Living
Digital media

When the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC) published Jason Helms’ (2017) digital book Rhizcomics, it held a release event during the 2017 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Portland, Oregon. A release event is often a means to celebrate a book in a live, interactive format. A year later, Helms (2018) published a webtext reflecting on the making of Rhizcomics, wondering whether readers would leave comments on it after its publication: "In the first few weeks after publication, readers seemed more willing to enter the conversation without having read everything. It remains to be seen whether and how readers will continue to comment” ("Making Rhizcomics”).

In addition to reading a published work of digital media scholarship like Rhizcomics, how often do readers have a chance to engage with it in a shared space (in a comment system or live event) with the author or with public audiences? How often do they read about updates to and reflections on it after publication? For example, visit enculturation’s Intermezzo book series. Anything? How about this very press through which Living Digital Media is published? For many of us in writing studies, once we publish a piece—we’re done. There is usually no need for updates, and reflections are optional. Beyond the collaborative practices discussed in Chapter One, the final delivery has been one of the most pleasurable practices of creating digital media scholarship. By “delivery,” I mean releasing the final publication for a journal issue or publishing house and sharing the publication on social media as well as with peers and administrators. Recall what Jonathan Alexander told me about delivering sections of his digital monograph to a live audience:

... while it was hard and sometimes painful, emotionally evocative, and rich [to compose a multimodal memoir], it was also very pleasurable to see that come together, and to understand that I could write both in a theoretically sophisticated way but also in a personally powerful way.

Let’s hold Alexander’s reflection for a moment and turn to game development. How often do you read about updates to games that are released? What technical bugs have been squashed? What content has been added? How about when downloading an application on a phone or tablet’s app store? Do you know what’s been updated? Do you read the development logs and notes? I admit that I rarely read these announcements, but when I do read them, I notice they are often layered with good feelings. A new level. A glitch resolved. More compatibility with modern devices and software. Figures 23 and 24 displays a screenshot of my library webpage on the game distribution platform Steam, which foregrounds developer updates to games under the “What’s New” section.

Figure 23
An Example Page from a Gaming Platform

Figure 24
A Development Update Published on Steam

In this chapter, I focus on another key difference between creators of digital media scholarship and game development. Game developers present finished games in public and share post-production updates and reflections designed to evoke, sustain, or shift public feelings about a project. They practice what I call living delivery. Building on the initial delivery of a text, living delivery is an area of rhetorical-affective practices that animate interpersonal circulation on a global scale. 

Many developers, including some featured in the book, have said that a game is never done. Brad Wardell (2016) writes that “one of the greatest advances in gaming for players and developers is that games are no longer set in stone at release (“Some Final Thoughts on Postmortems”). Even before the initial joy of releasing a game resolves, potential updates reveal themselves. As Attilla “Gabriel” Branyiczky told me in an interview about Worlds Within Worlds, “I’m definitely the kind of person who will just keep working on a thing, and if I’m given as much time as I like, I will keep iterating to make it better and better and better.” This iterative approach to game development is part of living delivery. Recently, John Gallagher (2020) has presented a study of writers who ascribe to “update culture,” in which they “[write] comments on their writing, write continuously in response, and contend with emergent audiences at extreme intensity” (p. 6). Building on Gallagher’s attention to updates, I theorize the practices of living delivery as the culmination of living collaboration and feedback practices in real time and without an endpoint.

Temporally, living delivery extends the life of a project beyond the initial production cycle and final publication through rhetorical-affective circulation in the form of updates, presentations, and “post-mortem” writing in public realms. A project presentation at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) or the field of writing studies’ Computers and Writing (C&W) conference prompts new ideas and revelations that are only possible in person. Moreover, the presentation might prompt an update or a post-mortem reflection on the entire experience. 

To be clear, a theory of living delivery still animates the relationship between the creator and digital media. By “living delivery,” I don’t mean a practice that detaches digital media in such a way from the creator that it takes on a life of its own. This theoretical ground has been covered extensively by scholars such as Jane Bennett (2010), Casey Boyle (2018), Byron Hawk (2018), and Laurie Gries (2015). The circulatory nature of living delivery—again, through updates, presentations, and post-mortems—means it ought not to be divorced from the rhetor. Put differently, building on extensive research into rhetorical delivery and circulation by rhetors, living delivery remains interested in human-computer and digital-tool-audience circulation. Affect theory helps underscore feelings that emerge through circulation.

To shed light on the living delivery of living digital media, then, Chapter Four sheds additional light on theories of circulation, affect, and delivery, including by working with recent research by scholars such as the aforementioned Gallagher, Melissa Gregg (2010), and Zizi Papacharissi (2015). Such theories help underscore that digital content creation in circulation is open-ended, porous, and shaped by audiences and developer desires. Shedding light on those theories, Chapter Four then turns to stories from the 2022 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, an annual event I had been trying to attend for two years amid pandemic restrictions. I turn to developers such as Yong Zhen Zhou, Zayna Sheikh, and David Vicker, who have precariously navigated pandemic conditions and exhibited at the conference, working among full-feeling living bodies and not those on screen, then updating their work during and after the conference. Stories from GDC’s expo hall emphasize this idea.

In closing, I once again return to the field of writing studies to reframe the delivery practices of living digital media for digital media scholarship. What have and perhaps would post-publication updates look like for an article, say, in Kairos? What’s at stake for creators who engage in these practices, either by serializing their work or publishing updates?

Physical and Digital Bodies in Motion

In the introduction and previous sections of this book, I’ve taken care to draw on a range of theories of emotions that depict the socially dynamic nature of full-feeling bodies and affectively charged practices in relation to collaboration and feedback. This section of Chapter Four returns to and builds on such theories, focusing on rhetorical-affective practices under the rhetorical canon of delivery.

