Keegan 33

Brett Keegan

Exams – Annotated Bibliography

Collin Brooke, Krista Kennedy, and Rebecca Moore Howard

Exams: Annotated Bibliography

I started this project focused around spheres of work and play, but as I moved forward, questions of authorship converged with the new media properties of videogames, shifting this focus. My main question became how to theorize the systems of ownership and originality that govern work like modding, game walk throughs, and fan art that rely on the intellectual property of others and (in a more understudied question) the engine and procedures of others. These questions then informed my other areas. For game studies, I wanted to give a fair representation of the larger field, including of more cornerstone texts, but most texts focused on designer and player agencies, trying to better understand the authorship tensions between these participants and the broader history and context that situates them. My focus on new media came from the role of interaction and emergence in game studies, as these videogame conversations often drew from new media issues. My texts on authorship tended to focus on ownership and originality, including remix, fandom, and circulation. Before moving onto the bibliography itself, though, I wanted to give a more specific overview of my sections and their intersections

Game Studies

With game studies, I had three main focal points: play, design, and videogame history and culture. With play, Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Bernard Suits’ Grasshopper, Bernard DeKoven’s The Well-Played Game, and John Alberti’s “The Game of Reading and Writing” provided core theoretical perspectives for game studies without crowding other titles. Huizinga’s text, considered the bedrock to game studies, contains a lot of now dated analysis on play in human culture and development, but one of its lasting impacts is its grounding definition of “play”: that it is outside ordinary life, takes place in a bounded time and space, is often governed by rules and customs, and often has a flair for disguises and ritual. In a similar way, Suits’ Grasshopper, while more recent, provides one of the grounding definitions on what a “game” is. For Suits, a game is a self-contained, goals-oriented activity structured by rules. And with his focus on rules, Suits showcases emergence, contrasting the “institution” of a game, which houses its rules and associations, with the “game” that results as players engage with the institution. But Suits’ focus, as with many in game studies, is on games in general; John Alberti focuses on the emergent nature of play with videogames and other new media. Placing players in dialogue with the game through the interface, videogames allow players to compose through their actions, Alberti argues, giving players considerable agency. Bernard DeKoven takes the role of players to the next level by focusing on the “player community.” DeKoven argues that players can make more hospitable communities by restructuring rules and attitudes when they play games, making him one of the few here to point to the role of games beyond their bounded sessions. From Huizinga onward, the focus tended to be in the “magic circle” where play takes place, but DeKoven points to the ripples of play in the lives of its participants and the world beyond.

Alberti also presents the intersection of game studies and composition. In a more rhetorical intersection with game studies, James J. Brown, Jr, and Eric Alexander’s “Procedural Rhetoric, Proairesis, Game Design, and the Revaluing of Invention” draws from Collin Brooke’s “prioaretic invention” and Ian Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric” to also consider the agency of players. Bogost’s Persuasive Games mainly considers the role of designers in procedural rhetoric—investigating how designers craft procedurally driven claims in videogames—but while Brown and Alexander also recognize this as a form of invention, they argue that invention extends beyond design into the hands of players who engage with games in unpredictable ways as “new media objects.” As new media, videogames are a clear site for prioaretic invention, they argue, the more generative, unbounded side of invention that Brooke theorizes in Lingua Fracta, based on Barthes’ hermeneutic and prioaretic codes. Also considering player agency, Andréa Davis’ “‘Leroy Jenkins!’ What Videogames can Teach us About Visual Arguments” focuses more on the literacy required to construct arguments through game interfaces, using the famous Leroy Jenkins’ scene as an example. While Brown and Alexander see the players and the designers as co-participants interacting with the same new media object, Davis aligns more with Alberti, considering the play session more concretely as a site for composing. Davis, like DeKoven, also considers the role of community when it comes to play, noting how the Leroy Jenkins’ scene uses many World of Warcraft community jokes to drive its humor.

This focus on community opens up further when considering the larger culture and history of games. As one of the most comprehensive titles, Digital Play by Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter presents a robust way to theorize game ecologies as “circuits of interaction,” then uses this framework to analyze the history of videogames from the 1960s to the present day. This framework includes the economics, designers, players, technology, and more as participants in the development of videogames, going far beyond the typical player-game dynamic. In a different approach to videogame history, Carly Kocurek focuses her analysis on the challenges that videogames faced to gain legitimacy, the tactics they used to overcome these challenges, and how these tactics inform present-day “gamer culture.” In general, she points out the continued need to justify games amid a culture that fretted over their capacity to waste time and expose players to violence. To gain legitimacy, game advocates often connected games to patriotism and what she calls the “technomasculine,” a type of masculinity based in a Cold War drive for technology skills. Contrasting Kline et al and Kocurek, Tanja Sihvonen turns the cultural lens inward, focusing on the community created by The Sims. Using Kline et al’s circuits of interactivity, she analyzes the players’ role in the popularity of The Sims, including the robust culture of fan authors and modding. Sihvonen also represents a valuable addition for her theorizing on modding and an excellent summary in modding scholarship, representing a thorough overview that ultimately informs her theory of fan interaction.

When it came to design, most of my selections focused on the act of design, including its practices and underlying philosophies. Ian Bogost and Mary Flanagan both highlight how games may put forth certain views, with Bogost theorizing his procedural rhetoric as a unique modality for videogames and Flanagan articulating the “radical design” of activist programmers and more avant-garde games. Both highlight how the designers’ philosophies and tactics create impactful games. Kathryn Isbister creates an important addition to this more foundational work by pointing out the role of emotion in game design, like capacity to illicit “flow” in players or create network communities. Like Flanagan and Bogost, she discusses mechanics and aesthetics, but her singular focus stresses the broader expressive capacity for games, and though she does not argue in terms of rhetoric, to me her work aligns with scholars like Diane Davis, Thomas Rickert, and Laurie Gries who note the affective dimension of persuasion. Other titles, like Montford and Bogost and McNely et al, focus more on the fundamentals or situations of design. Montford and Bogost ground their work on the Atari 2600 and the platform affordances and markets that informed key games, and McNely et al uses visual ethnography to explore a case study of a student-produced game. Anna Anthropy’s rounds out this area, presenting a how-to manual for individually authored amateur “zine games” and a broader critique on the limits of mainstream game design.

New Media and Procedurality

While working with videogames, though, I found the approaches and outlooks fitting under the broader umbrellas of new media and procedural thinking. On the one hand I drew from scholarship that discusses “interfaces,” including Collin Brooke, Teena Carnegie, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Lori Emerson. Brooke, in particular, highlights a resilient point, writing, “A turn toward the interface as our unit of analysis would be an acknowledgment that it is not necessary that these processes culminate in products . . . but rather that what we think of as products (books, articles, essays) are but special, stabilized instances of an ongoing process conducted at the level of interface” (25). Much of my general thinking about interface drew from this general outlook, and as Brown, Jr., and Alexander’s text on invention and game design shows, it presents a helpful viewpoint for videogames with their distributed interaction. From Wardrip-Fruin and Teena Carnegie, I focused on the interface as a site of meeting and interaction, with computer-based procedures and content acting expressively and rhetorically on users. Much of this interaction, as Alberti notes in his piece above, breaks down traditional reading and writing distinction, with these combining into a dialogic, simultaneous exchanges. Coining a term, Emerson calls this breakdown “readingwriting,” with computers and people readingwriting one another as they interact through the interface. Furthermore, this more enclosed writing environment—between user and computer—also opens outward into broader mediated networks, a point emphasized by Brooke, Carnegie, Brock and Shepherd, and John Jones. Jones has an especially versatile approach, coining the term “network* writing,” which he defines as, “writing that does not simply follow and operate within the logic of networks—writing within networks—but also shapes and creates the networks where writing occurs—writing with networks.” Though Jones does not focus on interface with the same directness as the others, his work highlights the role of networks and networking in more capacious understandings of interface.

