A site I might like to research

This semester I'm taking a game design class from Kurt Squire in Curriculum and Instruction. He's also a part of Games Learning Society. I took up board game design as a hobby six years ago and have been getting progressively deeper into game design ever since.

I'd like to focus my work in this class on game design as well, in an attempt to broaden my scholarly profile. If I could integrate game design into my scholarly work and pedagogy, that would be really rewarding for me.

So a site that I'd like to research and write about for the first paper is Depression Quest, a Twine game that aims to simulate the experience of living with depression. The game is relevant, I think, to the themes of this class for two reasons: 1) It's goal is to create better awareness of a mental illness, and this is something like activist work, and 2) the game and its designer, Zoe Quinn, were at the epicenter of Gamergate, a controversy that brought a great deal of public attention and scrutiny to sexual harassment, gender inequality, and sexism in the video game industry and among male video game fans. I'd like to pay attention to both the formal features and the social context of Depression Quest to see if I can discover what work this design has performed in the world.

More broadly, I'm interested in gamification, especially as it applies to pedagogy. When I teach 201, I plan to run the course as a collaborative project in game narrative. We will compose a massive twine game together set in Madison, WI, during the month of August, 1970. We will do a bunch of research on that month and the era generally, including archival research at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the campus archives. We will build a wiki together that includes characters, locations, events, items, and cultural details relevant to our setting. And then we will compose a branching narrative that spans the month, perhaps from the perspective of one or more playable characters.

I'd like to say more about this class idea in my second paper (or maybe my final paper?) and/or explore theories of gamification more deeply.

So I hope to learn at least these three things from an analysis of Depression Quest:

• How can a Twine game be effective and persuasive, both personally for a player and broadly as a part of a social movement?


• How does Twine work as a platform and/or as a social network of designers and players? (I'll need to know to teach the class)


• How can games and branching narratives be integrated into the teaching of writing? (I have ideas about this already, but I think close observation of a text and its social impact could broaden my ideas)

Visual Rhetoric Articles

It seems I may be spending too much energy on trying to think of rhetoric as based in kairos. The articles by Hariman & Lucaites and Finnegan enact, more or less, the kind of rhetorical analysis that I had imagined. H&L look at the Iwo Jima flag-planting image in terms of its cultural context and significance and conclude that "public identity is negotiated in an event-driven process of performance and response, a process epitomized by...the iconic photograph." Finnegan more or less outlines the method by way of Zarefsky's thoughts on rhetoric and history. She argues that to do a proper analysis of a photo spread in LOOK magazine, she must both use history to understand the text and the text to understand history. I am reminded that this sort of move is common in rhetorical work. We move from text to culture and culture to text in order to understand each more fully. We do it all the time. We don't need a new theory of kairos to accomplish what we are already doing. It is a basic assumption of rhetoric that context and audience matter. Right?

I was curious about how social forces worked to enable or prohibit moments in which personal agency can produce persuasive texts. We got an answer to that question this week in Finnegan, who showed us how the LOOK spread was enabled by technology (e.g. the flash bulb), the development of the picture magazine, a public appetite for "salacious" images, a project by the Farm Security Administration to create a visual document of the working conditions of farm laborers, and Depression-era attitudes about poverty. All of these factors (and others) conspired to make possible a moment in which LOOK editor Mike Cowles could imagine to seek out images that show "the worst conditions in the south" for a spread. They also made possible a public readership could be receptive and approving of the spread he created.

H&L were not quite as clear in addressing how history produces opportune moments, but they did show how an image like Iwo Jima can iterate itself in a popular consciousness once it has become "iconic." Iwo Jima becomes (among other things) a potato chip eaten by Homer Simpson and fire fighters at Ground Zero. This is to say that an iconic image can itself become a social force, or a locus of social forces, which then operates to enable future opportune moments. This is the meme. Because an image or idea exists, I can take it, change it, and redistribute it, knowing that it will make some kind of claim on an audience's attention. The Iwo Jima image enables both the Simpson's joke and the image of the fire fighters.