As I note in the Introduction, rhetoric and writing studies’ theories of rhetorical circulation are enriched by related disciplines that study emotions and affects that circulate in physical and digital spaces. Recent scholarship has taken up Jim Ridolfo’s (2012) call to study rhetors who are engaging with content after its delivery and circulation across the physical-digital world. A work is finished and "out there,” but its wide circulation depends on in-person delivery and through social media. At times, the physical delivery of a text is necessary to ensure better circulation, according to David M. Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel (2012) in their study of filmmaker Terence Winter’s delivery of films to agencies. John Silvestro (2023) drives such a point further in his analysis of a live event in which National Public Radio reporter Cokie Roberts delivered a speech for a non-profit that concurrently live-"tweeted” the speech. Before the event, “[The Women’s Fund]’s staff and volunteers spent months promoting the event, using word-of-mouth circulation, advertising, and content writing to raise awareness” (p. 2). This hybrid practice of physical-digital delivery was essential for “a multi-phase [circulation] process through which public events can be developed to generate an exigency through which attendees and members of targeted publics can circulate information” (p. 15). Studies of recent protests drive this point even further by tracing how activists who organize physical protests later engage with positive and negative appropriations of their work in digital spaces. As James Alexander McVey and Heather Suzanne Woods (2016) write of anti-racism protests, “Whereas the rapid circulation of #HandsUpDontShoot prompted the formation of anti-racist publics and coordinated material practices of protest against the violence of state racism, #PantsUpDontLoot prompted the formation of racist publics and coordinated material practices of violence against black life” (“Conclusion”).

In addition to demonstrating the symbiotic nature of physical and digital delivery, these examples in rhetoric and writing studies align with John Gallagher’s (2020) theory of “update culture,” in which many digital writers find themselves entrenched. Gallagher defines update culture in the introduction to his book Update Culture: The Afterlife of Digital Writing:

In an age of participatory audiences and audience comments on a “published” piece of writing, digital writers can now see how audience interaction impacts the reception of their texts—in real time and over long periods of time. Seeing and reading this audience reception influence[s] the way digital writers write during the circulation of their texts (emphasis added), which is not possible for print-based writing. (p. 4)

Speaking with Gallagher about update culture, digital writers acknowledge they are “addressing the need to be ‘always on,’ including the pressure of responding to audiences. As the redditor Roboticide and reviewer Margulies both said, ‘I stop when people stop responding’” (p. 73). Although Gallagher’s project is outside the scope of digital media scholarship and game development, it’s a useful term for understanding what’s at stake after digital composers across genres and media distribute their work in public. The stories conveyed in Update Culture are similar to those we read about from game developers. In its April 7th 2022 update, game development company Larian Studios indicates that they are responding to player feedback about its role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3. “Thank you for your work reporting issues to us via our socials, forums, support, and more—your feedback is important to us! Thank you for playing Baldur’s Gate 3” ("Hotfix #23 Now Live!”). Larian continues publishing updates while encountering 45,000-plus reviews of the game already in circulation.

Game developers and publishers also release downloadable content (DLCs) after the initial release of a game, often charging extra fees to access them. During the production of this book, for example, I was finishing all of FromSoftware’s “Soulsborne” games such as Dark Souls II (2014) and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), both of which have "Game of the Year” editions that repackage later content with the original title. The development team Vagabond Dog, led by Justin Amirkhani, publishes updates and new content for Sometimes Always Monsters (2020) on a regular basis. In an update dated May 2020, the Vagabond Dog team writes about adding new interactions with non-playable characters. The game revolves around the lives of authors on a book tour and their personal relationships:

Not a terribly deep feature, but the authors on board the bus will now sometimes work on a puzzle that will complete itself over the course of the tour. There’s a minor thread about a missing piece that needs the player’s help, but it’s a pretty dumb piece of content all-considered. More importantly it sets up a bit of framework that’ll help expand future activities for authors sitting in the table-seats (“Fans, Fury, & Puzzles - Build Update #447”) (“Fans, Fury, & Puzzles - Build Update #447”).

Figure 25
Vagabond Dog's News Update on Steam

To wit: Even minor updates are announced by Vagabond Dog, suggesting its transparency with its players. Updates lead to more potential audiences and more visibility on platforms. This is how Justin Amirkhani explained updates to Jessica Oliveira Da Silva and I when we spoke with him in May 2020:

I think it’s essential in the current ecosystem. Within Steam itself, we hit the “New Release” shelf. We were on there for, like, a second. There’s an article from Ars Technica that really breaks down the trajectory of a new release these days, and it is shocking the difference from when we shipped in 2014 to today. How many games are shipping, and how many games are not succeeding? You have to do everything you can to leverage your position within the marketplace in the ecosystem. I think updates are a huge part of that. It keeps you in the Steam newsfeed. I'll show you here. [Shows screen.] This is my Steam page. There's our game; it has a news bulletin. Now, that is obviously curated based on the games I interact with the most frequently or whatever Steam thinks I want to see. But if you're not here, your game just goes into this mess pile that you're never going to look at again. In the store page, once you're off of the “New Release” [section], you never hit the [“Top Sellers” section] anymore because there's AAA [games] that just eat that up. The “Recently Updated” section is pretty crucial. 

Elsewhere, many developers on Steam release games under the “Early Access” program, meaning they can sell the game as they are completing features, fixing bugs, and so forth. The Early Access program can be a bit more nuanced and involved than game demos. As detailed by journalists such as Vikki Blake, Larian Studios wrote this explanation of Early Access for its forthcoming game Baldur’s Gate 3: “Through releasing Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2, we’ve learned that working directly with our players during development makes our games better. RPGs this large, with so many avenues for player choice and exploration, thrive from feedback as new features and fixes are incrementally added to the game” (Blake, 2022). The studio has completed and written about more than 20 "hot fix” updates during its Early Access period.

The aforementioned stories of game development implicate how Gallagher defines update culture. For Gallagher, update culture attends to the afterlife of delivered digital writing, a kind of virtual apparition that haunts the writer in question. Making a contrast, I contend that many published digital texts never die after they are delivered. A publication—whether a game or a conversation on social media about a public event—is still living, growing new arms and legs, we might say, after its initial delivery. “Living” suggests continual movement and fluidity on which circulation and feelings depend. What I mean to emphasize here is that living is organic rather than ghostly. Perhaps it’s more or less liquid than gaseous. After all, digital media is often lively when it’s published, and it remains that way as it courses through digital platforms, physical spaces (i.e., a convention), and related writings. If digital media is sustained online, then it’s alive. It’s living digital media.

Further meditations on the difference between update culture and living digital media run the risk of straying from the topic at hand in this chapter. In short, theories of delivery and circulation, including Gallagher’s theory, and the aforementioned examples are enlivened by interdisciplinary affect theories that emphasize the movement of feelings in public spheres. Affect theory reminds us that even global circulation is interpersonal circulation, still connected to rhetorical bodies.

In social contexts like Twitter, affect, with its intensities, moves us to respond with emotion, which feeds back into such intensities. This is Papacharissi’s (2015) line of thinking in Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. As I note in Chapter Three, her work examines the circulation of affect on Twitter in response to political unrest and interventions. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, Twitter has served as a platform for circulating affect and sticking emotions to textual and visual production, generating what Papacharissi calls “affective publics.” She argues that journalists have resources, a global reach, and objective news values, but everyday citizens who compose on Twitter have the freedom to transmit anger, shock, and fear without consequence. In a sense, through Twitter, citizens who are not tied to news values can transmit sentiments on a global scale, and those sentiments continue to intensify when they receive responses and uptake from publics, whether from news reporters or concerned parties. From a global view of top-down circulation that affects public audiences, Papacharissi’s study is important in examining the circulation of feelings and political change that follows. Circulatory feelings parlay into rhetorical action.

Papacharissi’s investigation of affective circulation on Twitter illuminates a theory of feelings brought forth by Gregg’s (2010) essay “On Friday Night Drinks: Workplace Affects in the Age of the Cubicle.” Gregg hones in on the emotional work of the main character Claire Fisher in the television series Six Feet Under, as well as a website that features office Post-It Notes. A workplace has social conventions and rules of engagement. As Gregg shows, workplaces that privilege positive affect(s)—that “serve with a smile”—can run counter to the emotions of workers. Gregg describes Claire’s emotional work that unfolds in a bathroom stall as well as among cubicle-ridden colleagues, positing that we see a breakdown of her "professional cool” demanded by the workplace. Gregg uses the case of Claire to position analyses of online and analog communication that reinforce and circumvent the positivity reinforced by workplaces. Her primary examples include emails and Post-It Notes remediated on a website. In the genre of email writing, a primary genre of the workplace writ large, "The smiley face (or the signature kiss [x] among women) is a temporary resolution as much as it is an index of the problem of conveying affect through the screen” (p. 254). Elsewhere in the office, anonymous Post-It Notes allow affects to proliferate without "local criticism or other embarrassing displays of affect that face-to-face confrontation might threaten” (p. 258). I should say at this point that I read Gregg’s “affect” as emotion, socially performed and located across the office. Without a doubt, one Post-It Note that reads "PELASE [sic] DON’T LET ME CATCH YOU STARVING MY CHILD (UNBORN OR NOT) BY TASTING, EATING, OR STEALING MY FOOD” (p. 258) stems from an emotional center: that of anger.

Beyond Affective Publics (2015) and The Affect Theory Reader (2010), new inquiries into digital affects in circulatory contexts continue to surface. The 2017 edited collection Networked Affect offers a range of theories and studies about intensity, sensation, and value—three key terms that, as the editors claim, encompass affect theory (Paasonen et al., p. 14). Susanna Paasonen (2017) examines online debates and their affective intensities, while Jennifer Pybus (2017) looks to Facebook as an archive of feeling. Jodi Dean (2017) offers a promising theory about the movement of affect across online networks and digital media. As Dean argues, “Affective networks express/are the expression of the circulatory movement of drive—the repeated making, uploading, sampling, and decomposition occurring as movement on the Internet doubles itself, becoming itself and its record of trace” (p. 98). In short, scholars in fields that are complementary to writing studies have committed considerable attention to feelings that circulate with digital objects and across networks. 

These notable studies occasion a stronger focus on the rhetors who help power feelings that circulate on a global scale.

In varying respects, the affect theories I present here, from Papacharissi to Dean, address writing and those who write in public: The feelings of writers shape, course through, intensify, and subside during the production and circulation of public compositions across spaces, whether Twitter or a webpage. Twitter users aim to create change by reporting discontent for political powers; workers try to manage their emotions by moving to spaces (e.g., the bathroom stall, the bar) and leaving notes, which are then reposted on a website for public view. My review of such scholarship, at the very least, further underscores the transitory nature of emotion—again, socially performed and transmitted across digital spaces. 

Like Gallagher, I present stories of creators to make such theories more tangible. Living delivery is dependent on lively creators and their feelings.

Living Delivery at a Conference

We might say that 2022 was a watershed year for conferences, as many returned to in-person programming for the first time in two years. In this section, I turn to stories of developers who delivered finished games at the annual GDC in March 2022. To emphasize the conference’s lively context, I focus on developers such as Zayna Sheikh, David Vicker, and Yong Zhen Zhou, who presented in GDC’s special showcase Alt.Ctrl, which celebrates games with alternative controllers. Their stories occasion a question I entertain at the end of this chapter: What if writing studies scholars presented webtexts in a live format?

Before I tell their stories, some scene setting of GDC is necessary for understanding its lively context.

Inside the Game Developers Conference

It’s a Wednesday in March 2022, and I’ve just arrived at GDC in San Francisco. GDC is an annual gathering for game developers, publishers, and businesses associated with the industry, featuring a weeks’ worth of game demonstrations, panels, and such. (It happens that I lost my wallet just after I got off the plane, but that story’s for another day.) The streets are bustling with those who live and work here, but the intersection of Howard and 4th Street is teeming with those wearing conference badges, laptop bags, and video game and technology t-shirts. As I note in Chapter Three, my trip to the physical GDC was delayed by two years due to pandemic cancellations. GDC 2020 and 2021 were entirely virtual.

