Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice

Steve Holmes is Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University, USA

"This book offers scholars in game studies and rhetoric and composition a much needed theoretical lens for examining how habit, or hexis, creates a rhetorical force in games." – Rebekah Shultz Colby, University of Denver"The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice points us to a massive blind spot in the field of digital rhetoric—the mundane technologies that persuade us. The habits that emerge from our engagement with such technologies have not yet been a central concern to those studying rhetoric and digital games, and Holmes provides us with an impressive theoretical toolkit to remedy that problem." --James Brown, Rutgers University-Camden"In The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice, Holmes provides an important, even transcendent perspective about how fields such as rhetoric, composition, and writing studies might study videogames in ways that go beyond traditional approaches that have often limited how and what videogames are studied." --Sean Morey, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• Introduction Part I: Theorizing Procedural Habits 1. Persuasive Technologies in the Rhetoric of Videogames 2. From Persuasive Technologies to Procedural Habits Part II: Thinking Persuasive Technologies Differently3. Affective Design and the Captivation of Memory in First-Person Shooter Videogames 4. Gamification and Suggestion Technologies (Kairos) Beyond Critique 5. Achieving Eudaimonia in Free-to-Play Social Media Games 6. The Habits of Highly Unsuccessful Nonhuman Computational Actors 7. The Materiality of Play as Public Rhetoric Pedagogy Conclusion