The following paper considers the rhetorical situation of playing a videogame in
terms of co-authorship between the player and game. Put simply, in playing a videogame,
something—a level, a character, a city, a story, a world, etc.—is being composed, and
this “composition” is indebted to the ongoing interplay of human and computer. Looking
at games in this way can help us rethink what we mean by authorship and text in a new
media context, building off work like Jessica Reyman and Krista Kennedy. Moreover it
focuses the act of composing more on specific contexts or events that rework already
circulating material. This is not to critique the use of game design in class—indeed, I’ve
employed it myself as a unit of inquiry—but I think it offers a new way to rethink gaming
literacies and composing in class and beyond.
Before more squarely looking at games as compositions, however, I think it worth
pausing for a moment to consider the rhetorical agency of games. For this, scholars often
draw from Ian Bogost’s concept of “procedural rhetoric,” though exceptions exist, like
Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s “expressive processes.” In procedural rhetoric, as Bogost writes,
“arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the
authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models” (Persuasive Games
29). Procedures refer to the constraints built into the game that inform what one can or
can’t do within the game. To detail this, Bogost uses many examples, like the
MacDonalds Game (2006) by the Italian-based MolleIndustries. Here, the player must
use underhanded tactics, like feeding cows growth hormones or using coercive
marketing, to appease a greedy corporate command structure. By constructing a system
of procedures that the player must interact with(in), and by constructing these procedures
as the only way to run a successful business, argues Bogost, the game is making a
critique of how fastfood, in the real world works, saying it too uses these procedures.
A point that is often not taken up regarding procedural rhetoric, however, is that
the game requires the player to play in order to make the argument. In other words, a
procedural argument is emergent, coming from player and procedure. It cannot be
“made” without both participants. As Bogost writes, “a procedural model like a
videogame could be seen as a system of nested enthymemes, individual procedural
claims that the player literally completes through interaction” (Persuasive Games 49). As
Richard Colby (2013) points out, this involves the audience, as the gamer, in the
meaning-making process. Invoking Lloyd Bitzer, Colby also points out that gaming could
be seen as a rhetorical situation of sorts (“Procedurality,” 214). However, as with Bogost,
Colby focuses on design, arguing, “The actual game (or text) has to exist beforehand,”
lessening the role of the audience, except in the case of play testing (214). From the
perspective of design, this is the clear direction, but from the perspective of the player,
the specter of the rhetorical situation remains, as well as the emergent arguments that
arise from playing.
Moving closer into this direction, James J. Brown, Jr., and Eric Alexander (2016)
draw from Collin Brooke’s prioaretic invention. Invention rarely—if ever—happens ex
nihilo, with the writer coming up with a brand new idea instantly; instead, it comes from
a constellation of forms and forces, often outside the writer’s own hands. This can be
scene in the form of genres, as Brooke points out. A genre has certain procedures and
expectations, but the writer also has some freedom within those constraints, allowing
them to enact certain potentials. The genre—authored, reworked, or codified by others—
is helps inform the “invention” of the writer, with constraints potentially challenged or
upheld.
Thus, as Brown and Alexander point out, in gaming, the act of invention
continues beyond the hands of the game designer, with the player finding new
possibilities within the procedures of the game. As they write, “Designers compose
procedures that create a model of the world, but players move through the world in
unpredictable ways” (274-5). This “unpredictable” engagement is an inevitable outcome
of the “play” within the constraints of procedures, as Bogost and others articulate. Some
games, like Minecraft, are radically open-ended, allowing a considerable possibility
space, and others, like the MacDonald’s game or Pong or quite limited. In either
situation, though, while a skillful designer anticipates certain uses, players may inevitably
find new ones, and in particularly open-ended games, many possibilities may be built into
the game already that a designer may not clearly envision. It is this “play” that offers the
potential for new invention. Recognizing this, Brown and Alexander make the next step
of continuing the invention process into the playing itself.
In the course of playing, then, the players are producing something—an object, a
text, a story, an avatar—in short, a composition. Here, I want to more explicitly define
what I mean by composition. Composition has tended to focus on academic writing, but
obvious breaks from this exist, like Geoffry Sirc’s (2002) “happening,” a sort of designed
space or situation in which unexpected somethings can arise. Likewise, Jody Shipka’s
work not only expands that materiality of composing, but her focus on process highlights
the often ephemeral moments, technologies, and negotiations that get folded into what we
often call “products.” It is this tradition of composition in which I want to align myself. If
the game is a composition—or perhaps, better put, a “composing”—such a composition
is volatile and ephemeral, evolving constantly as the player and game communicate.