Considering procedures, the scholarship was a bit messier. Here, I wanted to distinguish from the game side of procedural rhetoric to consider these processes in a non-videogame context, again offering a broader contextualization for Bogost’s procedural rhetoric. Noah Wardrip-Fruin considers games, but his main focus is on other programs, especially interactive fictions, drawing from Janet Murray, as Bogost does, but focusing more squarely on procedures’ role in interaction than Murray’s broader theorizing did. Brock and Shepherd make one of the more current arguments I’ve read regarding procedural rhetoric, grounding themselves in the preceding work like Bogost, but also better connecting the role of procedures with the history of the enthymeme. For them, procedures are rhetorical, much like Carnegie’s view of interface, for their ability to draw in and integrate users with the logics of the system, a machine rhetoric they outline with three examples: search engines, dating applications, and Facebook feeds. With the impact of these procedures, they argue for “procedural literacy,” a point shared by Bogost and others, including Annett Vee. However, Vee includes this procedural literacy as part of her broader understanding of computational literacy. While other work focuses more on the framing and theorizing of interfaces and procedures, Vee presents the history, aspects of, and value of these literacies as they relate to coding and computer usage. Vee represents a recent addition to a deeper history in the role of literacy in new media and computation, building on work like Stuart Selber, Selfe and Hawisher, and James Paul. Alexander and Rhodes’ On Multimodality also extends this work, working in multiple case-studies from photomanipulation to videogames to consider new media from a rhetoric and composition lens. This text, along with Vee, present recent and substantial views from the field on this material, while Brooke and others present more of a cornerstone perspective.

Ownership, Remix, and Circulation

The last section of the bibliography highlights a more interdisciplinary or inter-topical hybrid, but I see a viable unity around issues of ownership and circulation, largely in digital or new media realms. Looking at titles, this focus clarifies. Roland Barthes, Lewis Hyde, Mark Rose, and Henry Jenkins represent more cornerstone or foundational texts and articulate central themes taken up by other texts. Barthes’ “Death of the Author” has been a perennial text for fandom scholarship for its emphasis on multiple interpretations and reader authority over authoritative readings based on author intentions and cultural gatekeeping. Alexandra Herzog takes Barthes up directly, along with Genette and similar theorists, to navigate the tension created as fan authors try to assert their authority after the author’s interpretive death, and Leavenworth draws directly from Genette to explore issues of intertextuality in fan composition.

Gift theory, largely introduced by Marcel Mauss in The Gift and expanded by Lewis Hyde in his The Gift, represents another grounding theory in fan scholarship and modding. Hyde focuses on the distinction between two main types of economies, those based on gift and those based on commodification, much like Huizinga’s distinction between play and everyday life. Though he focuses more on a more Romantic view of art and the values of various communities like scientists and Polynesian tribes, his work helps inform texts like Martine Courant Rife’s, which deal with copyright and the commons. It also informs work on fan communities, as chapters in Hellekson and Busse’s edited collection point to, as well as Rachel Parish’s chapter in Robillard and Fortune’s Authorship Contested. Much of this work emphasizes the values in gift communities placed on open exchange with reciprocity, encouraging citation and circulation and discouraging monetary ownership and constraint. Parish’s chapter has a unique place for its emphasis on the tensions produced as fan economies get commercialized, leading to issues of intellectual copyright and ownership. Giving a deeper history of copyright and ownership, Mark Rose’s text showcases patterns that circulated in that history, giving more context to Rife’s and Parish’s work and other texts focused more on the Internet, like Jenkins’ Convergence Culture.

Much of this work on ownership and originality, in fandom creations and otherwise, rely on other theories of circulation and remix, which give rise to the same sort of tension. David Gunkel presents a thorough and deeply theoretical approach to remix and related actions, arguing that both conservative and copyleft proponents rely on fundamental assumptions about originality. Overviewing these assumptions, which largely reflect a Platonic bias toward certain views of “original,” Gunkel then argues that we should accept other values, which he outlines, reflecting remix, emphasizing the role of the DJ over the role of the author, for example. Steadman’s piece on fan work represents a less theoretical and more example-driven approach to two fandoms, but it makes similar claims and shares a similar understanding to remix as Gunkel, the range of actions that constitute producing derivative and transformative work from prior material. Here, I see the intersection of circulation being central. While circulation has a strong link to work like DeVoss and Ridolfo’s “rhetorical velocity” and Jenny Rice’s “rhetorical ecology,” it shares a lot in common with this work on remix, as both look at the uptake, movement, and re-working of material. Gries’ Still Life with Rhetoric grounds much contemporary discussion, using a new materialist methodology to trace the affective nature of the Obama Hope image is it changed materials, formed networks, inspired movements, and drew critique and parody. Gries takes a consequentialist approach to rhetoric, focusing more on what rhetoric does on an extended timescale than on the intentions of the author. While Gries focuses on the artifact, Dustin Edward’s addition to circulation is the focus on how authors work with what he sees as a fluid archive of circulating material. The savvy considerations of those doing the re-purposing, he argues, shows a similar concern for the future circulation for their own work, as well as an intertextual savvy from the larger source(s) of their material. His work has much in common with fandom scholarship, especially Abigail Derecho’s theorizing of Derrida and archive. As this overall work on circulation and remix shows, writers can approach materials through a spectrum of ongoing interaction, drawing from circulating work to produce more circulating work.

Game Studies

Alberti, John. “The Game of Reading and Writing: How Videogames Reframe Our

Understanding of Literacy.” Computers and Composition 25 (2008): 258-69. PDF.

Anthropy, Anna. Rise of Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs Artists,

Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. New York, NY: Seven Stories P, 2012.

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Boston: MIT P,

2010. Print.

Brown, James J., Jr. and Eric Alexander. “Procedural Rhetoric, Proairesis, Game Design,

and the Revaluing of Invention.” Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, and Games. Eds. Doug Eyman and Andréa Davis. Anderson, SC: Parlour P, 2016. 270-287. Print.

Davis, Andréa. “‘Leroy Jenkins!’ What Videogames can Teach us About Visual

Arguments.” Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, and Games. Eds. Doug Eyman and Andréa Davis. Anderson, SC: Parlour P, 2016. 181-95. Print.

DeKoven, Bernard. The Well-Played Game: A Player’s Philosophy. Cambridge: The MIT P,

2013. Print.

Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT UP, 2009. Print.

Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: U of

Minnesota Press, 2006. Print.

Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London:

Routledge UP, 1949. Print.

Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. Cambridge: MIT Press,

2016. Print.

Kline, Stephen, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter. Digital Play: The Interaction of

Technology, Culture, and Marketing. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. Print.

Kocurek, Carly A. Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Videogame

Arcade. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015. Print.

McNely, Brian J., Paul Gestwicki, Bridget Gelms, and Ann Burke. “Spaces and Surfaces

of Invention: A Visual Ethnography of Game Development.” Enculturation. 28 Feb. 2013. Web.

Monfort, Nick and Ian Bogost. Racing the Beam: The Atari Videogame System.

Cambridge: MIT P, 2009. Print.

Sihvonen, Tanja. Players Unleashed!: Modding The Sims and the Culture of Gaming.

Amsterdam: U of Amsterdam P, 2011. eBook.

Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. 2nd ed. Peterborough:

Broadview P, 2005. Print.

New Media and Procedurality

Alexander, Jonathan and Jacqueline Rhodes. On Multimodality: New Media in Composition

Studies. Urbane: NCTE, 2014. Print.

Brooke, Collin Gifford. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. New York:

Hampton Press, 2009. PDF.

Brock, Kevin and Dawn Shepherd. “Understanding how Algorithms Work Persuasively

Through the Procedural Enthymeme.” Computers and Composition 42 (2016): 17-27. PDF.

Carnegie, Teena A.M. “The Interface as Exordium: The Rhetoric of Interactivity.” Computers

and Composition 26 (2009): 164-173. PDF.

Emerson, Lori. Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound. Minneapolis,

MN: U of Minnesota P, 2014

Jones, John. Network* Writing. Kairos 20.1 (2015): n.p. 2015. Web.

Vee, Annette. Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing the World.

Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2017. Print.

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and

Software Studies. Cambridge: MIT P, 2009. Print.

Fanwork, Remix, and Ownership

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Aspen: The Magazine in a Box 5+6. ubu.com.

UbuWeb, 1967. Web.

Black, Rebecca. “Online Fan Fiction, Global Identities, and Imagination” Research in the

Teaching of English 43.4 (2009): 397-425. PDF.