So it seems that rhetoricians have mostly moved beyond the formal. We care still about he composition of the image, the positions and relative sizes of images on the page, but we care about them mostly in the social and historical contexts they inhabit.

I guess I want to know, then, how to figure out what parts of history/culture/context matter to an historical/rhetorical analysis. The rhetorician who makes an analysis of a LOOK magazine spread, or a WWII photograph, or a Simpsons episode, must make choices about what parts of history and social context matter most to her analysis. The rhetorician is at a point where her personal agency intersects with social forces, and she is in a position to tell a story about which social forces matter most to an object of study. The selections she makes will also be choices to leave out other aspects of history. Other forces. Other perspectives. And the way we tell the story of things like southern poverty and WWII patriotism matter a great deal here and now. So how are we to decide what should and should not enter our analyses?

Still re-thinking these diagrams

I'm going to suggest that kairos is the point at which personal agency encounters and/or exploits social and historical forces. What gives rise to "opportune moments"? Not personal agency, which can only recognize these moments and respond to them. It must be that greater powers produce these moments in which an individual can produce a persuasive text.

And so maybe an understanding of rhetoric based on kairos needs to be grounded in an understanding of social forces, for it is these forces that create and shape opportune moments. It is these forces that also dictate what may or may not be persuasive to the audience or (more often) audiences that have access to the text produced.

Instead of a diagram that charts a path from a single author to a single audience through a uniform text, we need a diagram of how history moves to create and limit opportunities for persuasive communication.

So what does that look like?

Rhetorical Diagram

Here's Longaker and Walker's diagram of rhetoric:

We have rhetors creating texts, images of themselves, and intended audiences for those texts within particular occasions and given particular presuppositions. We also have readers interpreting/recreating those same texts/intended audiences/implied rhetors.

The only objection I have to their illustration is that Occassion and Presuppositions are here tied to the text, as if the text itself inhabited a specific occasion and was tied to a given set of presuppositions. I would suggest two things: first, that it is the actual rhetor and actual reader, rather than the text, who exist in particular occasions and are tied to particular presuppositions, and second, that because some forms of text can exist over long periods of time and can travel from place to place, the occasion and presuppositions of actual rhetor and actual reader may be quite different. The Actual reader's occasion and presuppositions will always be temporally later, and will sometimes (not always) be inherited and altered versions of the actual rhetor's occasion and presuppositions (as in the case of an author and reader who exist in the "same" culture 100 years apart).

So I'd prefer to draw the diagram like this:

I guess my first question is: How useful is it to have a model like this? Is it misleading? It seems to give the impression that rhetoric is a fully known and map-able object or system. Rhetoric itself is in flux, right? It changes over time. So what purpose do such diagrams serve? Can we use them for something other than feeling like we've got it all figured out?

Second question: In chapter 3, Longaker and Walker say this: "Though kairos is arguably most important, the better part of classical and contemporary rhetorical theory focuses on content and form, not timing." Why is that? If kairos is the more important feature, why isn't it given its due? My sense is that examining social situations forces one to move away from the rhetorical formalism expressed in diagrams like those above and toward something more like ethnography. Situations are always particular and don't lend themselves well to strict formalist frames. Are there examples of a rhetorical method that is fully (or at least more heavily) focused on kairos rather than content and form?

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In-class post 1/19

Today we had an introduction to the course and a brief overview of the history of rhetoric. Anne drew her model of rhetoric for us and spoke of its different features, emphasizing how shifts in media affect rhetorical action. We then spent some time looking at each others' blog posts and discussing the examples of digital activism we each cited. The question I'm supposed to consider here is what is new to me and how my own interests might fit in to whatever is new, and I'm not sure I know how to answer either of those questions. I'm familiar with rhetoric and its history, less familiar with the intersections of digital media and rhetoric. I have a loose understanding of digital activism as the kind of arguments and persuasion that take place in social media. I don't know how creative writing studies or the study of recovery writing might fit into any of this. My feeling is that there isn't really a bridge, at least not an obvious one, between my interests and the content of this class. Maybe the link will become clearer when we start talking about the rhetoric of social movements. Recovery can be thought of as a social movement. So can creative writing studies. I've got some thinking to do, 'cause right now I'm drawing a blank.