While this offers its own challenges, I do not think it bars play from the status of
composition. As Brooke argues, products, or what we might call “products,” like books
or essays, are only one instance in a more distributed process at the interface, and “new
media encourages us to consider a more radical distribution of individual invention” (80).
Within the possibility offered by procedures, players may create a virtual SimCity, a
society as in the game Democracy 3, a thriving MacDonalds, or a narrative world in a
more traditional platform game. The player is “finishing” the arguments to the game, but
more broadly, any play is producing an ongoing unfolding at the level of the interface.
Here, the player is not a game designer, but a unique caretaker and participant shaping
and exploring the possibilities authored by someone else into compositions visualized on
the interface. Both player and game are combining data and processes into a particular
expression.
In other words, one does not need to see “authoring” or “composing” as
constructing a new artifact that exists discretely, concretely as an object. Instead, it can be
as a way of exploring and working with what is already circulating in new. I argue that
this is composition or compositing: reworking what’s in the rhetorical situation into
something else, literally “composing,” in Bruno Latour’s (2010) sense, something that
has not existed before from what is already there, even while those other components
exist on their own. Moving in this direction with gaming, Kevin Moberly (2008) argues:
Games like WoW [World of Warcraft] evaluate players on their
ability to compose themselves in relationship to these highly
symbolic environments—to write and ultimately revise
their actions in relationship to the reality that is manufactured on
the screen. This activity. . . is often constructed as play rather than
writing or composition. (291).
In Moberly’s example of World of Warcraft, players compose characters based on the
possibilities offered by the game. Then, the player explores a free-form map to further
compose their avatar through their actions, as well as the world itself. To compose
effectively, one must have certain literacies, connecting this composition to larger
conversations on literacy, like Johnathan Alexander (2009), Selfe and Hawisher (2007),
and James Paul Gee.
This shift to playing as composing highlights the sticky nature of gaming as a
medium. As John Alberti (2008) writes, “From the perspective of print-based theories of
literacy, gaming is an inherently dialogic discursive space, one that problematizes the
distinction between ‘reading’ and ‘writing,’ ‘process’ and ‘product’” (267). As Alberti
argues, we “play” games, much like a musician “plays” music, implying a fairly active
participation of actor, audience, text, and nonhuman material. Indeed, the musician
provides a good example of the sort of composition I am arguing for. While a
composition of notes, clefts, rests, etc., remains fixed as a “composition,” a particular
interpretation lives on as something else apart from that collection of inky notes and rests.
From Billie Holiday to the Beatles, from a neighborhood garage band covering The
Killers, to the improv of jazz musicians reworking Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue,”
cover songs or live concerts rework music into unique expressions, often in the context of
the moment.
And though recording may give a sense of permanence, the expression itself takes
place in a complex “live” exchange of actants. In particular, the musical notes present a
possibility space for new creation, with the player, the instrument, and the ambience of
the studio, the material and the moment, acting as fellow contributors to a specific
performance or recording. Similarly, videogames also present a live space for creation,
and are often recorded, presenting the ubiquitous genre of “let’s play” and walkthrough
videos. However, I think recording or capturing a performance certainly changes the
ontology of a particular creation, turning a musical performance to a recording, for
example, or a living game interface into a static image or film. But I do not think we
should privilege one form of composition over the other, as they can compliment each
other or offer different rhetorical potentials. A live speech is a different composition from
a written version of the speech, a recording of the speech, or a new media treatment of
the speech.1 Each material and moment is reversioning, re-inventing, and re-composing
something both new and derivative, with the potential for further invention always
inscribed within each new version. Each also represents different literacies to invent,
arrange, and deliver—in short, to compose.
Thus, I think composition ought to recognize the composition and authorship of
gaming. Many logistical issues exist for this: access to technology, “collecting” work,
assessing work, the learning curve (as with all media), and the stigma still associated with
play just to name a few. But, though unexamined in this essay, play and playing offers a
powerful modality for new creation. Through challenging the procedures of composition
classes, we reveal new possibilities that further augment our engagement with the world
1
Casey Boyle and Nathanial Rivers (2016) have recently investigated a similar issue in light of
access, how a piece of media may contain multiple potential versions that change based on
different media and moments.
and the rhetoric that informs it. In this particular case, I think videogame literacies in
terms of authorship and composition help us to further focus on composition as verb and
moment, echoing more situated and ambient approaches to rhetoric and composition.
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