Edwards, Dustin. “On Circulatory Encounters: The Case for Tactical Rhetoric.” Enculturation. 4

Oct. 2017. Web.

Gries, Laurie. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetoric.

Logan: U of Utah P, 2015. Print.

Gunkel, David J. Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics after Remix. MIT P, 2016.

Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the

Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland and Co., 2006.

Herzog, Alexandra Elisabeth. "'But this is my story and how I wanted to write it':

Author's Notes as a Fannish Claim to Power in Fan Fiction Writing." Transformative Works and Cultures 11 (2012). Web. 3 Oct. 2014.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. 2nd ed. New York, NY:

Vintage Books, 2007. Print.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergent Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New

York: NYU P, 2006. Print.

Leavenworth, Maria Lindgren. “The Paratext of Fan Fiction.” Narrative 23.1

(Jan. 2015): 40-60. PDF.

Rife, Martine Courant. Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing. Southern

Illinois UP, 2013.

Robillard, Amy E., and Ron Fortune, editors. Authorship Contested: Cultural

Challenges to the Authentic, Autonomous Author. New York, NY: Routledge, 2016.

Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

UP, 1993.

Scholz, Trebor, ed. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York, NY:

Routledge, 2013. Print.

Stedman, Kyle D. “Remix Literacy and Fan Composition.” Computers and

Composition 29 (2012): 107-123. PDF.

Game Studies

Alberti, John. “The Game of Reading and Writing: How Videogames Reframe Our

Understanding of Literacy.” Computers and Composition 25 (2008): 258-69. PDF.

Alberti tries to articulate how videogames challenge our approach to literacy and writing pedagogy, focusing on three main areas: play, authority, and the role of visual literacies and interfaces. Regarding play, he notes that one may “read” a book or “watch” a movie, but one “plays” a game, giving this activity a less serious connotation and a more interactive encounter that disrupts traditional views of reading and writing. He draws from James Paul Gee and others to critique literacy education that ignores play, especially videogames, and he argues ways that videogames can amplify our understanding of more current digital literacies in student lives and beyond. When it comes to the visual, he argues that videogames challenge traditional understandings of alphabetic text by involving it in rich digital spaces and presenting more variation on its style and interaction. When it comes to authority, Alberti brings his argument together, arguing that videogames challenge many traditional views of authority in alphabetic, literary views of text. Games offer a dialogic space that disrupts notion of progress and process, as the player is constantly interacting with the game in an ever-unfolding text through the interface. Furthermore, as he noted under his investigation of play, the player is always reading and writing as part of this dialogic interaction. Alberti uses these challenges to authority to consider similar new media examples beyond games, like how writing in a word processor has the same ephemeral interaction as play when we write, edit, and delete. Concluding, Alberti argues that we should use videogames as models to transform the writing classroom into an “arena of play” based more around metaphors of digital play and less around paper and print.

Anthropy, Anna. Rise of Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs Artists,

Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. New York, NY: Seven Stories P, 2012.

In this book, Anthropy, a prominent indie designer, critic, and activist, outlines the history and current state of the mainstream game industry and contrasts it with games designed by individuals, often amateurs. For her main thesis, she first argues that the goals of the industry—to produce lucrative, massive games—and its lack of diversity in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation often leads to a monotonous set of titles and “stories,” potentially marginalizing or ignoring others who may otherwise enjoy videogames. Contrasting this, she shows how current technologies have eased the production of games, leading to the growth of videogame subcultures and companies that encourage amateur design. Regarding these designers, she applauds the prominence of indie companies, but her main emphasis is on individual designers and their capacity to use game design as an expressive tool for difficult topics that may not circulate in more prominent locations. She discusses prominent examples of this work, like Glorious Trainwrecks, founded in 2007 to provide an outlet for self-described “crappy games” that may just be for fun, but often tackle importan issues for individual designers. The text includes both practical tips and more theoretical principles regarding the “videogame zine” development that she envisions and explores the communities and individuals that hold this philosophy or a related one.

For my uses, the book has three main parts that I see connecting. First, her history of the evolution of the gaming industry, including her own experience in it, raises productive questions regarding technology, the economics and labor of game development, and the role of gate-keeping and videogame culture. Second, she notes her own description of what games are and why they matter, but she emphasizes the role of “authored games,” which express the views and design of the author(s), and contrasts them to “folk games,” which arise from social views and decentered design. She argues that authored games may allow a more individual or niche expression of experiences and topics if done well. Third, she discusses many kinds of games and means of design, ranging from simple hacking to AAA design and production, with authors ranging from trained professionals to amateurs. This work connects her somewhat with Bogost and Montfort and Kline et al by considering technology and industry, and it connects her more with Galloway and Flanagan by considering the cultural and subversive nature of some designers and videogame subcultures.

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Boston: MIT P,

2010. Print.

In rhetorical studies, this has tended to be one of the dominant ways of viewing video games as a rhetorical force. It draws from the history of rhetoric, moving glibly from classical rhetoric into modern rhetorical theory, particularly visual rhetoric, then claims the addition of procedural rhetoric as an extension of this lineage. This historical approach and Bogost’s understanding of rhetoric, being outside the field, is a bit limited, largely centered on rhetoric as a “means of persuasion” that may incorporate ideology but little else. Through procedural rhetoric, as Ian Bogost defines it, “arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models” (29). In this framework, videogame designers construct rule-bound systems that guide players into a particular “possibility space” where they complete certain “nested enthymemes” through play. Furthermore, many of these possibility spaces have ideological assumptions or arguments about how the world works, and by interacting within the rule-bound system, players come to realize or experience the potential arguments that the game is trying to make. Bogost emphasizes procedural argument as a modality itself, though it may incorporate other modalities, so that a game may use writing and visuals to make a specific argument, but that does not mean its procedures do.

After putting together his theory, he applies it to three specific areas, using multiple videogame examples: politics, advertising, and education. When it comes to politics, he considers how games put forth ideological viewpoints or get used to make political arguments and teach political concepts. On the one hand, this includes games authored by the military or with a military-driven ideology in mind, and on the other hand, he explores the “serious games” that activist and advocacy groups author to critique institutions like capitalism. Many of these build on procedural rhetoric’s ability to simulate real world systems, like cities. When it comes to his section on advertising, he discusses three different approaches to advertising and advertising rhetoric drawn from advertising literature: demonstrative (showing how a product works), associative (associating more intangible elements with a product), and illustrative (a bit of both). He then shows how games use these approaches with product placement and “advergames.” For example, he discusses that one could simply have the product placement of Mountain Dew, or they could use it as an energy-providing power up in a game, giving more demonstrative or illustrative power. When it comes to education, he argues that procedural rhetoric can help create illustrative systems to teach topics, and he also considers how to teach procedural literacies. Like the other sections, he considers both sides: educational games that extend more hegemonic values and games that critique these values.

Forming one of the foundational texts in the field’s uptake of games, this would likely be a central book for my project and related work. It focuses heavily on examples and theoretical approaches from a variety of disciplines, ranging from literary and rhetorical studies to advertising. It also offers a potential jumping off point for my work with its somewhat restricted sense of rhetoric.

Brown, James J., Jr. and Eric Alexander. “Procedural Rhetoric, Proairesis, Game Design,

and the Revaluing of Invention.” Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, and Games. Eds. Doug Eyman and Andréa Davis. Anderson, SC: Parlour P, 2016. 270-287.

This chapter uses Brooke’s “praioretic invention” to include players in the invention process of videogames, along with the designer. Brown and Alexander first review Bogost’s procedural rhetoric, using their class as an example of how designers make arguments through procedural rhetoric. They then observe how their students also find new ways of using the game, exploring it, etc., which they argue is an example of Brooke’s prioaretic invention. This type of invention, as explored more below emphasizes a more ongoing, unbounded engagement at the level of the interface. Like Brooke, they note that this may not be purely endemic to new media, but new media—games in their example—showcase an especially rich, vivid example of it. In their view, when players play through a game, bringing out the procedural enthymemes authored by the designer, they continue invention beyond the “product” of the designer, with the player finding new possibilities within the procedures of the game, “moving through the game in unpredictable ways” (274-5).

