Living Digital Media

What This Chapter would have been Before the Pandemic

This chapter would have likely gone deeper into the collaborative practices of creators based in Montréal. From my university in Toronto, it’s about a six-hour drive, and it’s a hotbed of indie and major-studio game development. For example, in March 2020, I spoke at length with Henry Smith about his independent work and experiences with a university and cooperative work groups in the city. Smith founded Sleeping Beast Games and was the solo indie developer behind cooperative games such as Spaceteam and the forthcoming Blabyrinth. Henry Smith has lived in Montréal for more than 10 years. Before going solo, Smith was a programmer for BioWare, the company behind role-playing games such as Dead Space 2 (2011) and Dragon Age: Origins (2010). When we talk over Skype about his solo games, Smith reflected on in-person events with fellow indies as well as collaborating with Concordia University. Walcir Cardoso and David Waddington at Concordia have published research about how Spaceteam supports English as a second language, or ESL. For Smith, these informal and formal forms of collaborations were vital for idea-sharing and funding purposes. And frankly, his recent games are dependent on players being in the same room together. As Smith told me:

It’s like a really fertile ground to nurture new ideas. There are a lot of academics in the game scene here as well. Concordia has a great academic games lab, where I wish I spent more time. And there used to be a really successful meetup group once a month, and then it became one twice a month, called Mount Royal Game Society, where like indies gather and drink and show off projects and stuff. 100-200 people would show up. They kept outgrowing spaces. But then in recent years it has stopped happening because the leadership changed. But the people are all still here, and there are small other groups that have filled the void now. I don’t know as much about the Francophone scene because my French is still terrible even after being here for 10 years. The Meetup group was a really, really good place to get inspired and meet up with other developers and share ideas and see demos and works in progress.

After our call, Smith followed up with me by sending a number of groups in town that support game developers, either by providing workspaces or occasional meetups like the one he referenced. He referenced KO-OP and GamePlay Space, both of which are cooperative working spaces for game creators. I had the contacts lined up, and I had the gear ready for capturing collaboration in action. But in the two years since that interview, pandemic-related lockdowns and university bans on in-person research understandably relegated all qualitative research to the screen. And for me, asking co-authors to record their screen or set-up a camera and document their own progress isn’t an effective—or affective—way of capturing scenes of collaborative composing. I should be the one handling the tech and resources for such research rather than putting the onus on the creators. The latter is something that creators do gracefully on Twitch with public audiences.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes and Grants for Field Research 2020-2022

When working on research amid the pandemic’s waves in spring 2020-2022, it was basically impossible to do field research. In the early stages of my research with and about content creators, I had received a number of internal grants from my institution to conduct field interviews at locations such as the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco in March 2020, and Computers and Writing 2020 in Greenville, North Carolina, spending days and weeks at a time there. In November 2019, I wrote the following in an application for a "Minor Research Grant” from York:

Data gathered from interviews with authors in the video game industry will serve as a key source for my study. My plan is to conduct research at the upcoming Independent Games Festival and Summit 2020 in San Francisco. I already have more than 20 interviews with writing studies scholars who authored digital media articles and books. Moving forward, I plan to interview and analyze the work of authors across other professions. My investigation of the composing practices and feelings of scholars revealed that they develop interactive content similar to independent games (e.g., Helms’ [2019] article-as-game "Play Smarter Not Harder: Developing Your Scholarly Meta”). I anticipate that a comparison of game authors will provide insights into unique tools, software, support networks, and feelings (anxiety, fear) that shape their interactive projects. What, then, will be the implications for scholarly production?

I received the minor research grant in January 2020, just months before the pandemic forced me to do some methodological maneuvering. A few months later, I also received my institution’s internal “Social Science and Humanities Research Council Explore Grant” to travel to Montréal and Vancouver to study "emplaced” composing practices. Here’s a snippet that speaks to the aim of the grant proposal:

I’m seeking answers to the following interconnected questions: what are some common composing practices and feelings for authors who produce interactive projects outside of writing studies? Secondly, to what extent do their emplaced locations, namely in tech-centric metropolitan areas, limit and drive their practices and feelings behind such projects? And lastly, what do practices and feelings look like in-situ when I connect with such authors in real-time?

My interest in studying emplaced composing really came to light this winter. I had planned to travel to San Francisco to the Independent Games Festival and Summit 2020 in March, in which many authors have shared interactive projects that address such issues as mental health (After Hours) and surveillance (Do Not Feed the Monkeys). Due to our COVID-19 situation, the festival was cancelled and my interviews between January and now have been conducted remotely. While I’m grateful to speak with such authors, what’s missing is the corporeal connection, what Laura Micciche calls the “withness” of composing.

As I’ve mentioned in previous sections of the book, qualitative fieldwork takes a considerable amount of time and energy to set up. Sure, you can show up at, say, a convention and build a research network there, but I like to make arrangements with sources well before a site visit so that it doesn’t interfere too much with a participant’s already existing plans. I also like to be transparent about my research agenda, so foregrounding my plans for qualitative research helps me achieve that transparency.

Because the pandemic effectively closed off all fieldwork that I do domestically and internationally, I resorted to remote interviews across platforms such as Zoom and Skype. For example, my institution required a number of health and safety protocols and disclaimers that needed to be included as amendments in participant consent forms. Those materials were then reviewed by health and safety advisors, even if the research had already been labeled as “low risk.” And, I admit, reading this checklist was a quick way to getting discouraged about doing field work:

• "In determining risk, I have considered the infection rate in the community or region where the research will take place.”
• "If the research is to be conducted in a different region or country, I have confirmed my ability to enter the region or country and have prepared for any mandatory quarantine period (away and home) and associated requirements.” ("ADDENDUM- Checklist for In-Person research with Human Participants - revised October 21,” 2020)

Although limitations on fieldwork are a pain, I understand why they are placed on researchers. Unfortunately, what gets lost is the sensory flair of qualitative work. What do scenes of composing look, feel, and/or sound like when you’re there as opposed to when they’re remediated on screens and such?

