Living Digital Media

Living Digital Media is a work of research-driven storytelling that makes sense of practices and feelings behind digital media scholarship and independent games. The broad field of rhetoric and writing studies has valued studies of digital media scholarship and games. However, a comprehensive project drawing together and comparing these digital media productions remains underdeveloped. Comparing these productions, then, addresses a research gap, raises new questions about composing practices, and extends theories of feelings associated with digital media.

For years now, I’ve been interested in the stories that creators tell about their digital media productions. When creators compose with digital media, they’re sinking many hours of practice into a production. They’re living it. It’s a part of them. They love it. Hate it. Delete it. Undo it. And they’re not alone. In addition to making use of myriad digital tools, they are collaborating with peers and teams, revising arguments in response to reviewer feedback, and sharing final publications and reflections with larger public audiences. They are living digital media.

Working from this premise, Living Digital Media substantiates a theory of rhetorical-affective practices, or entwined rhetorical practices and feelings that circulate between bodies involved in a production cycle. This theory augments what many have called the “living document,” a finished publication or project that creators circulate to publics and then update routinely (e.g., a wiki or document available for editing on Google Docs). Living Digital Media calls attention to the circulation of final publications, but it calls more attention to practices and feelings that circulate between creators, reviewers, and public audiences while a production cycle is still in motion. In other words, a theory of rhetorical-affective practices demands attention to circulation before circulation.

In terms of scope, this book depicts rhetorical practices under the auspices of collaboration, revision, and delivery as circulatory and affectively charged. In a production cycle, practices flow and overlap with each other in recursive ways. For creators, rhetorical-affective practices within a production cycle animate forms of interpersonal circulation. Collaborative practices animate the most immediate interpersonal circulation whether teams work in close proximity or remotely. Revision practices animate both immediate and wider circulation as creators share drafts with peers and livestream their processes for public audiences. Finally, delivery animates global forms of interpersonal circulation as creators share their final publications and subsequent updates in local and global contexts.

Despite the forms of circulation that these rhetorical-affective practices animate, they are still interpersonal, coursing through bodies across physical and digital spaces. It’s as if creators, rhetorical-affective practices, and audiences amount to the lifeblood of digital media. Hence, living digital media.

The stories and analyses inside Living Digital Media are based on numerous interviews with writing studies scholars and independent game developers. These creators—the catch-all term I use throughout this book—share common ground and productive differences that make rhetorical-affective practices a dynamic, flexible set. Living Digital Media begins with stories of scholars who have created “webtexts” or interactive digital media arguments rendered through video, webpages, and soundscapes. Later, Living Digital Media turns to independent game developers whose practices we, as scholars, might consider in order to invite more circulatory practices and feelings—and more public and collaborative lives—into our work. The process of living digital media is at once an interpersonal and public experience, the latter of which might further cultivate digital media scholarship in writing studies.

Living Digital Media arrives on the heels of timely initiatives and calls for change in the field of writing studies. Journal and book editors in writing studies continue to invite multimedia-rich submissions and interdisciplinary perspectives that increasingly diversify definitions of scholarship and their well-worn expectations. When I was composing parts of this book in 2021, writing studies and technical and professional communication (TPC) editors were carrying out a number of inclusive initiatives designed to make authorial and editorial processes more visible to prospective authors. Editors were hosting “Lunch with an Editor” roundtables on Zoom and planning a YouTube channel that features authors and editors of notable journals. Such initiatives take us behind the scenes of scholarly productions, shedding light on the living, editorial bodies who support our journals, and thereby empowering prospective authors who are perhaps uncertain, intimidated, or curious about submitting their work. These initiatives are rhetorical and affective, insofar as editors are publicly sharing information about scholarly production that, as recent research tells us, is ripe with feelings (Shivener, 2020; Beare & Stenberg; 2020).

Drawing from more than 40 interviews and project excerpts, and responding in a timely manner to the aforementioned initiatives, Living Digital Media captures and interprets lively behind-the-scenes stories of digital media creators. This book is responsive to the above initiatives because 1) it makes transparent the work of scholarly creators of digital media, and 2) by identifying key issues of such scholarly creators, it turns to game developers who are doing inclusive, rhetorically rich, affectively charged work in public. In other words, to appeal to its primary audience of writing studies scholars, Living Digital Media addresses three questions: Which rhetorical practices behind digital media scholarship have been of the most concern, the most pleasurable, and otherwise vibrant with feelings? What might editors and authors do—and what are they doing—to address those practices and feelings and to make them transparent for future authors? How might creators outside of scholarly realms—namely, game developers—help us reimagine those practices and thus those feelings, particularly those creators who have been working in public for many, many years?