I see this text helpful, as it is largely setting the same general patterns that I want to build on, extending the rhetorical authorship of the game beyond the design phase. It also offers a nice application of more central concepts—namely procedural rhetoric and pioraretic invention.

Davis, Andréa. “‘Leroy Jenkins!’ What Videogames can Teach us About Visual

Arguments.” Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, and Games. Eds. Doug Eyman and Andréa Davis. Anderson, SC: Parlour P, 2016. 181-95. Print.

Davis details the “multilayered and multimodal environment of World of Warcraft as a site of production and composition” (182) and then analyzes the famous “Leroy Jenkins” scene as a carefully orchestrated production. Much of this work consists of detailing the interface of WOW and describing the multitasking and literacies involved with working through it to produce avatar actions and interact with the game space. It also looks trough the social literacies involved with working together as a guild and the more game-specific literacies involved with knowing the jokes involved with video, which an audience of WOW fans may pick up on, though outsiders may not. Davis argues that the Leroy Jenkins video, a recruitment tool, “packs in a rich visual argument employing humor, satire, and rhetorical appeals and archetypes” and contains many elements of effective writing, like a strong hook and sensitivity to audience (193). All of these elements highlight how the players can use their literacies and the game interface to not only play but to make rhetorically savvy texts for a given audience.

In particular, this piece provides a helpful example with which to work through looking at games as rhetorical situations and as composing sites. It offers a helpful application of some of the theory presented in a range of texts, from literacy and games and composing through game interfaces. The approach to audience and less direct literacies, like the knowledge of the game and its tropes, also offered a nice reference to communities.

DeKoven, Bernard. The Well-Played Game: A Player’s Philosophy. Cambridge: The MIT P,

2013. Print.

As the subtitle suggests, this text articulates a player-centric philosophy to play and games, advancing DeKoven’s personal position within the New Games movement. DeKoven argues for the importance of a strong player community, the group of participants and spectators involved in a play session and beyond, placing the creation and maintenance of these social, ludic bonds at the center of a well-played game. This particular version of play is one that values the wellness of the community and a genuine sense of fun over more formal concerns. As such, he challeges the role of rules in games, arguing that they shoud be amenable to the needs of the players, like the “well-timed cheat” or his instance that no pure version of a game exists. He advocates the need in play for trust and fairness, for caring and respect among participants, and for the mutal goal of a session being a well-played game, contrasted to merely winning. With these concerns in mind, he distinguishes between “playing to win” and “needing to win” and other related issues, stressing the need for everyone in the community to be on the same page when it comes to winning conditions. Often “winning” and “losing” divide us, even when we are unified as players trying to play the same game. Contrasting this, when we truly lose ourselves in the game and start to play the for its own sake, the need to win fades, even as the win condition and the rules help contextualize and define how and what one plays.

While DeKoven gets at certain specifics, like different ways to end a game or the effect of playing for keeps, the book is mainly helpful for the larger philosophy of play that DeKoven and others argue for. It offers a counterpoint to the agonistic element of play that Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois point out, emphasizing the social, coperative elements of play and making a clear case for the positive, heathy values that play should foster. In an almost utopian scope, for example, he describes the “Games Preserve,” a space that we all should build in our communities and lives to play together and form these player communities. More immediate to the project, his player-centric approach recognizes the role of community and player agency when it comes to shaping the game experience, which emphasizes the malleable and emergent nature of play.

Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT UP, 2009.

Print.

In this monograph, designer and scholar-activist Mary Flanagan takes a comprehensive approach to articulate a concept of “critical play” and “critical design,” building off the work of various artists in game design and other media to envision a form of design that contrasts most mainstream and popculture views of gaming. Her overall thesis is that games, and play more generally, has often been associated with entertainment or childish diversion and little else, and this trend has continued to inform the values of much of the gaming industry. She contrasts this with a more “subversive” and “artistic” view of play, games, and game design that sees play as expressive endevours that can not only explore major concepts and ideas, but can use the unique modalities of game design and play to “disrupt” audiences and structures and advance activist agendas. To make her case, she begins by looking at the domestic nature of early play, focusing on dolls and dollhouses and noting the reammergance of this play in games like The Sims. Like Tanja Sihvonen, though with a different taxonomy and broader context, she describes how this type of play’s more free, imporivsational quality allows “rewriting” or “unwriting” in the hands of less mainstream participants. She does similar work in ensuing chapters, looking at the history of activism and disruption at the heart of early board games like the Monopoly precurser Landlord, then discussing the role of word play and language games like puns and satire. She then moves toward avant-garde movements in other types of media, like the Surealists and Situationists, and connects this to game movments like The New Games and game subcultures that differ from the central game industry and tried to use play, games, and game design to advance particular ideals or activitst and artistic agendas. In these chapters, which are example-driven, she tends to focus heavily on the cultural and social impact of art as well as the affordances of the media that expresses this work.

Most helpfully for me, she then moves into the role of videogames in this critical tradition and her clearest forumlation of critical design, an activist- and artist-forward version of iterative design. In her chapter on critical videogames, she connects with Bogost, Galloway, and Anthropy in particular, but she frames her analysis and examples in different ways. Like Bogost, she discusses “serious games” and includes many of the same examples, like Darfur is Dying, but she focuses less on the procedural nature of these games—how they “argue” a specific claim—and more about how they use traditional game mechanics and styles to discuss something serious, eskewing fun in favor of activism. She views these games as additional tools that activists can take up and employ and discusses some of the particular intenstions behind their creation. She also goes beyond Bogost and considrs games more in terms of artistic pieces, aligning her more with Galloway. Though more example than theory-driven, she discusses games that break traditional mechanics—like games that play themselves or barely play at all—and games that treat the medium itself in unsual, disruptive ways. Like Anthropy, Flanagan here and in the book in general, ephasizes the ability of invidual or groups of non-mainstream designers to construct unique games or alter existing games through modding and hacking. In the last chapter, when she finally articulates her view of design, she uses her preceding analysis and critical theory to expand the iterative design process, tweaking and adding steps to make it more value- and goal-driven and more participatory and inclusive for both design and audience. In some ways her approach to design connects with how Sihvonen and others view a more participatory approach, but her grounding in activist and avant-garde traditions offers a unique spin that she further amplifies into theories on what games and play can accomplish, aligning her somewhat with DeKoven—though in a more radicial, disruptive vein and squarely bound with a clear design methodology and method. In terms of the project, then, this texts connects in a variety of ways, analyzing the design, culture, and history of games and makign its own addition.

Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: U of

Minnesota Press, 2006. Print.

Alexander Galloway wants to craft a theory about how videogames are different from other media, particularly through their algorithmic and (inter)active qualities and their ability to inform and represent an “algorithmic culture.” To make his argument, he draws from media theory, cybernetics, and critical theory and uses examples that include mainstream games, activist work, and glitch-based art. Like others, he sees videogames as especially active, preferring the term “action-based” media over interactive to stress this active dimension and goes on to argue that a videogame is only a videogame when being enacted, distinguishing it from other media. When not being “operated,” to Galloway, a game is simply a collection of rules and content with the potential for expression. Beyond the technological and material aspects of videogames, he also stresses the cultural, economic, and social dimensions to gaming, referring to games as “algorithmic cultural objects” that may profess or instill a certain “allegorithm” that the player masters—like the empire-building mechanics in Civilization. In other words, algorithms can involve the player in a sort of logic that is not just based on mechanics, but involves cultural and social logics. This aligns with procedural rhetoric in some ways, but Galloway explores the subjectivity and process that leads to the expression of the allegorithm in a different manner, drawing from cybernetics to stress how a player, or “operator” in his terminology, becomes part of the algorithm’s expression. As active media, then, videogames require scholars to consider what they mean—what values or narratives they uphold—by analyzing this cybernetic circuit between player and algorithms, not just reading the symbolic aspects of a game.