To boot, despite wading through what seems like a massive gathering, I’m told in San Francisco that GDC 2022 is scaled down significantly when compared to past GDCs. No giant displays by Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft. No massive after-parties. Small rows of game demos and tables. But to me, this GDC seems like a manageable introduction to the event. When I attended San Diego Comic Con International for the first time in 2012, I was overwhelmed by the lights and the cacophony of booths and showcases on the convention floor—the allatonceness of the convention. GDC 2022 is not like that, but it is still a worthwhile trip.

Figure 26
Attending the Game Developers Conference

GDC’s organization team is on top of pandemic-related protocols for health and safety. Upon arriving, I’m directed three different times to the required entrance to the line for checking in, sharing vaccine passports, etc … The line is long, and rightfully so. It’s the first in-person GDC in two years, feeling like the “annual gathering of video game creators from across the world that in most ways resembled a return to the good old pre-COVID days—save for the masks on everybody’s faces. Well, on almost everybody’s faces” (Grayson & Liao, 2022). I’m masked, but I’m not entirely comfortable—mainly because I haven’t been around large crowds for two years. The idea of mingling, eating, or just being, at an event like this reminds me that I’ve kind of forgotten how to interact with 3D people. How to make eye contact. How to approach random people, assuming we’re both vaccinated. These social elements aren’t the easiest either in a convention space. With music blasting at a motion capture demonstration booth nearby, for example, I’m having trouble communicating with a developer of a virtual reality system. We occasionally pull our masks down to punctuate the air between us.

Again, I’m not entirely comfortable, but I’m grateful to be here.

My research goal for the convention reveals itself when I arrive at the North Hall of the Moscone Center. I pass the GDC Arcade chairs, controllers, and screens that offer historically famous games from the convention (e.g., Wolfenstein 3D on Super Nintendo). I pass the third-party vendors selling games, merch, and such. Moments later, I find rows of game developers and companies organized by region: Chile, Switzerland, France, Québec. I play demos of games such as Legion Hearts from Switzerland and Shadow’s Light: Tale of the Champions from Montréal. I say hello. Take a card. Play. Say hello. Take a card. Play. Thank you. At one point, I’m wearing a VR headset and learning how to parry and slash in Thirdverse’s forthcoming sword-fighting game Altair Breaker. The company's Tokyo and San Francisco offices are previewing the game at GDC. The North Hall of the expo floor keeps attendees like me busy for hours. With controllers and systems ready to go, game developers get rapid public testing with players and consideration for funders and publishers.

Game developers say conferencing is vital for testing games. This is David Martin speaking about conferencing and live playthroughs in general; his company Barnaque tested their experimental game Infini (2020) at several conferences before it was finished:

We started playtesting the game from the beginning because we’ve been going to events a lot. We went to 12 events, I think, just with Infini. We would make the demo, so in a way that would be some kind of playtesting. On the demo we had a seven-minute time limit. And after that it would say, “Thanks for playing,” and we have the newsletter prompt. There would be more people trying the game, because if someone liked the game and was interrupted [by the time limit], he’ll have the impression that he liked the game and he wants to know more. It didn’t feel cheap cutting it off after that, and people who didn’t like the game, of course, they would just move on. It would allow us to let more people try to play the game. We would show different parts at different events. It would really act as a playtest, because some things would just become super apparent. For example, if everybody would get stuck on this specific level for some reason, then we’d figure it out, and we’d retry it in another event, and then it would be fixed; we would see it.

At GDC 2022, many developers still feel that presenting to live audiences is worth it, even if health and safety protocols make interactions somewhat awkward. This is what developer Evan Steitz tells me as he sits at a small table and shares Knightmare Games’ physical card game, Last Call for Alcohol (2022). Last Call for Alcohol is a game in which you pass around cards and attempt to get the lowest numerical values. The player with the highest value drinks. In a way, drinking is punishment:

To me, it’s indescribable, but it’s kind of a feeling of pride and genuine wholehearted happiness. The reason why I create games is because I want to see people enjoying the thing that I create. Being able to see them smile and see the lights in their eyes when they get that design that I’m going for, when they get that “Aha!” moment in the core gameplay loop, it kind of feels like adrenaline.

Figure 27
A Brief Demonstration of Last Call for Alcohol

Perhaps GDC 2022 is a means to reliving what was thought to be lost on game developers forever. Developers desire those real-time, embodied energies that circulate interpersonally at conferences through the in-person delivery of games.

Alt.Ctrl as Living Delivery

One area of GDC 2022 that is emblematic of desires for in-person conferencing is the Alt.Ctrl section of the expo floor. Alt.Ctrl is a special showcase dedicated to games that use alternative controllers, the kind that vary from mainstream controllers (e.g., Sony Playstation Dualshock, Xbox One, Steam Valve Index). Game developers submit their games to GDC, and it selects a number for the showcase. On the expo floor, behind rows and rows of flashing lights, blaring music, and video screens, the Alt.Ctrl event is teeming with the curious. These are games that really don’t translate well to home consoles and personal computers—if at all. When I play the game NumberCruncher (2022) by the ATLAS Institute at University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), it involves solving somewhat simple math problems, inputting the answers on a floor pad, then mining a monster’s gut to receive a coin. It’s a parody of mining for cryptocurrency.

While crunching such numbers, I keep hearing someone shout a word I don’t hear often outside of discussions of food.

“Pickles!”

Touring more of the Alt.Ctrl section, I stop at a game booth where someone is shouting an order into what looks like a drive-through cashier microphone. All the while, they’re holding a ketchup bottle in their left hand and a mustard bottle in the other. The game is Plinko Burger (2022), created by Zayna Sheikh and David Vicker, recent graduates of CU Boulder. Plinko Burger is connected to a computer, yes, but how players interact with the computer is guided by these controllers. Sheikh and Vicker have decided to exhibit Plinko Burger for three days in a row—four if you count the day of setting up the game. Both are standing near the game, wearing aprons and server hats. Sheikh and Vicker completed Plinko Burger when they were students in a game design class at CU Boulder. In November 2021, they demoed the game at the Whaaat!? festival at the university. In a Zoom call after the conference, Sheikh tells me that the game received plenty of play and feedback at the Whaaat!? festival, the kind of feedback that made it a better game, something that would eventually be accepted among submissions to Alt.Ctrl. This is how Vicker recalls the Whaaat!? festival:

One thing that I just remember watching and really enjoying was the different play styles people came up with for this game in particular; you can play it many different ways. I always like to yell over and over and try to get things to drop as much as they can, while other people were very technical about calling out what ingredients and getting it into the basket and then the next and then the next. And then we let a few people into the little shortcut keywords that we had, and it was fun to watch them use them, and for other people that really confused them. So, just all the different play styles that we were coming up with and the people we were watching was really cool to see.