At first, I thought this project was going to suffer rather significantly because I was losing that sensory flair. Fortunately, I still completed 20 interviews via phone and online-chat platforms. And were there advantages for adapting to the pandemic? Yes. With grant funding, I was able to re-direct funding to purchasing creators’ games, donating to their streaming channels, and investing in better transcription services for accuracy purposes. In these isolated settings, where conversations were divorced from the thrum and bustle of, say, an in-person game jam, participants and I had better audio feeds and more private conversations about their composing practices.

Also, the research shifts I made in the pandemic led to new questions about rhetorical-affective practices. What would this book have looked like had the pandemic not happened, let alone lasted for as long as it has? Before the pandemic, that is, I was a silent viewer on Twitch, merely enjoying it as content. Later, it was clear that Twitch and other livestreaming platforms were significant places for affective intensities to bloom and shift among creators and viewers. In fact, one question I baked into many interviews was, “How do you feel about livestreaming your work for public audiences?” I noticed many more creators were opting to do that in lieu of attending festivals. Additionally, games such as Lana Lux’s Strain were started during the pandemic. As I mention in the opening section of Chapter Two, to ignore the pandemic’s exigencies and impacts on rhetorical practice would be a disservice to the new normal of creative work.

On DARE-ing Collaborations that Figured into This Chapter

Part of writing a book is building on and harmonizing with research you have in motion. Part of it, too, is accounting for collaborators to whom you are indebted. Collaborators who aren’t listed as co-authors are usually listed in “Acknowledgments” sections of publications, but Laura Micciche’s (2017) research has demonstrated that we need to acknowledge our "writing partners” beyond those pages. To that end, I want to discuss some collaborative experiences that have been fundamental to this chapter and others. Chapter One’s “Ephemera” section discussed some contributors of voiceovers I imagined in the early drafts of this book. When and where else have colleagues supported this project, and how so?

In the winter terms of 2020 and 2021, York University’s dean’s office for the faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies released a call for proposals for the Dean’s Award for Research Excellence (DARE) for undergraduate students. Under the DARE program, researchers submit project descriptions and calls for research assistants, and students apply directly to the researcher. The student then collaborates with the researcher on a project in motion (e.g., research related to a book, article, etc.). When a researcher selects a student, the team submits a letter of recommendation and statement of project goals, along with other background information to the dean’s office, which makes the final decision on funding. In May 2020, Jessica Oliveira Da Silva was a DARE recipient and was offered a stipend by the university to work with me from May to August 2020. Da Silva was asked to work between 15 hours a week on what was described as low-level and high-level tasks for the project, from assisting with a database of contact information of creators to asking questions during my interviews with research participants. Although I’ve done the writing and content creation entirely for Living Digital Media, Da Silva’s contributions were a massive help for keeping the project at a steady pace. Our collaborations have branched beyond this one. As a result of DARE, Da Silva handled the video editing for our collaborative article, “Sharing Pain and Pleasure: A Case for Studying Post-Mortems and Game Development Feelings,” published as a webtext in Computers and Composition Online.

Later, Jessica was a recipient of DARE in 2021 and served as a peer mentor to a second DARE recipient, Anika Rahman, who was new to qualitative research methods. In summer 2021, Anika participated in interviews with Douglas Gregory and Attila “Gabriel” Branyiczky, listening carefully and asking thoughtful questions. By the end of summer, the three of us co-authored a proposal for an article in Composition Forum. The now-published (2022) article, “The Discourse-Based Interview on Twitch: Methods for Studying the Tacit Knowledge of Game Developers,” features my writing about Twitch and Jessica and Anika’s video-based reflections on working as undergraduate researchers. Without a doubt, I can say that these collaborations have been crucial for completing Living Digital Media and related projects.

Highlight Video: Composing Chapters by Hand

This highlight video is based on my composing Chapters Two and Three of this project by hand. Something about the pen unlocked good thinking, pulling me away from the screen and into the world. Much handwriting was done with and around public audiences, whether on Twitch or with a collaborator. Scenes for this video were pulled from my series called “100 Days of Writing,” a livestreaming project that I started on Twitch and archived on YouTube in 2021 and 2022. I discuss "100 Days of Writing” more fully in Chapter Three.

Finally, a Longer Excerpt from an Interview with Hannah Nicklin

I have to admit that selective editing was a primary challenge of this book. It was a challenge to include and cut out the many revelatory comments from interviews with scholars and games creators. Cutting is the worst! What do you do when you feel so much has been left unsaid in the main chapters? My answer: I’m going to end the second installment of “Ephemera” by featuring more excerpts from my interview with Hannah Nicklin over Skype. Nicklin earned their PhD in game studies and spoke at length about the stakes of working as a narrative designer in a male-dominated industry. We were joined by Jessica Oliveira Da Silva, the aforementioned undergraduate at York University who worked with me for two summers as a recipient of York’s Dean’s Award for Undergraduate Research. Nicklin was so open about her process that this interview simply couldn’t be relegated to a hard drive. Here are more excerpts from the interview, edited down to three minutes: