Computers and Composition最新文献

We examine how rules and mechanics act as attractors, or stabilizing end points within the multitude of trajectories in a possibility space, within games that form dispositions through the habits of material gameplay, which players can either resist or accept through a process of phronesis and metis. We videotaped a playthrough of the card game Illuminati and interviewed four players before and after the game. We discovered that the rule of allowing cheating and a player role with an unbalanced mechanic acted as material attractors (DeLanda, 2013; 2016) for gameplay dispositions. However, through a process of metis and phronesis, players resisted the dispositions of cheat and spoilsport and materially played the game so that they embodied the Aristotelian virtue of friendliness instead.

For some time, rhetorical games studies have been interested in the potential for serious games to materially affect and embody change in users, in social systems, and in the gaming industry itself. In this study, we use the occasion of the first videogame cleared for marketing as a medical device by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—EndeavorRx—to examine material-discursive processes that transform a game into medicine, and that produce our ideas of “medicine,” “gaming,” and “seriousness.” Allowing scholarship from rhetorical games studies and from the rhetoric of health and medicine to inform one another, and analyzing textual evidence from materials that produced EndeavorRx’s identity as “medicine,” we argue this more-than-serious transformation habituates the public to a new market, affecting patients, institutions, and disciplinary boundaries.

Random build challenges became a trend among Sims YouTubers in April 2020 following Vixella's The Sims 4 but every room is a different pack. This mode of gameplay incorporates computerized randomizers to make building decisions and represent the challenges and risks associated with aleatory invention (Holmes, 2016, Lauer, 2016, Leadon, 2011, Vitanza, 2000). However, these challenges and risks emerge partly from material agency. To explore this phenomenon, I herein use Jane Bennett's (2010) vital materiality as a theoretical lens to examine random build challenges. Central to Bennett's theory is vitality, an agentive quality of both human and nonhuman materials that yields an effect—or in some cases affect—on other materials involved. Through examining three examples from popular Sims 4 YouTubers, Plumbella's random pack build; Lilsimsie's random townie build; and finally LaurenZSide's random meme build, this article demonstrates how player, game, and randomizer vitalities collaborate, compete, and co-exist. In addition to the videos serving as examples of aleatory building processes, random build challenges pose opportunities for experienced composers to implement new approaches in response to aleatory elements that can be adapted to other composing settings.

Gaming culture and platforms are becoming more popular for educational use, a trend that has been amplified during the massive migration to online education and conferencing across institutions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Among these repurposed tools, one of the most popular is an unassuming social platform originally associated with guild meetings and gaming communities: Discord. Using a combination of software studies and design thinking, and drawing upon the authors’ experience designing and participating in Discord communities for academic purposes including conferences and classroom usage, this work examines the rhetorical disruption this games-designated platform potentially presents to institutional spaces and expectations. These disruptions and rhetorical disconnects manifest throughout the platform, involving choices in aesthetics, logistical elements of organization and threading (or the lack thereof), and assumptions in visual communication and available rhetorics. Even without greater gamification intention, such design elements and platform affordances can offer significant potential impact on the classroom, conference, or academic organization occupying this space. These changes are not without risks: gaming platforms carry with them mechanisms for decontextualized and intertextual racism, misogyny, and the transference of toxic community norms back to the classroom.

This article examines a case study of a video game based course relying on embodied gameful design as the foundation of its game-based pedagogy. Moving away from some of the more superficial means of gamifying (or, incorporating game based elements into) the classroom, this piece looks specifically at how composition instructors can integrate some of the more habitual and material elements of playing video games into the larger course design to further benefit student learning outcomes. Culminating in the creation of a set of heuristics referred to as The 4 R's (repetition, recognition, relation, and reward), the article ultimately argues for a process of course gamification that relies on Jane McGonigal's (2010) conceptions of gameful design. More specifically, the piece illustrates that the material habituations that occur through gameplay can be translated to the physical classroom in ways that help students achieve their personal and professional learning goals through the practice of embodied gameful course design.

In 2019, video game giant Blizzard banned a competitive e-sports player who made a pro-Hong Kong statement during a post-game interview. The international game community responded with outrage, organizing both on- and offline actions to provoke change within the organization. This article examines the #BoycottBlizzard gaming counterpublic via deceptively discrete mixed methods: a new materialist investigation of protest gear and a distant reading of a Reddit dataset of 3500 posts between October 7 and 10, 2019. The investigation concludes that gas masks demonstrate nonhuman aleatory agency in the #BoycottBlizzard protest movement, by inserting subversive subtext into costumes and gameplay. Online, protestors relied heavily on other resistance tactics, including using Twitch copypasta spam; this article suggests this form of resistance functions similarly to a sit-in. Finally, the article iconographically tracks the rise and dissemination of a particular meme image representing the movement's appointed mascot, a Chinese climatologist named Mei. Ultimately, the Blitzchung counterpublic achieved only modest success; the player's ban was reversed and his prize money reinstated, but many protestors considered Blizzard's response milquetoast. However, this analysis proposes that the Blitzchung counterpublic likely emboldened the 2021 #BoycottBlizzard movement and may in some measure be responsible for its success.

Keying in on Ring Fit Adventure as a game of analysis, we trace the new materialist rhetoric and thing-power of gaming assemblage across physical and cultural borders. Our new materialist analysis at once builds on and extends beyond the existing scholarship on the hybridity of gaming procedure and bodily movement already made available through a previous generation of embodied gameplay. We take such materialist theorization a bit further to forward a co-constitutive examination of the game's design mechanism in relation to diverse players’ embodied gaming experience. Based on our multimodal analysis of the gaming procedure and diverse YouTube player video reviews of the game, this article reveals that a pluralistic perspective on embodiment—including linguistic, cultural, and corporeal diversity—have the potentiality to disrupt the dominant rhetoric of physical wellness. We conclude this article with implications for the design of a more accessible gaming experience that attends to the thing-power in exercise as well as suggestions for the development of robust digital rhetoric practices and pedagogies.

This study curates an annotated portfolio of print scholarship, web design, and webtext features as a basis for interviews with webtext authors to examine their experiences composing webtexts for publication and design rationales within a four-part design space: orientation, movement, multimodality, and contextualization. Findings show that webtext authors draw on conventions of print-based scholarship and web design to define new possibilities for born-digital scholarship.