At GDC 2022, the two are handling the Plinko Burger booth all day. They have speakers playing the music and sound effects of the game, and they are surrounded by fellow developers, such as Yong Zhen Zhou and his baking game PASTRY PANIC (with Cat) (2022). The energy of the space keeps them going all day, even if their feet and stomachs are aching. Sheikh recalls those embodied moments and the “vibe,” which seems only possible at the convention and not in an online environment:

And so, since we always had a line of people once the showcase had opened, we had a ton of people around the booth all the time, because we were kind of in the middle, and we were next to a bunch of other games like PASTRY PANIC Having the music was really fun because not only was it a clear indicator that the game someone was playing was over and then it was transitioning to the next player, but also it was just, like, a really fun, upbeat vibe for that sort of space. So, I think that was both good to keep our spirits up and also it was contributing to the vibe.

After immersing myself as a drive-through operator at Plinko Burger and failing hard, I turn around and get in line for Yong Zhen Zhou’s PASTRY PANIC (with Cat) (ZZ Y, 2022). The game was developed as a final project during Zhen Zhou’s studies at National University of Singapore. Looking at a screen with an adorable cat, players insert tiny kitchen tools (e.g., bread slicer, kneader) into two slots in a box in order to fulfill orders for baked goods. Inside the box, mirrors and a webcam identify the “haptic feedback sliders” (i.e., kitchen tools) inserted into the box, rendering the player’s actions on screen (ZZ Y, 2022). The game also has a cookbook that players must consult as they go. The line is 10-people deep, with audiences waiting to use its alternative controllers. Several players collaborate when they play, one making pastries while the other reads aloud recipes. Playful panic indeed fills the air.

In a Zoom call after GDC, Zhen Zhou and I are speaking about PASTRY PANIC's development and his experience seeing it come together before a live audience. For GDC’s Alt.Ctrl showcase, he brought a few friends along to help with setting up the game. In this lengthy passage, he describes the challenges of the game and friends serving as a “live patch” at GDC. I include this lengthy excerpt from our interview because it contextualizes his definition of that live patch:

The cookbook is outside of the game because it’s meant to be part of the challenge in playing the game. It’s another thing to manage with your hands. You’re juggling these five different controllers in your hands and two different slots. You’re juggling the information on the screen. And now you’re juggling a third element, which is this cookbook that you need to flip through to get the information that you need to deal with the stuff, the problems on the screen.

Having the recipe book outside there, as an element for somebody to play with, opens up some possibilities in the social dynamics of the game, outside of the game . . . So, you can see here, that’s my friend Aaron holding the book for the person who’s playing the game there. Ultimately, we wanted people to have a good experience there. We wanted them to have fun while playing the game. So, if they’re struggling with some of the elements, we’ll hold the book for them or flip to the right page so it’s just smoother for them to play.

And I guess you could call it a “live patch” to the game mechanics or something. . . . some people would take pictures of the recipe book while other people were playing. So, while waiting in line, they took pictures of the book so that they could study up before playing the game, which is really fun to see.

It’s worth noting that games like PASTRY PANIC and their “live patches” at Alt.Ctrl 2022 are delivered at a time when many are still unnerved by pandemic conditions, such as being in proximity to others. At GDC 2022, masks are required inside, but distancing has relaxed a bit. GDC, and Alt.Ctrl for that matter, mark my first time in the United States since December 2020. Triple-vaxxed now, I find this event to be safe, thanks to organizers of the conference and their various health and safety measures. And I admit that my desire to sample experimental games like Plinko Burger and PASTRY PANIC supersede my nervousness about attending public events in general. Alt.Ctrl showcases games that are difficult to access anywhere else. For example, Lisa and Matt Bethancourt’s game Buy! Sell! requires three wired telephones and Arduino controllers, plus screens to convey rising and falling stocks (Couture, 2020). The game Teletext WRN1 is only available to play on televisions old enough to support the system and its interface (Müller, Lange, Coaz, & Kraft, 2019). NumberCruncher, which I mentioned earlier, needs enough floor space for a rather large monster, a horizontal screen, and a circle of numbers that players stomp on.

The point of Alt.Ctrl isn’t to market these games beyond GDC. Although several of these games are available in some abridged way on itch.io, a popular platform for independent developers, they just aren’t the same when taken out of the conference’s context. As Zhen Zhou tells me about PASTRY PANIC, a player trying this at home would need a replication of his alternative controllers:

Obviously, PASTRY PANIC can’t really be played without the controller. So, it’s not like you can just download PASTRY PANIC on Steam and play PASTRY PANIC at home because that’s a different game now, although there’s certainly possibilities there. A lot of people at the convention were like, “Oh, yes. Is this going to be on Steam?” And I look at them and I look at my controller and I’ll be like, “Can this go on Steam?” Sure, maybe [after] a Kickstarter [campaign] where I can send flat pack PASTRY PANICs out to people.

Echoing what Zhen Zhou tells me, my point is that GDC’s Alt.Ctrl is a rich example of living digital media, the kind that foregrounds the body’s interaction with devices and interfaces in games. Some of these games are updated after the fact, sure, but they often aren’t released prior to Alt.Ctrl. It’s an annual event, and some games’ shelf lives extend beyond the conference, even extending to additional conferences.

