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Introduction


"Game Master" as Mannerist-Rhetor




The passion and seriousness with which people engage in their learning that they do when no one is watching (or testing) is precisely the passion that is required to nurture and sustain meaningful learning in schools."
~ Meghan Parker, Teaching Artfully


A Game Master’s (GM) role parallels that of an instructor in several ways. Both practice an art. Both are tasked with designing engaging (learning) experiences, developing a coherent program that results in some sort of resolution (e.g., meeting course learning outcomes; completing a quest), and adapting to the needs and social dynamics of particular communities (e.g., a class roster; a regular gaming group). Both function as guides, mentors, and co-participants in collective action. Both are engaged in constructing environments for collaborative learning. In How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, Anna Anthropy (2012) describes the role of the game master as a "player who manages the game for other players, laying out the scenario and directing the world’s responses to the players’ actions[, essentially inhabiting] the role of storyteller, preparing and guiding the players through a story in which they make decisions" (p. 56). Similarly, Jaime Banks et al. (2010) describe the myriad duties of a GM in terms of storytelling, entertaining, moderating, creating, instructing, and playing. Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford (2014) also highlight the collaborative nature of games like Dungeons and Dragons but place the success or failure of a game on the shoulders of a GM's ability to know and understand their players and adapt accordingly. Briefly, GMs and instructors must understand and attune themselves to the needs of their audience and respond effectively. In their various roles, they create content (narrative), lead inquiry, moderate discourse, and adapt to the evolving needs of their players/students (audience). If successful, they cultivate an effective learning environment crafted as an enjoyable and memorable game/course.


While we take issue with the term "master" for a number of reasons, the colloquial title (Game Master or Gamemaster1) offers a conceptual starting point for considering how games provide opportunities for designing engaging (material) pedagogical spaces in a rhetorical register. To make this connection apparent, we consider the figures of the Aristotelian orator (classicist ) and the Gorgianic sophist (mannerist ) as proto-GMs, offering insight into the role a GM2 plays in delivering rhetorical education.3 Eric White (1987) distinguishes the classicist with the mannerist by contrasting two early-Greek rhetors/pedagogues, Aristotle and Gorgias, writing:


The contrast between Aristotelian and Gorgianic views on the heuristic possibilities of figurative language provides an early instance of a perennial controversy for which the twin rubric of ‘classicism’ and ‘mannerism’ may serve as a convenient label. For the classicist, rhetorical tropes and figures are properly subordinate to the logical content of speech because language achieves its purpose in the preservation of a body of normative values. Aristotle would be an early exponent of classicism, since he argued that the style of a speech should not be obtrusive, that it must efface itself before the preexistent truth the orator would communicate. The mannerist, on the other hand, values the occasional over the traditional and restlessly experiments with the style of utterance in the hope of producing genuine novelty. Because of his skepticism concerning the possibility of knowledge, Gorgias will therefore practice a mannerist style, or the one that makes ample use of rhetorical ornament. Since final knowledge is precluded for the sophist, content has to serve style. (p. 30)


Of those two figures, a mannerist style, rather than a classicist one, is a particularly productive way to approach game-based instruction in ways that matter, that have matter, and that will continue to matter to curricula at the intersection of rhetoric, technology, and culture.4 Patrick Jagoda (2020), writing about games as experiments, makes the productive function of the mannerist figure apparent when he notes that "games operate as experiments insofar as they combine a stable foundation of starting conditions, rules, and objective on the one hand with the contingency and possibility of play on the other'' (p. 28). Our mannerist approach is similarly guided by Sean Morey’s (2016) discussion of the style of delivery in an expanded version of sophistic rhetoric: as a process that makes knowledge and delivers self-knowledge related to questions of community that accounts for the "new identity and institutional formations that develop around the emerging technologies of the image and Internet" (p. 4). Briefly, a mannerist approaches rhetorical education as an ecological process of collective invention, making this figure especially well-suited to understanding the role of a GM in game-based pedagogy: as a player tasked with mediating the desires of a community and their fulfillment (see Morey, 2016, p. 12). In a sense, we are all GMs in the classroom, in our institutions, and in our communities (scholarly and otherwise).5 In the jargon of recent online gaming spaces, GMs function as community managers with two primary tasks: (1) to "remind players of codes of conduct" and "bring player concerns back to the development team" and (2) adding empathy to the governance process "by boosting a sense of belonging, responsibility, and human presence" (Sparrow, 2021). GMs → Community Builders. Methodologically, the GM practices a heuretic pedagogy, using new teaching methods they are inventing while they are inventing them.6