He also takes on issues of remediation. In his chapter on first-person shooters and POV shots, he highlights how films pioneered POV shots and often associated them with killers, monsters, or machines, thereby setting the history that informs POV videogames. After tracing this history, though, he argues how videogames have inflected traditional film with their use of POV. Rather than trying to use shots, like montage, to create meaning through symbolism or representation, “gamic vision” tries to use shots to produce meaning through the framing and allowing of action. Galloway also draws from the literary and film traditions of realism to consider what realism means for videogames, arguing that they represent a third form based in action: the player’s actions in the game must align with the action in their daily life. For example, a typical American teenager playing a first-person shooter is not engaged in realism, while a solider on the front line who plays the same game is. Last, Galloway considers anti-games, modding that changes the game “technologies” and not the game play, unlike other modding. This type of modding seeks to radically shift what the game can express, often valuing aesthetics over play, changing what the underlying mechanics and content expresses. For example, traditional modding may change aspects of a first-person shooter but it ultimately remains a first-person shooter; this type of modding may turn a first-person shooter into an abstract art piece.

Overall, this book presents a few helpful elements for my project: a unique view of algorithms and their role in expression, a taxonomy of the (inter)active features involved with games, a unique consideration of modding, and more generally how they align with other media through Galloway’s contextualizing. His focus on action, in my opinion, also offers a contrast to more design-centered approaches to games, as it emphasizes how videogames present a uniquely active, emergent media and modality, even among other new media types.

Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element In Culture. London:

Routledge UP, 1949. Print.

This is considered one of the foundational texts to game studies, though it is a bit dated at this point. Huizinga’s main thesis is that play is a foundational characteristic of what it means to be human, informing religion, philosophy, law, warfare, poetry, and other central elements of our human development and culture across the world. He takes a largely anthropological and linguistic approach, focusing on different words for play and social institutions that reflect the “play instinct,” a set of values that Huizinga loosely outlines while recognizing its flexibility. This view of play, Huizinga argues, has the following qualities: it exists outside “ordinary life,” it often involves intrigue and costumes, it can be seriously pursued, it is largely done for its own sake, and it is bounded in a time and space. In arguing for the bounded nature of play, Huizinga coins the famous “magical circle” term, which other scholars, including Salen and Zimmerman, Bogost, and Miguel Sicart, have taken up. The for-itself or autotelic nature of play has also resonated in multiple works since Huizinga and represents a recurrent pattern in traditional approaches to leisure, like Josef Pieper’s “Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

After defining the play instinct and going through different words for play in more ancient cultures, especially Greece and China, he focuses on certain cultural institutions and highlights their link to these features, tracing a ludic genealogy of their development. For example, when it comes to religion, he points to the riddles that early priestly classes may have used and their evolution into philosophy as well and how religious ceremonies often exist in a magic circle separated from ordinary life, are largely autotelic, and often contain props and costumes. He does this same sort of move for the law, warfare, elements of government, and certain types of language, including rhetoric and poetry, use cultural examples and words to make similar cases. In regards to rhetoric, he emphasizes the agonistic approach of the Sophists. Toward the end of the text, as he considers his more contemporary context, including the role of professional sports, he tends to be more critical, seeing the role of play reduced by more material, economic, and industrial goals. For example, he says that the professional athlete does not fit his play instinct because the athlete plays for money, therefore breaking the autotelic rule and making play, in the athlete’s case, part of everyday life.

In terms of my project, I mainly see this as a cornerstone book. I will likely draw from his definition and others’ variation of it. Of particular interest, I think the autotelic nature of play and its separation from “ordinary life,” as well as Huizinga’s skepticism with economic and industrial trends, fits potential patterns in my list in authorship and fandom conversations. I recognize the antiquated nature of some of his anthropological views and the flaws with some of his arguments, but some of the broader thinking may be helpful, especially considering their influence in game studies.

Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. Cambridge: MIT Press,

2016. Print.

Katherine Isbister wants to make a case for the role of emotion when it comes to game design, focusing on four main areas: the role of choice and flow, the building blocks of multiplayer gameplay, the role of identification and empathy through bodies and movement in games, and the techniques of using emotion to drive networked gameplay. Throughout the text, she offers clear examples from specific games, both videogames and analogue games, and presents genuine design philosophies and practices from the industry and other game-producing artists and activists. She largely wants to challenge some social views that try to connect violence and isolation to gaming by showing its capacity to build rich, empathic insights, nurture mental health, and build genuine social connections. The first chapter focuses primarily on the interactive capacity of gaming, which she views as making it more similar to sports that watching a movie or television, and she frames this interaction in terms of “choice,” the player’s capacity to influence the media through their actions, and in terms of “flow,” the positive psychology term that refers to the pleasurable immersion into our actions as designers draw from these ideas to design games like Flower and Journey. She also discusses the role that choice has in implicating the player into the effects of the world, including the health of the avatar like in The Sims or number of figures sent to Auschwitz in Train leading to complex emotional experiences and empathy. This chapter sets out the major tone and ideas of the others.

In terms of social play, the next chapter, she discusses how coordinated action, role-playing, and designed social situations contribute to comradery and ease socializing in multiplayer games, using multiple examples. In chapter three, she points out example games like Joust that take advantage of the embodied elements of gaming and how these embodied experiences and movements can deepen our emotional involvement in games. Many of these designers incorporate interactive feedback loops and medical, physiological science to optimize the role of movement and the body in terms of wellness or in exploring the capacities of the game. In the final chapter, revisits social play but does so through networked connections. Again, she tries to look at specific design strategies: sharing digital objects, creating special events subject to time, and shaping online activist and hobby communities. Each of these tactics contributes to networked communities.

Kline, Stephen, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter. Digital Play: The Interaction of

Technology, Culture, and Marketing. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. Print.

In this text, these authors create a theoretical framework based on communication studies, political economy, and cultural studies that includes “three circuits of interactivity” of technology, culture, and marketing, which they use to investigate videogames. They situate their approach as a response to the optimism of futurists and Silicon Valley executives who see the expansion of digital technology and its role in driving the economy with uncritical hope, but they also want to distance themselves from a neo-luddite perspective that rejects this technology. Instead, they want to bridge a “paradox,” as they see it, by both accepting and even embracing digital technology while also noting its negative impacts on culture and labor. As their framework of “circuits of interactivity” makes clear, forces of technology, labor, commerce, culture, etc., all interact to drive one another and produce a post-Fordist society that is an ideal atmosphere for the “interactive” media of videogames. They, therefore, expand interaction beyond the usual player-program interface to include a variety of forces, from technological advancement to the marketing that helps drive commerce (and therefore production). Each of these circuits—technology, culture, and marketing—drive one another and have their own artifacts and people, like computers and marketers.

After articulating this framework, they ground in with a historical analysis of the evolution of videogames, largely in the United States, from one of the earliest games, MIT graduate student Steve Russell’s Spacewar (1962), to the early 21st Century and speculation for beyond. While these histories present helpful details, they also note larger trends and tensions that tend to be more salient. Foremost, they note the tension between the rebellious and copyleft “hacker ethic” that infused the early evolution of videogames and videogame development as a whole. They also note the role that government military funding played in videogame development, like radar, DARPA, etc., and point to areas where these attributes crop up, such as in the militarism of most early games, like Space Invaders, and the masculine culture of gaming or the role of game modifications and general antiestablishment culture that infuses many circles of publishing. They also note the paradox of work and play in videogame development, particularly how many business interests can use the hacker ethic and narratives of play to drive exploitive labor practices—while the copyleft attitude of game programmers also hurts business interests through piracy. They conclude by going through particular case studies—videogame labor unrest and piracy, Gameboys and Pokémon, and masculine gaming culture—before concluding with The Sims. In both the history and the case studies, the authors remain consistent regarding their three circuits of technology, marketing, and culture.

I suspect this book will be quite useful for its theoretical framework, history, and use of case studies, as its goal aligns with my own and it speaks to my other sources, especially Kocurek’s and Sihvonen’s texts. It presents a robust framework that could help build a more rhetorical analysis to videogames, interaction, and the broader circuits of videogame culture and development.

Kocurek, Carly A. Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Videogame

Arcade. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015. Print.