And the Winners are…

Where else did I go on the expo floor? Next to Alt.Ctrl are award winners and nominees of the Independent Games Festival (IGF), an annual competition in which peers in the industry evaluate games released by independent developers. IGF, in fact, was one exigence for this book, a kind of repository for understanding the latest and noteworthy independent games that experimented with writing, story, design, and more. (As noted in the Introduction, I recruited a number of developers by reviewing the 2020 list of nominees, and I’m grateful that many agreed to interview with me!). The IGF Pavilion features rows of nominated games that anyone can walk up to and play. The surprising thing to me is that none of the developers from the games are present to talk about their processes and such. The pavilion is more or less a space to demo the games. To let the games stand on their own.

Later, when I meet industry professionals and talk informally with other developers, I’m told that GDC might not be the best space to demo myriad games and talk with developers. This conference is more or less a peer-to-peer event, one where those in the industry are looking to augment their work (i.e., sell it!). Panel talks are another facet of the conference, but I’m told the best experiences of the conference are those that happen in hallways and on walks to different parts of the Moscone, bars, and sponsored afterparties. Again, I’m an outsider, a stranger in the industry. In some ways, it’s a relief. The pressure is off to perform as sometimes is necessary at academic conferences. I’m just a curious traveler who loves games and finds interesting connections between developers of games and digital media scholarship. GDC has solidified such connections for me.

Toward Living Updates and Documentation

For many game developers, revisions to finished games are commonplace and well-documented. As Elizabeth Caravella and Steve Holmes (2022) indicate, revisions are a matter of ethos construction in game development. Reviewing the “patch notes” of developer Jeff Kaplan, an update “builds his ethos as a player of the game by specifically gesturing to feedback received by players that lead to technical changes” (p. 7). For game developers such as Zayna Sheikh and David Vicker, and Yong Zhen Zhou, updates to their games are not crucial because their games were designed for unique contexts and were difficult to replicate on personal computers. However, many developers presenting games at GDC demo their works in progress and update them after receiving feedback. Having covered feedback on works in progress in Chapter Three, though, I turn now to game developers who have published updates to and about their games. These approaches ensure that a game lives on in public in some capacity.

Living Updates

It’s May 2021, and I’m watching Branyiczky develop Worlds Within Worlds, a game he began developing during the 2021 Toronto Game Jam (TO Jam), first discussed in Chapter Three. Worlds Within Worlds is a two-dimensional "platformer” in which you move through worlds to "collect Golden Leaves to restore Trees.” (The game is free to play, but donations help future developments.) Branyiczky has participated in several game jams in Toronto and online spaces, including the very popular Ludum Dare, an international game jam that gives developers one month to conceive and distribute an independent game with certain themes and parameters. During his TO Jam participation, Branyiczky is livestreaming his development: talking aloud about the game’s mechanics, showing programs and code that make the game possible, and interacting with viewers. When a version of Worlds Within Worlds is published on itch.io, it’s just the beginning for what Gallagher (2020) would call Worlds Within Worlds’ afterlife. Branyiczky describes the process this way:

I would say that developers tend to approach their jam games in a few different mindsets. You know, there’s the people who are just making it for fun for a passion project, maybe even a portfolio piece someday down the line. And when they’re continuing work on a jam game, it’s because they want it to be a more complete version, so that if anyone sees it in the future, it’ll reflect well on their work as a whole.

In July 2021, Branyiczky continues working on a more complete version of Worlds Within Worlds. We meet over Zoom for an introductory interview, and then he invites me to join him on Twitch for a conversation about the game later in the week. It’s a means to interviewing him and allowing him to explain his process while his regular audience participates. In this excerpt, we are discussing his decision to prepare parts of the game before TO Jam and then expand on them after the event. He describes revising and adding levels to Worlds Within Worlds:

Rich Shivener: I noticed with Worlds Within Worlds you said in the description that you developed some of the assets of the game ahead of time.

Gabriel Branyiczky: Oh yes, so much of your game is built ahead of time, like the only thing that I was doing for the jam was the level design. Everything else is built.

Rich Shivener: How many levels do you anticipate having for Worlds Within Worlds?

Gabriel Branyiczky: Well, right now, there are three worlds in the version of the game that is out there. Each world has five levels in it. And then right now, I’ve just finished World Four. So that’s the total up to 20. And I want to at least finish World Five and see where I’m at with that. So there’s going to be at least 25 levels in the game.

Figure 28
Branyiczky on developing Worlds Within Worlds

Branyiczky’s experiences underscore the value of living digital media even as a solo developer. It doesn’t take a massive team to make living digital media, but it can be a massive undertaking on one’s part—weeks and weeks of streaming, pushing constant and periodic updates, to get work done. To boot, audiences who play the game—even audiences that are smaller in size—contribute to the game and its developers’ liveliness. This confluence of interactive feedback and public collaboration amounts to the affective charges (Stewart, 2007) that the practice of living digital media depends on. Branyiczky argues that he streams and updates the games even when no one’s watching. Perhaps it is streaming that kick starts the heartbeat of his constant updates to a game that was finished during a game jam. To offer a sense of Branyiczky living digital media, and the positive vibes that stem from it, I invite you to attend to this section with one final excerpt from our chat:

The thing that’s really beneficial about keeping myself on such a rigid schedule is the fact that it means that—however small the steps that I am accomplishing on any given stream are—it’s giving me an opportunity to just keep making steps forward. I definitely have gone through various phases—like, years—of my life, where I just feel like I’m not getting very much done, not working towards the dreams, not engaging in hobbies, and not working towards whatever it is I really want to be making. I find that taking time out to participate in the stream and the fact that I’ve actually got an audience here, I feel somewhat accountable to maintain the consistency of the stream to be here, in some small form, as an entertainer, but also as a part of this community. It’s a great opportunity for me to mostly focus on actually working towards the development of my own games, but also for me to participate in conversations with chats and with other game developers and do interviews. It’s been a very positive thing for me. I figured, even if I only have like one, two viewers—in this case, we’re up to five, which is great—even if I had next to nobody watching me, I’d still keep doing this specifically because of the fact that it’s afforded me this time to work on my art.

