Matt Barton, Bob Samuels, Alex Reid

Matt Barton

Influenced by Wayne Booth’s rhetoric of fiction, applied to games.

Features of vws:
1. Connected set of objects and individuals.
2. Habitable environments
3. Reasonably intelligible totality for external observers.
4. Field of activity for its members.
Marie Laure Ryan.

Castanova (sp?): most advanced form of communication.

Maybe Burke’s pentad:
Act: situation, obstacle, puzzle.
Agent: characters, monsters
Agency: interface, possible actions, abilities.
Scene: setting, environment, location
Purpose:

Brummets’s Rhetoric of style:
Primacy of the text
Imaginary communities
Market contexts
Aesthetic rationales
Stylistic homologies: elements that carry across.

Interesting point that games don’t evolve; change style. Retrogames being repackaged evidence of their relevance.

Virtual Wrold Design Decisions
1. platform
2. engine
3. offline / online / downloadable content
4. licensed / original
5. user generated content.


Bob Samuels:

New media in historical, political, context.
Feeding libertarian consensus: roots in 1980s revolution
Pomo critique of science, etc.
Pomo loss of critical distance, dominance of late capitalism.
Pomo’s political and social movement = minority rights.
Automodern = personal autonomy. Shift from identity construction to identity expression through computes.
Conservative role of universities:
Tax revolt + irony (ironic distance) + ?? = attack on progressive postmodernism.
Conservatives obsessed with left-wing universities, linked with minorities.

Pedagogical tendency to give things away may undermine jobs; new media might contribute to economic downsizing of writing instruction.

Web as source of political discourse; elections should be free, but teaching writing should not be free.

Alex Reid, “30,000 Year of Virtual Composition.”
Connects composition to all theories of composition.
Mirror neurons might have developed about 100,000 years ago, may have played a pivotal role in human revolution.
30,000 years = the age of symbolic behavior.
Subjectivity emerges through relations of exteriority.
125 years of virtual composition: technologies printing press, typewriter, telephone, (what about paper and pen?) – territorialized the disciplines (independent scholars)
[if we had founded or re-invigorated rhetoric at that point in time, or if we re-invigorate what do we end up focusing on: not just writing, but thinking, but action, collaboration (why?), we cannot really teach writing only, can we?]
the alien in the crew member: us?
Monstrous exodisciplinarity
Sharing the space between: the surface, a point of access.
To see the outside as inside.