusly: "In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals" (p.3). While some futurists may see this as a freeing collapse of potential experience, Hayles worries about how this line of thought can elide the importance of our embodied, holistic, affective, and sensory experiences, which she argues are just as essential to an understanding of what it means to be human as our capacity for language.
Ultimately, according to Hayles, the digital can never and should never be separated from the material, because doing so in the case of human consciousness inscribes an incalculable loss to our understanding of ourselves. But this is [[not the only reason|RDA 3]] we need to consider the material carefully.
While genres are generally thought of as texts that don’t have much of a material existence in themselves, much like our last question about relevance, genres always arise in response to specific material and embodied conditions, and thus to think fully about materiality, we need to think about the genre expectations of a thing and why those expectations exist. Many game genres began in arcade boxes, meant to be played in public, standing upright, and with a single large joystick held with an entire hand. Understanding the material conditions of the origins of game genres can help us see how these genres have evolved from public arcade spectacle to largely private, at home play experiences, with totally different bodily orientation and control schemes required.
In addition to games participating in the already active genre ecology of gaming writ large, games also lead to the creation of several different genres in ecologies specific to the community who plays the game in question. These genres, commonly called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratext#:~:text=Paratext%20is%20a%20concept%20in,is%20known%20as%20the%20paratext.">paratexts</a>, include things like walkthroughs, let’s plays, Twitch streams, and chat forums dedicated to the game. They operate not only as ways of preserving and sharing knowledge about the game between players, but as a means of building and sustaining play communities.
[[So how can we use this idea?]]
The advent of a relatively new gaming technology, Virtual Reality (VR), further complicates an understanding of the situation of play. In VR, the player wears a headset that completely obscures their vision of their surroundings and is often using motion controls that require more rigorous arm movement than pressing buttons on a controller. When playing in VR, the environment becomes an issue of safety: if the player is near furniture or a ledge, they must be careful that they will not stumble and fall, and when using motion controls, they might hit an object or another person, causing damage.
[[So why does this matter to a classroom?]]Thinking about the environment of play as impacting ability to play brings concerns of access once again to the forefront. If play necessitates access to specific equipment and a particular kind of play area, that has implications for who gets to play and, by extension, who the play experience was built for. Thinking about how the physical components of play can afford or constrain the play of people from low-income or unstable living situations, or people with disabilities that might preclude them from comfortably using a particular control scheme, means that equity of play will be at the forefront of any analysis. Concerns of access can also translate into concerns of safety, as in this [[example|Example 4]].
More broadly, a lot of the questions of the heuristic end up dealing with questions of access – not only access to material conditions that allow for play, but of access to play experiences through inclusive design on the part of the developers. Thus, this heuristic could also spur further examinations of the ways in which the accepted material conditions of play afford or constrain access, and how we can retool our spaces for greater access to the experience of play.
This piece was created to respond to what I suppose is a deeply personal exigence: it is the thing that I think would have helped me in that graduate seminar on material rhetorics, to better understand the theory within the scope of my own work and to not be overwhelmed in abstraction. So perhaps my experience was not universal and thus there are folks for whom this heuristic is an unnecessary curiosity, but I’m willing to bet my experience wasn’t uncommon. So to everyone currently muddling through this fruitful but occluded body of work, I humbly submit this, as a means to help find understanding.
[[Citations]]Emma Kostopolus is an Assistant Professor of English at Valdosta State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming <i> Computers and Composition</i>, <i>OneShot: A Critical Journal of Games and Play</i>, and <i>Gamification in the Rhet/Comp Curriculum</i> from Vernon Press. When she isn't thinking about/writing about/playing games, she teaches digital rhetoric and technical/professional communication courses.