In sum, Branyiczky has made virtual space for living digital media and the updates that come alive in real time. Like Branyiczky, many devs featured in this book have published updates to their games. I refer once again to House House’s Untitled Goose Game and its August 2020 update, “Oh dear! Two horrible geese!”:

Soon you’ll be able to enjoy Untitled Goose Game with a friend, in a new two-player cooperative mode. Play through the whole game as two horrible geese, honking twice as much, teaming up to plan pranks, and generally ruining everyone’s day, together (House House, 2020)

As I emphasized in this book, developers need considerable time to update their projects, let alone while streaming in public. The perpetual motion of living digital media means perpetual invention. However, a project can live on in less intense yet meaningful ways. This is why documentation about games is important to acknowledge.

On Documentation

In addition to updating actual games, developers also write comprehensive documents detailing their updates and reflecting on their overall development processes. On the Worlds Within Worlds page, Branyiczky publishes “change logs” to the game, a recent one featuring updates such as:

• "Individual Level Best-Time Tracking: Your best attempt at clearing each level will be recorded and shown above each level’s gate in the overworld with Speedrun Mode enabled"
• "The cursor no longer remains invisible if you pause or reset the game while the butterfly is active" (“v1.2.3”)

Branyiczky’s change logs are similar to the patch notes of game developer Jeff Kaplan that "purposefully construct a particular narrative and rationale for both technical and aesthetic changes made to the game” (Caravella & Holmes, 2022). However they are labeled, such writings are updates that are responsive to the developer’s new ideas and feedback from players. Some are objective, simply describing which changes were made. Others, like Kaplan, take a multimodal approach, placing their bodies and voices on screen. The latter approach is an affectively rich delivery practice that helps recirculate content updates to global audiences. Although global circulation can spawn satiric remixes of updates (Caravella & Holmes, 2022), it can also create "flows and rhythms that cultivate new ideas for a serial installment [or update]” (Bahl & Shivener, 2020).

Sheikh and Vicker demonstrated the value of the latter as they released versions of Plinko Burger on itch.io and documented their process on a GitHub page, where visitors can check out their raw files and version changes. As Sheikh and Vicker tell me during our conversation on Zoom, documentation is the concurrent text of a project, a means to recalling successes and failures. It is also a way of giving back to the community that supports a game’s development. Put differently, if fellow game devs support a development during a production cycle, then documentation is a good way to pay that support forward. Documentation is more low-key than content updates to a game, but it’s still a crucial public service as much as it is crucial for raising a developer’s profile in the industry. Sheikh offers comments on documenting her games:

The process of making a game is so variable, and it takes you on crazy paths through different ideas and different prototypes and different experiences, and all of that is so awesome and valuable that if you do documentation while it’s happening, you have this amazing record of, “Sure, we made this thing, but also we went on this journey to making this thing and learning about what it takes to bring this idea forward.” The better documentation you do, the more you can look back on that and have that as its own body of work to show other people and to help other people with their own development. [With] this updating body of work you can look at and be like, “Here, this is how I did this. This is what it took to make this project. This was my thought process in making this thing a reality.” There’s so much value in that [documentation] that I have grown to appreciate as I’ve continued to work on creative projects.

Again, Plinko Burger might not be updated much after GDC, but its presence will live on as long as the two sustain the documentation about it on itch.io and Github. Combined with the game’s digital files on such sites, developers’ documentation ensures that their game remains a living project, capable of being replicated or referenced for future projects. Without such documentation, future developers might be less aware of how Alt.Ctrl and experimental projects take shape. This is a call I return to in the final section of Chapter Four.

A Scholarly DLC, Webtext Arcade and Process Document: Writing Studies as Living Digital Media

At the start of this chapter, I stated what might be a given among scholars: When a manuscript is published, whether it’s in print or in a digital space, it’s done. We move on the next one, the next manuscript that helps us add another crucial line to our CV. So my first question in this final section of Chapter Four is this: Can we afford to make updates to digital media scholarship in response to its initial public circulation and reader feedback? What’s at stake for those who attempt—and have attempted—this delivery approach?

Scholarly DLCs

There is a fine line between releasing projects in progress and updating them after publication. Echoing my comments in Chapter Two and Three, I would argue that Nathaniel Rivers and Jeremy Tirrell’s Following Mechanical Turks project is living digital media. It’s living digital media in progress, similar to games of Steam’s Early Access program. Rivers and Tirrell have uploaded more than 100 files to the project’s repository since 2019. They livestream discussions about their project and release notes and features of it. (By the time this book is in circulation, they might be done.) However, it doesn’t appear that the team is directly engaging with constant, public feedback on features and writings of the project. Still, their project’s approach constitutes a combination of highly visible collaboration in situ. At the time of writing this chapter, I wonder which updates will take place after the project is fully published. I wonder this, too, about the very project that you are reading now.

For this discussion, I’m most interested in projects that have been in circulation as final projects. For example, Alexander Hidalgo’s (2017) video book Cámara Retórica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition is a six-part series of short films on feminist filmmaking practices and its practitioners. How has this project evolved since its publication in 2017? This question is not designed to critique Hidalgo’s completed work, but to evoke wonder about which insights have emerged since Cámara Retórica’s publication. Wonder is a feeling that digital media projects can embrace well, according to Susan H. Delagrange (2011):

Interactive digital media can be designed as technologies of wonder, epistemically active digital Wunderkammern, spaces where we can accumulate, explore, and make meaning from a superabundance of visual, verbal, and auditory materials in digital formats. (p. 153)

Like games, digital media scholarship can foreground wonder through navigation choice and updates after publication. In 2019, Jason Helms published the game-as-scholarship “Play Smarter Not Harder: Developing Your Scholarly Meta” in the open-access electronic journal Scholarly and Research Communication. In “Play Smarter,” you take on the role of a scholar who is writing an article over a 50-day period. In this text-based game, you make decisions about committing time to drafting print or digital media, conducting research, revising your project, and taking time off. It’s a game that branches as you go, revealing your days left, your page count, and your emotional states. As it tells me in a recent playthrough, “Pages written: You have written 0 of your planned 25 pages. Emotions: you perceive yourself as more challenged than skilled, leaving you feeling anxious.” A complete playthrough of the game unlocks “a debug mode that makes its arguments more explicit.”