A theory of rhetorical-affective practices based on research-driven storytelling is important because it makes visible a range of creators and their embodied, felt practices. Theorizing rhetorical-affective practices aligns with bonnie lenore kyburz’ (2019) view that “with the generous range of compositional options open to us for scholarship, teaching, and learning, we are more fully able to act on our capacities for engaging our vibratory affects in ways that delight, provoke, and at the same time articulate rhetorical dispositions and creative vision” (p. 15). Creator stories make such dispositions and visions visible to audiences, including future creators in writing studies who want to publish webtexts. For the purposes of this book, stories help future creators attune to, and anticipate, feelings associated with rhetorical practices of a production cycle. This book foregrounds stories based on this author’s multimodal field research, analyzed through lenses of rhetoric and affect. Deep attention to scholarly and games developers’ reflections on collaboration, revision, and delivery forges a new understanding of the embodied, felt practices that swirl in and around digital media productions. As a result, creators in writing studies and game development are placed in conversation, and their commentaries help future creators better attend to what Berlant and Stewart (2019) call “slippages and swells,” those felt experiences and sensations of pain and pleasure that accompany writing situations. If behind-the-scenes stories of such projects remain invisible, then future creators have a limited view of digital media production cycles and rhetorical-affective practices therein. This condition is problematic if our field wants future creators to work in print- and web-based contexts—to be, as my department calls new faculty members, “amphibious creatures, making their contributions both by traditional and alternate means.” Living Digital Media embraces such alternate means.

Affective Interventions and Exigencies for Living Digital Media

Affect theory has a strong foothold in rhetoric and writing studies, and this book amplifies the role of feelings in relation to digital media production. This section outlines the exigencies for my study of practices and feelings that precede a final digital media publication.

A brief literature review here articulates my intervention in studies of digital rhetoric and writing, game development, and feelings. Our field has an enormous amount of studies of creators’ processes and digital media practices (e.g., Braun, 2013; Lockridge & Van Ittersum, 2020), practices that often include managing the circulation of rhetoric and writing (Sackey, Ridolfo, & DeVoss, 2018; Silvestro, 2019). Our field has also turned to its own community to study writing practices across print and digital scholarship (Shivener, 2020; Tham and Grace, 2022; Tulley, 2018). Furthermore, studies of games in our overarching field have made important contributions to understanding developer processes and experiences (McDaniel & Daer, 2016; Eyman & Davis, 2016; Colby & Shultz Colby, 2019; Karabinus & Atherton, 2019; Thominet, 2021). Working from these substantial areas of study, my research intervenes by drawing on a rhetorical-affective framework and by entwining stories of writing studies scholarship and game development practices in which felt circulation persists.

A number of recent digital writing and production studies discuss feelings but have largely elided theoretical orientations that foreground feelings. I don’t consider this general elision a fault of or disservice by scholars. They’ve created an affective exigence, a reason to build on their work. In the realm of affect theory, Sara Ahmed (2005) is among a strong chorus of theorists who have argued that feelings—and more abstractly, affective intensities and sensations—are the social forces between composers and their compositional objects and partners. In the field of writing studies, Joddy Murray (2009) claims non-discursive rhetoric—that which stems from image-based and multimodal production—is constructed with emotions because “every image carries with it an affective charge or emotional component” (p. 104). Sean Morey (2015) insists that digital “delivery can employ other kinds of psychic and bodily sensations: feeling and affect” (p. 96). Delivering found objects, grayscale video, and sound modulations, Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander (2015) argue that “queer composing is a demand born out of anger, resentment, pain …. Our ‘full, nasty, complicated lives’ often require acts of de-composition, of un-composing and re-composing dominant narratives of sexuality, gender, and identity” (“Composing while Queer”). Writing more recently, Trisha Campbell (2017) theorizes that audio software “might invite us into affectively charged, new rhetorical and empathetic relationships with voices that are both our own and not our own” (“Digital Empathy”). Such arguments add gravity to claims that writing is an affective, circulatory activity. Writing and composing are affectively charged practices. No (digital) writing is without affects, feelings, or emotions that stem from human and nonhuman action. To channel Anne Frances Wysocki’s (2012) argument about embodied composing: writing is bound up “with attending productively to one’s own felt experiences and with learning how to compose media out of those experiences, media for circulating and eliciting engagements with others” (p. 19). By paying attention to creators’ emotional words and discussions of relationships with tools and people, we can locate who and what enables and constrains composers—what and who helps them get work done or turns them away from an idea, a project, an approach. Process narratives and reflections on digital media production open the door for a more affectively centered intervention in writing studies research.