For the purposes of this webtext, we consider how games’ unique material affordances and constraints can add to the design of engaging experiences in online and hybrid pedagogical contexts from the view of instructors working with mannerist styles. This style is more ontological than disciplinary, reflecting White’s (1987) explanation of the mannerist-rhetor as one that "counsels a stylistic pluralism that refuses to privilege one style over all others [in order to transport] an audience beyond a traditional standpoint" (p. 31). While GMs may have different (and differently valuable) pedagogical styles and philosophies, they share a common goal: to facilitate an engaging and inclusive experience for all participants in which the audience and instructor collectively invent problems in need of solutions – an exercise in rhetorical phrónēsis (prudence, practical reasoning).7 It is here that a GM's individual style(s) may make or break their attempt at creating an effective learning/play community. Obviously a solipsistic GM, adversarial GM, or elitist GM (Scroll for Initiative, 2021) would fail to produce the inclusive, safe, and experimental atmosphere that is necessary for a successful adventure or learning experience. Yet we can also look to the planning GM or the highly improvisational GM (particularly for a mannerist approach) as a style that could be highly successful if employed for classroom instruction.


For instance, Jagoda (2020) explains that problem-making "operates as an experimental process that limbers up thinking, increases sensitivities, and opens participants up to coexisting potentials" by remaining "open to values, worldviews, criteria of success or failure, [and] ways of living that may not be available at the outset of a creative process" (p. 256). In studies of play, this kind of collaborative and collective action represents some of the highest virtues offered by games, guided by a desire to develop environments in which all participants can play well together (de Koven, 2013), to embody particular values (Flanagan and Nissenbaum, 2014), and to develop in players an attitude of playfulness that recognizes and adapts to the ecological nature of rhetorical action (among objects, situations, behaviors, people, etc.) (Sicart, 2017). White’s (1987) mannerist style complements Jogada’s (2020) problem-making practices, weaving it throughout the learning experience in order to experiment with "both processes and objectives [... and to construct] new, and often temporary, objectives" (p. 256). Problems are all around us, in and out of game, and White’s (1987) mannerist rhetorical style offers opportunities to extend Jagoda’s (2020) experimental game design practices into rhetorically-grounded, game-based pedagogical design.


The GM (as a mannerist-rhetor ) has a daunting task in structuring engaging, inclusive, and contingent experiences, but one not unfamiliar to rhetoricians from time immemorial: to attend and respond to the emergent dynamics of decorum with the audience (of whom they are a member) and the world they have constructed as co-participants. As an overarching principle of rhetorical pedagogy and practice, decorum can be a fraught concept when reduced to rules of moderation and it has been rightly critiqued under such conditions for merely reinforcing cultural conventions and excluding participants who violate normative forces (Banks, 2018; Alford, 2016; Lanham, 2012/1991). We approach games through the guiding rhetorical principle of decorum not as a shared opinion of appropriate behavior, but as the singular experience of thought, art, conduct, and embodiment (Ulmer, 2012; Mauer, 2016) that reflects Michael Leff’s (2016) description of decorum as a unity of "thought and expression necessary for comprehension and direction of life in the pluralistic space of public experience" (p. 159). A GM’s approach to rhetorical pedagogy is a decorous one, in the sense of being a process of arranging "the elements of a discourse and round[ing] them out into a coherent product relative to the occasion[, … aligning] the stylistic and argumentative features of the discourse within a unified structure while adjusting the whole structure to the context from which the discourse arises and to which it responds[, ...] as embodied in particular discourses," and governing the integrity of a collective rhetorical act in "a constantly moving process of negotiation" (Leff, 2016, p. 159-60). Moreover, the GM recognizes that there are moments during gameplay that the most decorous course of action may be the most disruptive one, a course of action that in any other moment would be considered lacking in the decorum of shared opinion.8