Figure 29
Playing Play Smarter Not Harder

Since its publication on July 2, 2019, the game has not been updated—or perhaps updates haven’t been publicly announced (e.g., on the journal’s website). And that makes sense. Unlike what we see on games pages at itch.io and Steam, a page detailing change logs are practically nonexistent on the pages of digital media scholarship. It’s not an expectation of the field of writing studies and academia writ large. If we have textual and technical errors in a digital argument, we fix it or we contact editors to help us. (This dialogue happens every so often at the online journal for which I edit.) We often don’t make updates public knowledge. Generally, when the article is published, that’s it. Done. The article’s link circulates in inboxes, social media feeds, and professional portfolios. This circulation is what my department calls “knowledge mobilization.”

To align with the rhetorical-affective production cycles of game devs, then, which updates for “Play Smarter Not Harder” would be appropriate? Helms might add an update, such as “the second article.” It would be scholarly downloadable content. Or perhaps he might unlock debug mode for anyone to play through. Within the game, Helms’ comment on prototyping prompts me to think about the lifespan of feedback in scholarship vs. game development.

I like to think that all scholarship is academic prototyping. In a long view, scholarly interventions are feedback mechanisms, but they’re not that rapid. In my own experience, I’ve found that new media scholarship offers more opportunities for immediate feedback to improve the prototype.

Toward the Webtext Arcade

If all scholarship is academic prototyping, how do we extend its feedback mechanisms beyond initial publication and capture the labor that figures into such an extension? One idea is to encourage reinterpreting a piece for another publication or venue. These reinterpretations happen in ethical ways all the time in our field, as we’re parlaying works in progress or finished articles into presentations at field conferences or vice versa. In fact, in 2008, Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander presented the multimedia installation “Multimedia[ted] [E]visceration” at the Watson Conference at the University of Louisville. The installation was later published as a webtext chapter in The New Work of Composing (2012). That said, a game like Helms’—and many of the digital media scholarship examples discussed in this book—could be arranged for a kind of webtext installation, similar to GDC’s Alt.Ctrl. At the Computers and Writing 2022 conference, in fact, the organizers highlighted several presenters as "emergent voices.” These voices were invited to create virtual projects ahead of the conference and to participate in question-and-answer sessions about their projects at the in-person conference. This intentional approach to invite participants to engage with digital projects at the conference more closely aligned with the demonstrations by game developers featured in this chapter. These scholars received immediate feedback in digital and physical spaces and could carry them forward to manuscripts.

Installing and sharing work this way is also similar to poster presentations at conferences. The Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Computers and Writing conference have poster sessions, and they welcome media-rich presentations. Perhaps Computers and Writing is the best conference space for blending in-person and digital interactions with works in progress and published webtexts. The conference presentation as a genre is interactive, but a dedicated space—a kind of open arcade—for webtexts might allow for more attendee agency and more temporally flexible ways of giving and receiving feedback. The Digital Media and Composition (DMAC) Institute at The Ohio State University commits an afternoon for participants to showcase their work to staff, faculty advisors, and fellow participants in an open format. For example, a draft video I composed at DMAC 2018 was displayed on a computer and accompanied by a notebook in which viewers could leave anonymous comments, a kind of low-key proxy of posting comments on a YouTube video. Although my project afforded passive viewing, the arrangement of the event and the delivery of the project felt interactive and welcomed rapid, immediate feedback.

Similar to DMAC, the webtext arcade could run for an entire day or concurrently with the conference programming, much like Alt.Ctrl on GDC’s expo floor. But I hazard to strongly suggest that it run throughout the conference due to the notable time commitment of presenting said webtext. As Sheikh told me in our interview about Alt.Ctrl, demonstrating Plinko Burger required hours and hours of standing and talking with people for three days in a row:

We had the support of all those people around, but we were very focused on running the booths the whole time. So, there was a lot of back-to-back just talking to people for like six hours and running this game and having that experience. I think we didn’t have any major technical issues, which was pretty wonderful.

Figure 30
A Demonstration of the Game Plinko Burger

Perhaps the middle ground is something like the aforementioned IGF Pavilion, where conference participants can freely play games. A computer lab demonstrating all the works might do the rhetorical trick. Furthermore, many academic institutions have labs for these activities already. The Webtext Arcade could be a productive partnership with an institution’s library, which have in their own ways become sites of media production (Mackenzie & Martin, 2016; Nelson, 2021). That said, what might be the specific asks? Immediately, I think of the following:

• 20 computers connected to Ethernet
• Headphones
• Sound
• Movable tables

These asks are commonplace items in labs and the kind of installation setups at gaming conventions. Perhaps the biggest asks are the promotion of the arcade and the incentive to present. We need to further recognize and celebrate myriad works of digital media scholarship—past, present and future—particularly those on the horizon. Beyond appearing in digital publications and institutes, a webtext arcade could amplify living digital media in our field, perhaps even resulting in more submissions.

Documenting Our Work

Aside from the two above approaches, documentation might be the best option for extending the lifespan of digital media scholarship. As I argue earlier in this book, we need to publicly document and reflect on our digital media scholarship more often, and we need to do a better job of arguing that documentation is a public-facing service. Whether modeling after Branyiczky’s change logs or Sheikh and Vicker’s documentation on GitHub, tracking and writing about our revisions can be an enormous resource for fellow and future scholars. While drafting and revising a webtext, scholars might record their screens, capture screenshots of every draft, and upload versions to GitHub. This stuff, what I call ephemera, accompanies the revised submissions we collect from students. Ephemera allows for a contextualized assessment of the revised submission. Asking for and submitting ephemera animates the interpersonal circulation of a production, foregrounding a culture of affective openness that forms between bodies.

Let me put it frankly: For many of us, writing a webtext is hard as hell. For our peers and reviewers, let’s document how we made our way out of development hell.