The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice offers a critical reassessment of embodiment and materiality in rhetorical considerations of videogames. Holmes argues that rhetorical and philosophical conceptions of "habit" offer a critical resource for describing the interplay between thinking (writing and rhetoric) and embodiment. The book demonstrates how Aristotle's understanding of character (ethos), habit (hexis), and nature (phusis) can productively connect rhetoric to what Holmes calls "procedural habits": the ways in which rhetoric emerges from its interactions with the dynamic accumulation of conscious and nonconscious embodied experiences that consequently give rise to meaning, procedural subjectivity, control, and communicative agency both in digital game design discourse and the activity of play.

This book merges recent trends in game studies and multimodal studies to explore the relationship between the interaction between videogames’ different modes and the ways in which they inform meaning for both players and designers. The volume begins by laying the foundation for integrating the two disciplines, drawing upon social semiotic and discourse analytic traditions to examine their relationship with meaning in videogames. The book uses a wide range of games as examples to demonstrate the medium’s various forms of expression at work, including audio, visual, textual, haptic, and procedural modes, with a particular focus on the procedural form, which emphasizes processes and causal relationships, to better showcase its link with meaning-making. The second half of the book engages in a discussion of different multimodal configurations and user generated content to show how they contribute to the negotiation of meaning in the player experience, including their role in constructing and perpetuating persuasive messages and in driving interesting and unique player decisions in gameplay. Making the case for the benefits of multimodal approaches to game studies, this volume is key reading for students and researchers in multimodal studies, game studies, rhetoric, semiotics, and discourse analysis.

This book explores ethos and games while analyzing the ethical dimensions of playing, researching, and teaching games. Contributors, primarily from rhetoric and writing studies, connect instances of ethos and ethical practice with writing pedagogy, game studies, video games, gaming communities, gameworlds, and the gaming industry. The collection’s eighteen chapters investigate game-based writing classrooms, gamification, game design, player agency, and writing and gaming scholarship in order to illuminate how ethos is reputed, interpreted, and remembered in virtual gamespaces and in the gaming industry. Ethos is constructed, invented, and created in and for games, but inevitably spills out into other domains, affecting agency, ideology, and the cultures that surround game developers, players, and scholars.

Scholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being "poetic," yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice, independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can operate as a kind of poetry apart from any reliance on linguistic signs or symbols. This rigorous and accessible short book first examines characteristics of lyric poetry and explores how certain videogames can be appreciated more fully when read in light of the lyric tradition--that is, when read as "game poems." Magnuson then lays groundwork for those wishing to make game poems in practice, providing practical tips and pointers along with tools and resources. Rather than propose a monolithic framework or draw a sharp line between videogame poems and poets and their nonpoetic counterparts, Game Poems brings to light new insights for videogames and for poetry by promoting creative dialogue between disparate fields. The result is a lively account of poetic game-making praxis. "Everyone who loves the true power of games will benefit from the treasure trove of insights in Game Poems." -- Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design "Magnuson shines a sensitive and incisive light on small, often moving, videogames." -- D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., Professor of Digital Media, Computing, and Artificial Intelligence, MIT "[Game Poems] tells a new story about games-- that games can be lyrical, beautiful, emotionally challenging--to inspire creators and critics alike." --Noah Wardrip-Fruin, author of How Pac-Man Eats "Even as the news swells with impending doom for creativity, writing, and text itself, this literate and crafty book pursues poetry not through implacable algorithms but in concrete and personal play. It should be an indispensable guide for anyone who aims to maintain the true, human promise of technical poetics."--Stuart Moulthrop, coauthor of Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives "For far too long videogames have flourished - and commanded both capital and attention - in a kind of counterculture that they seem to have created as if ex nihilo for themselves and their players. But we are these players, and their culture has always been integrated with all of our own. In this evenhanded artist-scholar's ars poetica Jordan Magnuson respects the material cultural specificity of videogames while regarding them through the 'lens of poetry' in order to discover - and help create - a practice and an art of Game Poems within the wider field. Magnuson formally, int(erv)entionally embraces this art as lyrically poetic."--John Cayley, Brown University "In Game Poems, Magnuson listens carefully to videogames, and hears them speak to questions of art, language, and meaning that connect our written past to our software future. Read this book and you will hear it too."--Frank Lantz, Director, NYU Game Center "Jordan Magnuson has created a work that ties together the worlds of poetry and videogames in a deep and enlightening way. For those of us who care about the potential of poetic games, Jordan greatly improves the language of how we talk about them and expands our ability to see what this unique form can become. This is one of my favorite books on game design and I apologize in advance to those whom I will end up cornering and not being able to stop talking to about it."--Benjamin Ellinger, Game Design Program Director, DigiPen Institute of Technology "A groundbreaking and accessible book that helps us think about games as poems. With patient tenacity, Magnuson teases out what he felt for years as he engaged in his own practice of making videogames. His mission to help us apply a 'lyric reading' to games so that our engagement with, and appreciation of, games can be enhanced feels deeply personal. Drawing from a wide range of games and computational media scholars, poetry scholars, game creators, and poets, Magnuson provides a rigorous, balanced, and unique interdisciplinary contribution. A must-read for videogame scholars, practicing game makers, and anyone interested in the potential of 'game poems.'"--Susana Ruiz, University of California, Santa Cruz "This book tenaciously wrenches videogame hermeneutics from the insatiable maws of rhetoric and narratology--to the cheers of poets everywhere. In elucidating the lyric characteristics of the "game poem," Magnuson demonstrates not just that poetry is a useful lens for understanding videogames, but also that videogames can be a useful lens for understanding poetry. A rewarding text for scholars, game designers, poets, and anyone in between."--Allison Parrish, Interactive Telecommunications Program and Interactive Media Arts, NYU "A concise, passionate articulation - and defense! - of an artistic space between poems and videogames. If game scholars wish to prove that they are not engaged merely in an apologetics for violent pornography, they need only to teach this book."--Chris Bateman, author of Imaginary Games and 21st Century Game Design "I feel I've found a kindred spirit in Jordan Magnuson and his practical recommendations for creating distilled, compelling, personal videogames - throw out the conventions of game design one at a time? Yes, please! The revelation for me in this book, however, is the heat and power of the language of poets and poetry brought close to videogame design. There's much in here worth pursuing to kindle the fires of new and exciting videogame poems, and Jordan is a capable and delightfully humble guide."--Pippin Barr, author of How to Play a Video Game and The Stuff Games Are Made Of "With Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson lays to rest any last vestige of the notion that the implicit limits of games are as 'entertainment products'. By taking games seriously as successors of the lyric poetry tradition, he opens up new avenues for how game designers can think about what they do, how critical game theorists can approach their many-faceted object of study, and how players can more fully engage with videogames."--Soraya Murray, author of On Video Games "Game Poems shines an important light on a neglected area of videogame theory and provides unique guidance for those interested in exploring the poetic potential of videogames."--Jenova Chen, designer of Flow, Flower, Journey, and Sky: Children of the Light "Popular frameworks for video game scholarship consistently fail to account for the most avant-garde and affective works of interactive art. With Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson provides not only a lens to understand these diverse and important titles but also a guide to constructing the next generation of personal and incisive games. With numerous examples from decades of experimental games, including Magnuson's own minimalist and insightful work, this book is an excellent introduction to the form for neophytes as well as finally providing words to describe a movement that many experienced game poets previously understood only intuitively."--Gregory Avery-Weir, creator of The Majesty of Colors and Looming "Jordan Magnuson is one of a surprisingly small group of artists who see in the technology of videogames a versatile medium capable of expressing much more than conventional games."--Michaël Samyn, co-founder, Tale of Tales; co-creator of Sunset, The Graveyard, and The Path "So much has been written about what games are, and yet there's always a new way of thinking about them. In Jordan Magnuson's Game Poems we discover that games are also a lyrical form of art; that games can be understood as poetry, and that the making games as poetry creates new modes of artistic expression. Jordan Magnuson's book is a fascinating exploration of games as poetry, and the poetry of play."--Miguel Sicart, author of Play Matters, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, and Playing Software "In Game Poems, I found a new perspective on the kind of videogames that are dearest to me: short, personal, poetic games. By looking at games through the lens of lyric poetry, Jordan Magnuson puts into focus the workings of that mysterious hodgepodge of audio, visuals, and interactivity: the language of videogames. Both experienced and novice game makers will find approachable, practical advice on the craft of videogames. And anyone who plays short games will find new ways of appreciating and talking about them. I know I will be returning to it for inspiration when making my own small games!"--Adam Le Doux, creator of Bitsy "As a creator and researcher, Jordan Magnuson has been able to demonstrate through the utmost visual simplicity, by enhancing basic geometric forms, the empathetic capacity of the videogame medium. Game Poems explores this idea and the reconfiguration of the videogame beyond its ludic component, highlighting the artistic and poetic potential of games."--Antonio César Moreno Cantano, University Complutense of Madrid "Poems ask us to slow down, pay attention, and take the time to appreciate our experiences. Emerging from Magnuson's need to find ways to talk about his own creative practice, this book is all about discovering ways to do this with videogames. Magnuson explores what it means to view videogames as poetry, and provides insight, as a practitioner, on how to make game poems that enable and encourage this type of reflection. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from literature and philosophy to game studies and game design, this book covers a lot of material, but always remains grounded in concrete examples and solid theory. The book ends with a call to "go make some game poems!" After reading the book, I was keen to do exactly that. I urge you to do the same!"--Alex Mitchell, National University of Singapore "To many, poetry is a dying - or dead - art form. Few people sit down at night to open their favorite poet's chapbook with the latest streaming service at hand or their favorite videogame console sitting nearby. Spectacle seems to be the cultural norm, and this can be no more evident than in videogames: when the latest and greatest offers 60+ hours of spine-tingling excitement, why would someone want to launch a smaller-form game about expressions such as love, death, loneliness, or even God? But, as Jordan Magnuson, in his new book Games Poems, shows, poems have always been an integral piece of forming human culture. Poems have the ability to get right to the heart of the matter and, in fact, pierce the heart of the reader. Poems can be a form of cultural resistance, and even launch revolutions. Magnuson's book highlights what it means to use the medium of game design as poetry. Magnuson presents several examples of the intricacies of poetry in general, as well as work that fuses the ideals of poetry with game design. Magnuson succinctly examines how the imagination, rhythm, intensity, style - and brevity - of poetry can enlighten the game design process in order to form possibility spaces within videogames that are pointed and powerful."--Tim Samoff, Games and Interactive Media Program Director, Azusa Pacific University

Through a fusion of narrative and analysis, Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage examines how theater can enact critical discourse analysis, and how micro-instances of iniquitous language use have been politically and historically reiterated to oppress and deny equal rights to marginalized groups of people. Drawing from Aristophanes' rhetorical plays as a template for rhetoric in action, the author poses the stage as a rhetorical site whereby we can observe, see, and feel 20th-century rhetorical theories of the body. Using critical discourse analysis and Judith Butler’s theories of the performative body as a methodological and analytical lens, the book explores how a handful of American plays in the latter part of the 20th century – the works of Tony Kushner, Suzan Lori-Parks, and John Cameron Mitchell, among others – use rhetoric in order to perform and challenge marginalizing language about groups who are not offered center stage in public and political spheres. This innovative study initiates a conversation long overdue between scholars in rhetorical and performance studies; as such, it will be essential reading for academic researchers and graduate students in the areas of rhetorical studies, performance studies, theatre studies, and critical discourse analysis.

Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues offers a framework for theorizing ethics in digital and networked media. While the field of rhetoric and writing studies has traditionally given attention to Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus dialogues, this volume updates Aristotle’s basic framework of hexis for the digital age. According to Aristotle, “When men change their hexeis—their dispositions, habits, comportments, and so on, in relation to an activity—they change their thought.” Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues argues that virtue ethics supports postmodern criticisms of rational autonomy and universalism while also enabling a discussion of the actual ethical behaviors that digital users form through their particular communicative ends and various rhetorical purposes. Authors Jared Colton and Steve Holmes extend Aristotle’s hexis framework through contemporary virtue ethicists and political theorists whose writing works from a tacit virtue ethics framework. They examine these key theorists through a range of case studies of digital habits of human users, including closed captioning, trolling, sampling, remixing, gamifying for environmental causes, and using social media, alongside a consideration of the ethical habits of nonhuman actors. Tackling a needed topic with clarity and defined organization, Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues carefully synthesizes various strands of ethical thinking, convincingly argues that virtue ethics is a viable framework for digital rhetoric, and provides a practical way to assess the changing hexeis encountered across the network of ethical situations in the digital world.

This book examines mass communication and civic participation in the age of oil, analyzing the rhetorical and discursive ways that governments and corporations shape public opinion and public policy and activists attempt to reframe public debates to resist corporate framing. In the twenty-first century, oil has become a subject of civic deliberation. Environmental concerns have intensified, questions of indigenous rights have arisen, and private and public investment in energy companies has become open to deliberation. International contributors use local events as a starting point to explore larger issues associated with oil-dependent societies and cultures. This interdisciplinary collection synthesizes work in the energy humanities, rhetorical studies and environmental studies to analyze the global discourse of oil from the start of the twentieth century into the era of transnational corporations of the 21st century. This book will be a vital text for scholars in communication studies, the energy humanities and in environmental studies. Case studies are framed accessibly, and the theoretical lenses are accessible across disciplines, making it ideal for a post-graduate and advanced undergraduate audience in these fields.