Possible point of connection: Creative writing studies as a discipline/field is forming online through social media and digital tools.

What’s Activism?

In trying to define activism, I kinda picked a fight with my wife.

Don’t worry. It was civil. And she totally won.

She heard about this assignment and got excited about it. She is way better informed about activism and social justice movements than I am, especially in digital spaces. She suggested I link to blackout, a movement on tumblr and elsewhere. The idea is to create better representation for/of African Americans in media. Organizers pick a few days a year when participants flood social media outlets with images of themselves, their families, their lives. An internet full of positive, authentic images of black people and black life is an internet that acts against dominant representations of African Americans in major media outlets. (Listen to Malcolm X on that topic.)

She also suggested misogynoir, a term coined by digitial humanities scholar Moya Bailey which is now used on tumblr and on twitter to point out (and call out) instances of misogyny directed toward black women.

Those are solid examples. And I should have just thanked her and left it at that. But then I was all: What about conservative groups? Like videos from those derps in Oregon? Wouldn’t they count as activists too? And so wouldn’t their videos be digital activism?

This did not sit well with my wife: No. They were not activists, and their videos were not valid examples of activism.

But why not? They are actors in public spaces making arguments for social and political objectives, right? Same as #BlackLivesMatter.

Nope. Not equivalent. And even offensive to compare the two in this way. Activists worked for social progress. They organized and took action against the status quo in order to create more favorable conditions for oppressed and marginalized people.

The Oregon guy crying in his truck thinks he’s being oppressed, though.

Yeah, but he’s fucking NOT. He’s just asserting white privilege and reinforcing existing power structures.

Hmm. Okay, so what about something like abortion. It’s legal. Law of the land. Status quo. So then something like those videos that claim to expose planned parenthood, like, wouldn’t they be activism? They are working against the status quo and they are hoping to make what they think is progress.

Not really. A woman’s right to her body is not status quo. We are always fighting for that. And pro-life protestors aren’t working for progress. They just want to revert to the way things were. That’s not progress. They are just trying to reclaim something they lost to progressive movements.

Alright but then the only difference is the values of the groups involved. Really they are all actors in the public sphere, organizing groups to take action in the interests of a social or political objective. They have different values, but they are all engaged in the same behaviors. So they should all be called activists.

This is the problem with academics. They want to stand apart from something and abstract it and pretend that gives them a more privileged knowledge. As if flying over the country gives you a better perspective of America than someone standing on the ground and actually living here.

Yeah but that level of abstraction can be useful, too. Like it helps you understand things and you can still be politically committed. Maybe you take a step back and figure things out and then are able to be more effective at it.

Nope. All you accomplish is taking a term away from the people that actually use it to define themselves and their own behavior, and then you appropriate that term for a completely different use, one that equates them with people who represent everything the activists are working against. Not cool.

She made a good point. I didn’t have much to say to that. Definitions don’t exist in vacuums. They do work in the world. To undo a definition is to act against that work.

Even though the terms existed earlier, “activist” and "activism" come to us through the progressive social movements of the 1960s. I don’t think pro-life protestors or Oregon militia members would be comfortable with my attempt to label them as activists. Think of the way “activist judge” or “community organizer” get used by the right as pejorative labels for, in the first case, any judge that makes a decision which happens to align with the interests of social progressives and, in the second, folks who do for poor and underrepresented communities what other actors do for wealthier, enfranchised communities.

Maybe there is some value in thinking about persuasive social action/actors in an abstract sense that would allow us to consider the rhetoric of both right-leaning and left-leaning groups. But the term we use should not be “activism.” Activism is a label used by groups who self-identify as activists, and who participate in public action for progressive social and political ends. What does it mean? It means what those groups say and do. It means that black lives do matter. It means on some days, social media will be full of images of black people and black lives. It means that instances of misogyny against black women can, should, and will be called out. And many more things besides.

But it does not mean sending snacks to entitled white militiamen. Unless you are sending a bag of dicks.