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“LITERACY” by SCOTT REED EXTRA LIVES, EXTRA LIMBS: VIDEOGAMING, CYBERNETICS, AND RHETORIC AFTER “LITERACY” by SCOTT REED (Under the Direction of Michelle Ballif) ABSTRACT This project situates videogaming as an activity that, in its cultural and technological distinctness, challenges the discipline of Rhetoric & Composition studies. This project responds to that challenge by playfully reconceptualizing rhetoric itself, by exploring its history and “extending” many of its core concepts in conversation with the tradition of media theory. To begin, it proposes a two-fold move designed to bring these conversations into contact. The first is a rereading of the emergence of the Sophists, both historically and historiographically, with the aim of offering a “technologization of rhetoric,” that is, a sense of how shifts in history and (its historiographical perception) can be read as effected by differences in technological media. The second move, a “rhetoric of technologization,” reads trends in the modern discourse of game studies, their attempts to cope with the emergence of videogaming, through the lens of twentieth- century rhetorical theories. These two moves prepare the project to build an “extended” rhetoric according to the principles not of literacy, but of electracy, a concept which names an emergent electronic apparatus after literacy. The chapters that follow each take on of Aristotle's pisteis, or proofs, as a jumping-off point for exploring how certain rhetorical concerns stand to be reworked and reconceptualized due to the emergence of videogaming as a medium. One chapter explores, by considering the confluence of both image and computer code in gaming, how the concept of êthos (character), once influenced by gaming, leads to questions about how to approach rhetorical criticism and teaching. The next chapter considers mechanically-accelerated approaches to thinking about aesthetic experience as a way of stretching pathos, the proof based on emotion. The final chapter concludes by linking the long history of the term logos with the equally fraught history of “space” as a term of debate in media theory. Each of the three chapters offer case studies of particular games for how the medium as a whole sheds light on important rhetorical issues, and vice versa. INDEX WORDS: Rhetoric, Video games, Cybernetics, New Media, Electracy, Sophists, Grammatology, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Rhetorical proofs, Composition, Procedurality, Image theory EXTRA LIVES, EXTRA LIMBS: VIDEOGAMING, CYBERNETICS, AND RHETORIC AFTER “LITERACY” by SCOTT REED B.A., The University of Florida, 2001 M.A., The University of Florida, 2003 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2009 © 2009 Scott Reed All Rights Reserved EXTRA LIVES, EXTRA LIMBS: VIDEOGAMING, CYBERNETICS, AND RHETORIC AFTER “LITERACY” by SCOTT REED Major Professor: Michelle Ballif Committee: Christy Desmet James Marshall Cynthia Haynes Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2009 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank a handful of my colleagues from various institutions – Matthew Barton, Sarah Robbins, Sara Steger, and Douglas Eyman – for their feedback and support during various stages of this project. I would especially like to acknowledge Wendi Jewell, thanks to whose collaboration a substantial part of this project's third chapter emerged into view. And I would be remiss if I did not thank Dr. Michelle Ballif, whose patience and good humor, through a writing process that never quite found a balance between long layoffs and bursts of activity, gave me the much-needed confidence to pursue an eccentric topic, and to do so in a way that would hopefully produce good conversation. I would like to acknowledge and thank the First-Year Composition office at UGA, Drs. Christy Desmet and Deborah Church Miller, for allowing me to pursue the topic of this dissertation in my own teaching, a process that deepened both my grasp of the subject matter and my desire to pursue it academically. Finally, I'd like to thank my family and friends, especially my wife Sara, for their support and good humor throughout the long arc of my college career. Thanks for keeping me focused and keeping me playful. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...........................................................................................................iv LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................................vii INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 THE CYBERNETICS OF RHETORICAL HISTORY .........................................23 2 GAME THEORY AS A COMPOSING-HISTORY OF RHETORIC ...................56 The “Narratological” School: Games as Texts ..........................................58 The “Ludological” School: Games as Action ............................................67 The “Learning” School: Games as Culture ...............................................71 The Other School: Gaming as Meaningful Play ........................................80 3 PROCEDURALITY, ÊTHOS, AND THE WORK/PLAY OF THE “IMALGORITHM” ..............................................................................................95 RhetOrigami: On Image-Rhetoric .............................................................96 RhetAlgorithm: The Difficult Case of Computer Code ..........................102 RhetOperations: Methods and Composite Grammatology ......................111 Player 2: Re-processing Disciplinary Êthos ............................................125 Case Studies: From Portal to Rock Band ................................................143 4 STINGS, SCALPELS, AND THE SUBLIME: PATHOS ACCELERATED ......160 Emotion, On Beyond Aristotle ................................................................161 The Design of Emotion ...........................................................................174 vi Images, Acceleration, and the Sublime ...................................................182 Case Study: Bioshock ..............................................................................192 Conclusion: Being-Sublime .....................................................................200 5 SPACE INVADERS: THE IMALGORITHMIC LOGOS ..................................207 From Logos to Grounds ...........................................................................216 Spatial Theory and (Un)Concealment .....................................................226 Case Studies: World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy VII .........................248 POSTSCRIPT: (IN)CONCLUSIONS ........................................................................................262 WORKS CITED .........................................................................................................................274 vii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 3-1: The Aperture Science Enrichment Center [Portal] ..................................................146 Figure 3-2: The Portal Gun .........................................................................................................149 Figure 3-3: Screenshot of Rock Band .........................................................................................152 Figure 4-1: Screenshot of Bioshock ............................................................................................193 Figure 4-2: A moment of terror in Bioshock ...............................................................................194 Figure 4-3: The “Big Daddy” [Bioshock] ...................................................................................195 Figure 4-4: The player's encounter with Andrew Ryan [Bioshock] ............................................197 Figure 4-5: The death of Andrew Ryan [Bioshock] ....................................................................199 Figure 5-1: Lacan's Borromean Knot ..........................................................................................245 Figure 5-2: The avatar, centered [World of Warcraft] .................................................................249 Figure 5-3: A World of Warcraft raid interface .......................................................................... 251 Figure 5-4: A dramatic camera angle [Final Fantasy VII] ..........................................................253 Figure 5-5: The “overworld” view [Final Fantasy VII] .............................................................254 Figure 5-6: “For contrast, ...” [Final Fantasy VI] ......................................................................254 1 Introduction This project intends to contribute to Rhetoric & Composition studies a playful attempt to reconcile the apparatus of literate rhetoric passed down from antiquity with an important emergent technology of our time: videogaming. Rather than providing a rhetoric for videogaming, in the sense of a toolkit to appropriate gaming into education, this project seeks to enunciate and develop a videogame-rhetoric. Working from foundations in rhetorical history, media theory, and critical theory, this project hopes to investigate gaming first and foremost, in its interesting and unique contours, in an effort to recognize what rhetoric, understood as both an object of study and as a facet of lived experience, may come to look like under the
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