In this text, Kocurek traces the history of videogames in the United States, attempting to show how game entrepreneurs tried to overcome the challenges they faced from social conservatives and other cultural forces and how this tended helped produce a “technomasculine” culture that persists to today. In terms of the history, Kocurek situates the evolution of videogames and videogame culture in the U.S. along certain key moments and trends, describing how certain anxieties about the gambling and frivolous nature of play as well as the perceived violence of games like Death Race (1976) threatened their survival, leading to interventions that made games and gamers more palatable to the larger culture. Her first major example is the role of a 1982 Life Magazine photograph of cheerleaders and athletic gamers posing around arcade machines in an Iowa town, trying to soften the face of gaming by presenting it as more wholesome and “American” by using this athletic and masculine imagery. She makes a similar argument when looking at the rise of the “technomasculine,” essentially a more boyish, mischievous, and technologically savvy type of masculinity lauded by movies like The Last Starfighter and War Games that is an important asset for the U.S. regarding its technological ability and its impact and standing in the Cold War and post-Cold War world. Once again, she tries to highlight how this use of the technomasculine tries to give a purpose to videogames, here national pride and security, as well as a certain standing.

The darker side of this defense, however, was that the representation of early gaming spaces, including the arcade, tended to emphasize male figures, which intensified as time went on and persists in many ways, like Gamer Gate, making gaming a “boys only” hobby—as well as tech more generally. This contradicts the data from most arcades and Atari-owning bars, however, which showed a stronger gender diversity in these spaces, and the role of women in programming, especially in the early 90s.

I expect this book will be useful for two main reasons. First of all, it offers a fairly complete history of videogame evolution from the 70s into the 90s, even examining the role of pinball machines, and though it is using this history to make specific arguments, it is still a valuable genealogy of many of the current cultural trends as well as the context and impact of certain events in that evolution. Second, the book examines certain core themes that I am interested in considering in my thesis, including the tension of play/productivity, the role of social and moral forces on games and game culture, issues of gender with gaming culture—and how videogames and videogame culture established itself in its formative years.

McNely, Brian J., Paul Gestwicki, Bridget Gelms, and Ann Burke. “Spaces and Surfaces

of Invention: A Visual Ethnography of Game Development.” Enculturation. 28 Feb. 2013. Web.

This visual ethnography project draws from an intensive 15-week period monitoring a collection of advanced undergrad students as they designed and eventually delivered a videogame to a community partner. Observing this project, the researchers used visual ethnographic methods to study the range of day-to-day activities, from playing to workflow management, which took place during these weeks as part of the development process, allowing a rich window into the experience. McNely et al envision the development process in terms of invention, citing LeFevre. As LeFevre argued, this game design project operated through an ecology of mediating texts and genres, which the researchers also articulate in terms of Clay Spinuzzi’s genre ecology work. Mediating genres helped structure the team development through workflow management, like the use of sticky notes and other coordinating documents. Meetings and other more general genres eased the integration of more distinct genre ecologies, like those of computer science or music majors, which interacted together in the game’s production. The visual ethnographic approach also allows one to trace the way that this immersive approach operated, growing from initial planning sessions, through design and testing. This particular example also showed how the project encouraged learning through an intensive mentor-mediated, yet student-driven approach.

More descriptive and methodological than theoretical, this presents many vivid examples and an engaged overall study regarding distributed invention, game development, and intensive learning environments that I could see informing how I consider the development and design face of videogames. It presents a clear window into the development process of a specific game, including its different participants and the genres and tools that mediated that development.

Monfort, Nick and Ian Bogost. Racing the Beam: The Atari Videogame System.

Cambridge: MIT P, 2009. Print.

Nick Monfort and Ian Bogost perform what the call “platform studies,” part of a larger series that they edit, which analyzes the history of specific videogame systems, including a close read of the hardware, programming, games, people, and broader market forces that impacted these systems or “platforms” as they came into existence and developed. This text focuses on the VCS Atari 2600 and the “many-layered” elements of hardware that comprised it. They discuss major games for it throughout the book, using them to articulate the market forces, design philosophies, hardware affordances, etc., that defined the Atari 2600. They also point out larger trends: the symbiotic relationship between the hardware of the VCS and home televisions at the time, the influence of early arcade games like Pong on the design and repertoire of VCS games, and the raw flexibility of the Atari hardware.

They first discuss Combat, a popular, simple game set bundled with the VCS and developed as the hardware itself was still in development. Going through the game, Bogost and Montfort note how it showcases the role of earlier games and the creative approaches to the VCS hardware. They next look at Adventure, one of the first action-adventure games, which broke from previous single-screen games, from Pong to Pacman, to allow the play to go off screen and discover new areas. Not only did this take new programming skills, it pioneered a new genre of game. They next examine the port of Pacman to the Atari, specifically how it revealed the difficulty of transferring a game from one set of hardware to another, resulting in a poor port. This contrasts with Yar’s Revenge, the next game, which was one of the most critically acclaimed Atari games for the way it used its unique hardware to craft a new experience. The next game, Pitfall, looks at the rise of Activision and third-part developers designing games for the same system, including the work practices and office conditions of most game development at the time—which was isolated with little authorial recognition. The book closes out with Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back to consider the translation of a movie into a game, the rise of other media interests in videogame design, and the 1983 crash. The book also looks at the life of the Atari since then, including the homebrew culture that continues to mod and develop games for it.

Despite its focus on a single platform, this text has many rich considerations that could apply to other aspects of game studies, including the role of hardware, market pressures, design issues, and videogame culture and history.

Sihvonen, Tanja. Players Unleashed!: Modding The Sims and the Culture of Gaming.

Amsterdam: U of Amsterdam P, 2011. eBook.

In this monograph, Sihvonen explores the interactions of The Sims players and its fandom, with a particular focus on the modding community, while also providing a thorough overview of modding scholarship, including a theory of various levels of interaction. Her primary investigation centers on what made the fandom community for The Sims so rich, engaging with the coding of the game, its features, the intervention from the company, and the various sites created by fans. At the most basic level, she points to the affordances of the game itself as a space with considerable freedom for the play, arguing that The Sims created a flexible space for players to invent new materials, unlike more structured games. This type of invention includes creations like machinima, narratives, and “gamics,” comics created through screen capture. Elements, like the capacity to take screen shots, came with the game, and Maxis provided outlets for fans to show off and exchange these creations on the main Maxis site. Fans also created major fan sites and more personal blogs to showcase and exchange work. Moving beyond this level of interaction, Sihvonen also highlights the players’ uses and possible misuses of the game code, focusing her research into the objects and options authored by The Sims fanbase as mods to the original. As part of the success, the coding of The Sims was relatively easy to access and work with, and the object-oriented mechanics of the game—where one adds options to objects for players to interact with—eased editing. Maxis also had multiple editors to ease the process. Some of these creations, like new clothes, were innocuous, but other edits, like the inclusion of cars or the complication of gender, proved more radical. In some cases, as when hackers exploited a glitch to reveal the private areas of Sims’ anatomy, the company intervened with patches and warnings, showcasing the give-and-take nature of these relationships.

Drawing from a variety of primary examples and history to engage with The Sims directly, Sihvonen also theorizes about hacking and fan interaction overall. Grounding her work, she distinguishes between the “game-as-product,” how it’s originally released off the shelf and circulated in more official channels, and the “game-as-process,” how players take up playing it. In investigating the game, she situates The Sims within the markets, production, uptake culture, and various actors that Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter outline in their book, above, and how these elements influence the uptake and interaction that develops the game-as-process. She also crafts a theory of modding building off Jenkins’ participatory culture that is a voluntary self-satisfying set of communal activities involving both users and producers.. Both of these elements—the game-as-process model and her theory of modding—provide templates to build from for other examples.

Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. 2nd ed. Peterborough:

Broadview P, 2005. Print.

This is a mock Socratic dialogue with the titular Grasshopper acting as the philosopher, dying after his final pronouncement and leading his followers Prudence and Skepticus to debate the meaning of his ludic philosophy and its implications. After the Grasshopper dies, Prudence and Skepticus debate the role of games within the larger realm of play for the Grasshopper, seeking to define what a game is, in typical Socratic fashion, by abstracting from various examples to form a larger definition. They eventually reach a serious of rules, but largely argue that a game is an activity where you take a less efficient path to do so something. They use golf as an example, in that one could simply place the ball in the hole, but by imposing “rules” around this goal, like the use of clubs and the imposing of traps, golfing becomes a game. This game gets further definition by the use of scoring and competition, clarifying the intrinsic goal-directed intention of the game. Most importantly, The Grasshopper points to the need of a “lusory attitude” in play, emphasizing the approach and attitude of the players when engaged in a playful, game-oriented activity. Collectively, the definition requires that a “game” contains an achievable goal, means to that goal, rules that structure those means and goal, and the lusory attitude of the players.

