Sharing Pain and Pleasure by Shivener and Oliveira Da Silva

Overall, post-mortems take readers behind-the-scenes with development teams. Our findings on “what went right” sections in post-mortems revealed pleasurable feelings in relation to collaboration, design, and testing, while “what went wrong” sections revealed painful feelings in relation to management, design, and marketing. As two researchers who are not in fact game developers, we hazard to suggest possible solutions for invigorating collaboration or resolving failures in game development related to task management, for example—but we’re pleased to write that Game Developer continues to publish numerous helpful articles written for and by the game development industry. Rather, by analyzing dozens of post-mortems, we have ideas for bringing writing studies closer to the practice of writing post-mortems. Detailing myriad feelings and practices, Game Developer’s post-mortem series implicate the kind of public work writing studies creators (can) do (and have yet to do) to share knowledge with their peers. This section focuses on two questions related to the post-mortem genre for writing studies researchers and classrooms.

How might we cultivate more post-mortems in writing studies?

We wonder if the post-mortem genre might be the best, low-stakes solution to sharing the behind-the-scenes work of scholarly projects. Game Developer has demonstrated that developers have an appetite for the post-mortem genre, and we suspect writing studies creators would have the same appetite if solicited and provided the right venue and/or incentives to submit. Echoing Shivener’s (2020) call, we call for more contributions on the rights and wrongs of webtext production—then and now—and even print-based scholarship. Writing studies simply doesn’t have a massive corpus of recent post-mortems about developing webtexts but rather a few dozen behind-the-scenes contributions spread across more than a decade of publications in Kairos (see Sarkar & Bahl, 2021, for a recent contribution), Computers and Composition (e.g., Bray, 2013), and College English (Ianetta, 2020). The games industry is cranking out far more publications than our field on an annual basis, so a comparison of contributions by the numbers isn’t the most fruitful for our argument. However, we wonder what our field members would gain from reading and contributing more post-mortem-like articles to a shared space like Game Developer. Kairos editor Cheryl E. Ball (2021) noted that an “Ask the Authors” series is among the journal’s forthcoming plans to mentor and share knowledge with prospective authors. (As an associated editor for that journal, Rich is very excited about the series!) In addition, the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative blog features a “Webtext of the Month” series, typically in which a contributor “seeks to recognize composition innovation online” (“Webtext of the Month”).

These initiatives are low-stakes, voluntary ways of discussing the intricacies of production. Public reflection is about sharing feelings and practices as much as it is about networking with fellow creators. Writing post-mortems indeed calls forth a labor issue, however, so we are left wondering how post-mortem-like contributions can be plugged into the field’s current and forthcoming initiatives. Beyond composing interviews and blog posts, authors and editors might consider forming more conference panels of post-mortems, and editors might ask more contributors to submit short reflections along with their final submissions (see Shivener, 2020). We need to keep asking: How might we share our experiences so that others can make sense of their experience and those forthcoming? How might we create more connections with each other during these pandemic-strained times of feeling isolated and lonely as creators? Does anyone else sense a special issue in this very journal?

What does a post-mortem look like in a digital writing classroom?

In light of analyzing post-mortems for this project, Rich is beginning to introduce the post-mortem genre in his digital authoring courses at York University. In Winter 2021, students in his section of the seminar WRIT 3001: Intermediate Digital Authoring wrote post-mortems about their third and final project, a hand-coded web portfolio featuring their sound and video projects. The assignment details are located below and reflect the language of it. It’s important to note that this seminar did not center on games but rather digital media productions. Researchers and teachers might consider the use of a post-mortem assignment in classes of technical communication and game studies—if only for presenting reflective writing in a new light.

This assignment was similar to Jody Shipka’s (2013) statement of goals of goals and choices (SOGCs) required of students in her composition classrooms (p. 87), differing because it did not ask for specifics such as “Who and what played a role in accomplishing these goals?” In Rich’s assignment, stories of various bodies and tools figure into the binary categories of “right” and “wrong.” While collecting and sharing samples of post-mortems written by students was outside the scope of this research project (here’s to a follow-up on pedagogy!), we can say generally that students told stories of entirely deleted folders and crises that ensued; pesky images that wouldn’t resize; and some eureka moments when HTML tables and embedded media worked after hours and hours of experimentation and emailing peers. Asking students to describe what went right and what went wrong is a means to cultivating a community of full-feeling practices, similar to the vast community of game developers who have put their views in public for years. And because we aren’t sharing more specific details of a classroom’s feelings and practices, we close this webtext with our own post-mortem, a model for writing studies and technical communication.