In the following sections, we focus our analysis of two case studies unpacking avatar embodiment and spatial environments as important rhetorical dimensions of games’ materiality with implications for online pedagogical design. The case study on spatial environments focuses on the "Metroidvania" game genre (Nutt, 2015; Rodriguez et al., 2018), in which players must learn new skills to progressively unlock and explore new areas of an otherwise open game world (an organizational system that, we suggest, offers possibilities for combining the inventive strengths of a mannerist-style pedagogy with the affordances and constraints of an online-asynchronous pedagogical environment) . These analyses emerge from mannerist styles of teaching and game management that the authors utilize in developing game-based pedagogical strategies and curriculum design as they align with the fields of professional, technical, and creative writing. Specifically, we investigate what games' material affordances and constraints can add to rhetorical theory on designing for user experience in online and/or hybrid pedagogical contexts (Borgman and McArdle, n.d.; Borgman and McArdle, 2019; Gee, 2007; Potts and Salvo, 2017). Our interest in the materiality of gaming and game-based pedagogy focuses primarily on embodied, experiential, and affective learning, and teaching students to attune themselves to the material and spatial ambience of "a plastic, open-ended, and evolving event" (Rickert, 2013, p. 112). Moreover, our hope is that this webtext contributes to the growing scholarly literature on games, gaming cultures, and multimodal composition pedagogies that have appeared in Computers and Composition over the past decade (Neilsen, 2015; Daniel-Wariya, 2016; Colby, 2017; Arduini, 2018; Holmes, 2018; Jiang, 2020; Kelley and Weaver, 2020). By way of a conclusion, we offer some guiding principles to aid instructors developing their own game-based course and curricular designs in a manner that creates engaging, collective, and inclusive learning experiences.


Footnotes



1. While we personally advocate for a linguistic change with the title Game Master, following April Baker-Bell’s (2020) work in Linguistic Justice, taking on that argument is beyond the scope of this article. See also Alexander's (2021) discussion of the "Story Guide" in the Coyote and Crow: Core Rulebook for a decolonial approach to the role grounded in Indigenous rhetorics and storytelling (pp. 332-343).

2. If we were inclined to use more business- or sports-related terminology, we might suggest revising the acronym to mean General Manager.

3. Alternatively, we might consider the Greek orator’s counterpart as the pagan shaman (Morey, 2016). In an early draft of this article, we considered the Greek orator’s counterpart in the figure of the pagan shaman, following Sean Morey’s (2016) work in Rhetorical Delivery and Digital Technologies. However, after deliberation, we felt it inappropriate to use that term due to its appropriation by one of the most prominent members of QAnon, who came to fame during the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the United States Capitol.

4. The mannerist style parallels the mythopoetic function of the bricoleur described in Jacques Derrida’s essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play."

5. Our goal here is to self-consciously foreground the manner-ist style in our (post-)pedagogies.

6. See Gregory L. Ulmer, 1994 (p. 17), and Thomas Rickert, 2013 (p. 71).

7. For more on this approach to teaching phrónēsis, see Sergio C. Figueiredo and S. Andrew Stowe (2018) and Sean Morey (2016).

8. Rob Goodman’s (2018) article in Aeon, "Decorum is an unfashionable word but it has a radical core," could serve as an accessible review of the flexible and dynamic (i.e., rhetorical) understanding of decorum articulated in this article, particularly for undergraduate students.