After assembling their definition, the two test and extend it, articulating different player types and aspects to a game. Of interest to me, the two distinguish between the “institution” of a game, which gives structure and meaning to a game across play sessions, and the playing of a game, which takes place in a bounded time and place. The two also spend considerable time discussing some of the paradoxes of playing, like how one wants to defeat a foe in many games but also maintain a level of affable enjoyment or how certain actions the Grasshopper calls a game, like mountain climbing, do not fit the definition they seemed to set out. Through these challenges, the role of games and life becomes more totalizing and the idea of attitude becomes more important, emphasizing that an autotelic, non-utilitarian approach largely constitutes a game. They use this further to discuss many of the paradoxes of role-playing, a hefty section of the book. The debate culminates into the ludic utopia envisioned by the Grasshopper, where everyone views life as a game. Overall, I think this book presents a number of interesting definitions, discussions, and paradoxes when it games to discussing the deeper philosophy behind play and games.

New Media and Procedurality

Alexander, Jonathan and Jacqueline Rhodes. On Multimodality: New Media in Composition

Studies. Urbane: NCTE, 2014. Print.

In this text Alexander and Rhodes offer both theoretical and practical considerations of multimodal composing in the composition classroom, especially with new media, synthesizing other scholarship on new media and multimodality with composition pedagogy. Their main goal is to articulate an approach to multimodal composing that embraces the media and modality itself and uses it to structure its practices and logics, rather than embrace multimodal composing with print-based logics. They want to stress the unique rhetorical potentials of new media composing and argue for a techne suited to it, first historicizing the approaches and attitudes of the field toward multimodal composing, then exploring three specific examples of such composing. Outlining the uptake of technology and multimodal composing in the field, they largely claim that the broader uptake often maintained a textual approach to their view of rhetoric, while considering other rhetorical approaches less. The examples include the production of a video literacy narrative that allows students to engage with a range of multimedia, learning and exploring them; the “prosumer” task of photo manipulation; and the literacies that videogames help students express and explore.

Of particular use to me is the chapter on prosumerism and the chapter on videogames. Regarding the chapter on prosumerism, Alexander and Rhodes emphasize how new media technology allows consumers to produce media, allowing prosumerism. Drawing from the Situationists, especially their use of détournement, Alexander and Rhodes describe theorize how mass photo manipulation can act as a sort of prosumer action fighting the alienation of late capitalism, especially when complicating and critiquing notions of gender. Not only do they stress this work in the class, they also emphasize the need for scholars to take up these tools and actions. In the chapter on videogames, they draw from James Paul Gee’s, Stuart Selber’s, and Selfe and Hawisher’s views of literacies to engage with how their own students played World of Warcraft and interpreted the cultural dimensions to the game through critical literacies. They largely argue that videogames challenge us to consider how multimodal, new media spaces present multi-literacies, from the haptic and visual to the social and critical—and players may deploy these literacies in unpredictable ways. These two chapters present a helpful synthesis of scholarship and connect with other readings, as détournement aligns well with textual poaching, and their view on videogame literacies aligns with my views on player agency.

Brock, Kevin and Dawn Shepherd. “Understanding how Algorithms Work Persuasively

Through the Procedural Enthymeme.” Computers and Composition 42 (2016): 17-27. PDF.

In this piece, Brock and Shepherd try to extend work on procedural rhetoric, via Bogost and others, into broader procedural systems beyond videogames. Their larger conclusion is that procedural systems tend to persuade through a “procedural enthymeme,” a term from Bogost, that has us convince ourselves by interacting through the procedures. As they write, “we convince ourselves that we are actively making decisions about how to participate in a given system when, in reality, we accept options made apparently available to us from a set of constrained possibilities” (21). By guiding us to insert certain premises through constraining procedures, the program leads us to certain conclusions, even as we think we are reaching those conclusions on our own or through a neutral system. As part of this analysis, they bring in more object-oriented rhetoric approach, trying to recognize the role of these nonhuman, albeit human designed, procedures and their unique capacity for persuasion. To highlight how this works, they use examples: Google searches, Match.com, and Facebook searches. For the Google searches, they note how the desired end to the search—to find a relevant source—gets transformed into a curated list that emphasizes ad content. For Match.com, they note how one’s preferences may give a feeling of control when seeking out a future rhetorical situation in a date, but priorities of the match algorithms, largely unknown to the user, has a clear system that assumes what the user wants and uses these assumptions to design this rhetorical situation. With Facebook’s search engine, they point toward a larger issue: as many users use the system, the procedural rhetoric it displays may exert persuasion far beyond individual user searches.

Collectively, this article offers a helpful review of the literature around procedures and more object-oriented rhetoric, while also pushing that research in productive theoretical and practical directions. By building beyond videogames and focusing on how nonhuman systems more generally interact with users to persuade them, Brock and Shepard can help me theorize these systems in a variety of situations.

Brooke, Collin Gifford. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. New York:

Hampton Press, 2009. PDF.

Here, Brooke revisits Aristotle’s five canons of rhetoric—Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery—through the lens of new media, particularly drawing from a media ecology framework, though he also draws heavily from genre and hypertext scholarship. In particular, Brooke wants to move beyond the “remediation” of print technology into a digital realm, arguing that new media offers fundamentally different potentials for the rhetorical cannon. On the converse, he also argues that “new media” is not that new, particularly if one views media as more of an interface and less as a static product. As he writes, “A turn toward the interface as our unit of analysis would be an acknowledgment that it is not necessary that these processes culminate in products (which can then be decoupled from the contexts of their production), but rather that what we think of as products (books, articles, essays) are but special, stabilized instances of an ongoing process conducted at the level of interface” (25). This sensitivity to the affordances of the interfaces and the ongoing, ecological processes of interaction that take place through it inform the broadening of Aristotle’s canon.

In particular, I draw from Brooke’s reworking of invention. Drawing from Roland Barthes’ hermeneutic and prioaretic codes, Brooke describes that “hermeneutic invention relies on the relative sturdiness of a final object.” (68). Hermeneutic invention, then, focuses on closure and cohesion. Prioaretic codes, on the other hand, refer to the steps that often lead to hermeneutic closure, the more generative aspects of invention. Normally they align, producing “textual momentum.” Any steps out of this momentum feels “out of place,” as the generative process does not seem to have a clear or cohesive goal. But Brooke wants to separate these two elements, arguing for a more prioaretic invention, one that resists determinism or closure, instead embracing the ongoing, participatory nature of many new media platforms.

I see this resource as particularly valuable, connecting the circulation of a “text” to the potential expressions that text has in multiple situations through different participants. It opens up a text to more ongoing interaction at the site of the interface.

Carnegie, Teena A.M. “The Interface as Exordium: The Rhetoric of Interactivity.”

Computers and Composition 26 (2009): 164-173. PDF.

Carnegie lays out a taxonomy of the interactive features presented by interfaces in new media—multi-directionality, manipulability, and presence—and how these features contribute to the rhetorical nature of the interface as an exordium that disposes the user to persuasion through increasing levels of interactivity. When defining her view of interface, she acknowledges its role in linking and building relationships among participants and its broader application beyond new media, like the interface of a page, but wants to focus on the role of new media, emphasizing that this form of media presents a far more interactive space, especially when compared to traditional broadcast media. This shows up particularly in the multi-directional nature of new media interfaces, which at the lowest level allow users to submit into the interface, becoming senders, through things like forms. At more advanced levels, they can engage in dialogue through the interface, becoming both senders and receivers. Manipulability refers to users’ ability to alter content or create new content through the interface. Presence aligns more with how users experience their interaction. For example, strong social presence or spatial presence allows the users to feel a sense of being there, interacting with participants in a new space. Collectively, these factors can contribute to how effectively the interface fulfills its purpose as an exordium, arguing that more interaction likely makes users more susceptible to persuasion through the interface, which makes the withdrawal of the interface dangerous.

This piece offers a concrete taxonomy to consider HCI through a new media interface, and it connects well to other related texts, including Brooke and Emerson. It is especially helpful when connected to work like Brock and Shepherd, who more actively consider how interactivity can be persuasive in new media systems. While I do not fully accept Carnegie’s thesis regarding the persuasive capacity for interaction, I do think her taxonomy is productive, and her framing of the interface as an exordium offers a helpful foundation to consider new media in rhetorical terms.

Emerson, Lori. Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound.

Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2014. Print.

Emerson draws from media studies, literary studies, and media archaeology to analyze the role of the interface in what she calls “readingwriting,” the way we read and write with and through the interface into a network of human and nonhumans, while the writing technology uses algorithms and other tools to read what we write and write what we read in turn. She wants to argue that the recent trend pushing toward ubiquitous computing and “natural” or “organic” interfaces that blend into our lives and conceal the politics and mechanical elements of our tools presents an issue, as they conceal potential issues with these technologies and reduce our knowledge and agency as users. While she spends some time theorizing about the scholarship with the interface, she spends the bulk of the book considering certain historical moments and how interfaces get envisioned, designed, and marketed during those periods, then highlighting certain artists and technologies that challenge these trends. Overall, she argues for an interface that allows one to reflect on the interface itself and the workings of procedural systems, and she tends to value a hacker ethic based in tinkering, transparency, and actual knowledge on how machines and interfaces work, including programing and procedural literacy.

She begins with the current trend noted above, with the enthusiasm and force behind making the interface invisible, while enmeshing these devices into our lives more broadly. She argues that many assumptions get made at the level of design about what a technology ought to do, how it ought to do it, and who should use it. By making the interface invisible, these decisions become invisible to users and become more automatic or “natural.” Furthermore, she argues that many of these decisions value consumerism, productivity, and technology as tools, enframing the sort of culture that uses them and that they help create. However, some artists and game designers, like Jodi Nelson, reject these aesthetics and ideology and craft games, texts, and programs that challenge these norms. She spends the other chapters evoking a similar trend, while historicizing this current moment. In the next chapter, she notes how early views of the interface, including the GUI, often employed techniques to help bootstrap users into a more fundamental computer literacy or create the tools they would use, rather than have such tools created for them. She argues that this created a more tinker-centric, open interface and culture, which shifted with the Apple II in 1984. The next two chapters try to look at older technologies, but put them in conversation with modern trends, first with the concrete poetry movement with typewriters, then with Emily Dickenson’s use of the page. Here, Emerson’s main focus is on the way the form and, in some cases, content reflect the technology. She concludes by looking at the way poems written through Google can help us consider how to interrogate the way vast networked and black-boxed systems think and characterize.

For my purposes, this presents some helpful theorizing around technology, including her history of writing interfaces and her readingwriting concept.

Jones, John. Network* Writing. Kairos 20.1 (2015): n.p. 2015. Web.

In this webtext, Jones describes what he calls network* writing, with the asterisk signifying a range of network writing: writing in networks, writing for networks, and writing networks. He draws from network theory, articulating Barbasi’s main approach as well as Latour’s ANT approach, but he draws most heavily from Castelles’ theories on digital networks. Jones first emphasizes that digital networks differ from other communication networks, like railroads, in that the low cost of investment allows more changes more quickly, creating more malleable networks. This capacity, says Castelles, allows one to “program,” altering the purpose or rules of a network, and “switch,” coordinating how one network works with another. One’s capacity to influence networks, largely through switching and programming, refers to their network* power, with specific writing techniques arising in this digital networked space, like link farming. Jones then uses the Google PageRank as an example. Through this algorithm, a higher number of links act as a certain currency or capital that increases the chance that one’s site gets read, thereby aiding its rhetorical effectiveness. Thus, the algorithm affects one’s rhetorical strategies and allows one to author the network at a lower level by changing links. Here, one more definitely writes for the network as an audience, mindful of its algorithms and “algorithmic ideology.” Those with more substantial network* power may actually write networks, using their capacity to program and switch to change the underlying links, rules, and structure of the network itself.

This piece provides an interesting alignment of network thinking, authorship, and digital writing. I see it aligning with other pieces on procedurality and new media, especially Emerson, Carnegie, Brooke, and Brock and Shepard. I especially appreciate the potential and taxonomy that the concept network*, and the various dimensions of writing in, to, and of the network wrapped up in this term.

Scholz, Trebor, ed. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York, NY:

Routledge, 2013. Print.

This collection addresses the shift of labor and play as it transitions to the Internet, where the creation of crowdfunding, data mining (and the resulting ad revenue), distributed projects, the production of fan work and modding, the role of the attention economy, and general changes to revenue models and capital have created the needed for new approaches. While the book recognizes that similar exploitation has existed, pointing to Grub Street writers as an example, it argues that the tools advanced by digital Internet technologies allows a greater ability to draw profit from user actions and exploit writers and other content creators. In particular, Trebor and others note how the Internet can maximize the surplus labor of users, moving beyond necessary labor, by creating addictive programs that mine user data or encouraging the free labor of modders and fans.

When exploring these issues, the text has four main parts. The first introduces the major issues of the debate, which the second part expands with more specific case studies focused around Internet labor. Part three focus on harsher issues of exploitation and abuse, like the racialization of certain users and practices in the Warcraft goldmining controversy. The final parts looks at potential alternatives to our current system, trying to find alternatives that work within an altered form of the current paradigm or craft a new system. Of particular worth for my project, Andrew Ross makes a broad summation of the current state of unpaid Internet labor, focusing on a class-action lawsuit against Huffington Post for their unpaid contributors section and the use of Google and others of other nonpaid or underpaid labor like internships or workers overseas. He points out that these companies enjoy a massive bonus from this unpaid labor, relying on it for their framework and production. In the next chapter, Tizinia Terranova makes a similar investigation but theorizes the term “free labor” to describe the unpaid labor that helped produce the Internet and continues to contribute to it, driven by the technological and social pressures that she calls the “outernet.” Sean Cubitt, in the next chapter, draws from Marxism and political economy theory to consider the more political dimensions to this work, particularly how labor practices, rules of conduct, access, etc., are largely created by a small group of transnational forces, despite their broad reach and level of control. Also in the first section, Mackenzie Wark advances his term “vectoral class,” a class of individuals who manage resource allocation and logistics, and reconsiders the Hacker Manifesto, arguing that the vectoral class has more power than those who control the means of production, pointing to the increased value of information, presentation, and circulation. Later on in the text, Abigail De Kosnik draws from Terranova’s concept of free labor and other work on fandom, affinity spaces, and cultural studies more generally to argue that fan work represents an important site of labor but fans lack the ownership, authority, and economic capital that their work deserves. While other chapters hold important insights, these feel most relevant.

I see this book being helpful for the way it analyzes the breakdown between labor and play, noting important sites of various unpaid work and playbor. It also considers issues of ownership and the value that this “for fun” or voluntary work accrues and the exploitative nature of some of these channels and power structures. It also directly touches on other topics, including modding, fandom work, and exploiting gamers, framing these topics and others under these broader considerations.

Vee, Annette. Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing the World.

Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2017. Print.

Vee’s overall purpose with this text is to stitch together much of the writing in the discipline and related disciplines—like procedural literacy and procedural rhetoric—to consider what it means to call coding or programming a “literacy,” why this matters, and how we can move forward with programming literacy and its uptake and training. Her introduction is a thorough consideration of the scholarship, as Vee considers the different dimensions of the term “literacy,” balancing broader questions of the material and social dimensions with a more fundamental insistence on the value of coding competency itself. For example, while some argue that one should know, broadly, how procedural thinking and literacy may work, Vee is more insistent on the actual knowledge of coding. She emphasizes that this is not merely a functional literacy, however, and that the field of composition and rhetoric and other related fields have much to offer computer science and the broader social, economic, and technological move to computational systems with the disciplines more rhetorical understanding of this work. She also discusses what distances programming literacy from more traditional reading and writing literacies, especially the capacity of programing to enact what one codes and the role of human-computer communication.

She then moves to looking at the history of coding literacy, through certain key moments from the 60s to the present. She next considers how programming and writing work are similar, in that both are connected to thinking, while also trying to balance the role of technology in programming for its more active and interactive capacities. She continues this comparison to some ex