Sharing Pain and Pleasure by Shivener and Oliveira Da Silva

The “post-mortem” article is a commonplace genre of professional writing in which teams describe production processes and reflect on the successes and failures of their work. To emphasize the value of the post-mortem article and show its affective potential, this webtext focuses on analyses of more than 60 post-mortem articles written by and for game developers since 2015. Looking to the website Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), the authors draw on a number of post-mortem articles to underscore that rhetorical-affective practices such as management and collaboration at workplaces are painful and pleasurable, respectively. It closes with a call for more computers and writing studies researchers and teachers to engage in the post-mortem genre as a public practice to share the rhetorical moves and pains and pleasures, the rights and wrongs, of creating digital arguments.

Keywords: Game development; post-mortem; feelings; digital media; webtext

Looking back on all those postmortems, it’s interesting how they have changed. Most people don’t realize this but when the postmortem series began here, it was done because that was the end of that game’s life. It was that game’s memoirs.
—Brad Wardell, 2016, “Postmortem: Stardock and Oxide Games' Ashes of the Singularity”)

For game developers and software engineers alike, the “post-mortem” article is a commonplace genre of professional writing in which teams describe production processes and reflect on the successes and failures of their work (Washburn et al., 2016; Politowski et al., 2018). Post-mortem articles reveal a developer’s rhetorical-affective practices, meaning they describe rhetorical practices that are entangled with the affectively rich, material conditions of a game’s development. Often viewed as a force of encounter or felt sensations that circulate between bodies and materialities (e.g., this webtext’s authors and their laptops), affect is transient and inseparable from composing environments (Anable, 2018; Brennan, 2004; kyburz, 2019; Stewart, 2007). As Kathleen Stewart (2007) writes in Ordinary Affects, “Affect is connected to things. Literally moving things—things that are in motion and that are defined by their capacity to affect and to be affected—they have to be mapped through different, coexisting forms of composition, habituation, and event” (p. 4). One way we can further amplify the rhetorical and affectively rich practices of game development for computers and writing studies scholars is by turning to post-mortem articles. At their core, post-mortem articles are much like reflection essays we collect for courses and research projects, functioning as narratives that take readers behind the scenes of a project. Our theoretical framework and ensuing discussions that animate affect and game studies shed new light on the value of studying and practicing with the post-mortem article in the field.

To emphasize the value of the post-mortem article and show their affective potential, this webtext focuses on our analyses of more than 60 post-mortem articles written by and for game developers since 2015. Looking to the website Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), we draw on a number of post-mortem articles to underscore that rhetorical-affective practices such as management and collaboration at workplaces are painful and pleasurable, respectively. In making this argument matter to the field, we point out that reflections and project documentation speak to recent research into writing processes, materialities and affects (Micciche, 2017; Rule, 2019; Lockridge & Ittersum, 2020). In addition, project documentation rarely accompanies our field’s webtexts, digital books, and print counterparts (Shivener, 2020). We propose that more computers and writing studies scholar-practitioners engage in the post-mortem genre as a public research practice to help future field members understand the rhetorical moves and pains and pleasures, the rights and wrongs, of creating digital arguments. In this light, the post-mortem would function as a heuristic for future scholars who are creating digital arguments. Textual and multimedia models of post-mortems for creators and teachers are featured in the concluding sections of this webtext.

This webtext is divided into six main sections, each including a short video that covers its key ideas. By creating a webtext, we enact the parallels of game and webtext development, both of which require "rhetoric, design, and code" (Eyman & Ball, 2013) as well as numerous material resources, whether collaborative bodies or hard drive space. Closing with a post-mortem section, we make our rhetorical moves and feelings visible to readers. Overall, we committed to composing a public webtext because it allowed us to draw on mixed media in the spirit of game development and supported our goal to model the post-mortem article for webtext scholars.