Historically, our field has had an appetite for this intervention concerning behind-the-scenes stories of digital productions. In 2007, for example, Madeleine Sorapure and Karl Stolley, editors of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, introduced the “Inventio” section of the journal. “Inventio” webtexts take readers inside the processes and rhetorical work of scholars composing digital media texts. As Sorapure and Stolley (2007) explain, “Inventio authors can also choose to bring us into their production studios, describing not just the ‘how’ of their digital production work, but the important ‘why’ of the rhetoric behind these production choices” (“Introducing Inventio”). As of 2023, Kairos has published fewer than 30 webtexts in the “Inventio” section, which means it is the least featured section of the journal. Authors discuss anything from successes and failures with equipment and software, to ideas and plans for another revision. And they often do this with their bodies and voices on screen. Crystal VanKooten’s (2016) “Singer, Writer: A Choric Exploration of Sound and Writing” is a process narrative and reflection on composing a music video and embodying “the chora,” or a space in which “we compose and feel out meanings from diverse materials, patterns, emotions, bodies, and memories.” As VanKooten explains in her reflection:

Music, in particular, brought out such extra-discursive, bodily rhetorical action during this project. I listened to and worked around clips from Brahms, swaying to and fro, humming. I laughed, and got a little choked up [emphasis added], feeling emotion well up through my nose and eyes. The notes and associated memories were meaningful, moving. (“chora”)

In a sense, “Inventio” authors let down their guard when they compose for this Kairos section. In a webtext on the constraints of PowerPoint, for example, David M. Sheridan (2015) presents a video that situates his animated avatar in a dreamland amid the Microsoft slideware. Over a jazzy soundtrack, warped and colorful shapes give way to an illustrated house, though not exactly in the way Sheridan imagines. In the accompanying commentary, Sheridan notes that the video he presented to his digital composing class offered lessons in play, experimentation, and control in relation to invention: “Our storehouses of words are always threatening to dissolve into nonsense; pie charts will turn into butterflies and fly away. It can be frustrating at times, but also fun (emphasis added) in its own way” (“Pie Charts and Butterflies”). Process narratives on digital media productions, like VanKooten’s and Sheridan’s, are spaces for emotion-laden reflections.

Take another example, this time from Jennifer Sheppard’s recollection of a science-based website project published in a 2009 Computers and Composition article. Jennifer Sheppard (2009) admits she had trouble translating what ecologists wanted on the web pages and managing conflicts with stakeholders and school resources: “More astonishing and disheartening [emphasis added] to me, though, was the fact that the lab administrator for this school had set up the network to prevent students (or any unauthorized person) from downloading and installing anything on the machines, including plug-ins” (p. 126). Emotional language heightens her—and our—attunement to the administrator as well as the equipment and students in question. In other words, she has put into language an affective conflict that manifested along the way to a completed production (e.g., a website).

Encounters like Sheppard’s are detailed in other issues of Computers and Composition (Bray, 2013; Skains, 2017) and other digital sections of Kairos as well as Computers and Composition Digital Press (Berry et al., 2016). I’m drawn to a collaborative webtext by Sara Alvarez (2017) and graduate students from the University of Louisville. In the “Praxis” section of Kairos, “On Multimodal Composing” takes viewers inside the authors’ composing processes and habits, including the tools, embodiments, and human partners that shape their digital work. One vignette depicts Caitlin E. Ray working through and with chronic inflammation and pain, whereas another emphasizes the liberating nature of “black noise” that surrounds Khirsten L. Echols’ composing practices. The group contends that “writing is sedimented and intersected by life experiences occurring during our composing,” and that “the body has demands; the body interrupts, intervenes, processes, digests, and more” (Alvarez et al., 2017). Life experiences, bodily demands, movements—previous research has told us that feelings are embedded in these activities (Micciche, 2007; Murray, 2009; Arola & Wysocki, 2012). If life experiences are imbued within a digital media production, then so too are the feelings that stem from such life experiences. This is one theoretical view I amplify in my study of creators and the rhetorical-affective practices that constitute living digital media.

The aforementioned contributions to digital media work demonstrate a need for a book that comprehensively investigates practices and feelings attributed to creators and audiences across disciplines. kyburz’ Cruel Auteurism (2019) recovers film-composition’s long affectively charged history and reflects on her filmmaking practices. Living Digital Media is a productive partner of kyburz’ book because it speaks more broadly to the affective work of content creators who engage with digital media. Living Digital Media also builds on Aubrey Anable’s (2018) readings of the affective dimensions of modern games, such as Gamelab’s Diner Dash series (2003) and Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero (2013). To adapt Anable’s research question: “how might [writing and rhetoric] studies account for the embodied and discursive ways affect circulates through [digital media production]?” (p. 2). Living Digital Media addresses such a question by telling stories of creators across media. My argument foregrounds affect and envisions that practices and feelings flow into each other as a draft changes hands between authors and editors, moves to cloud storage, and becomes a permanent fixture on a website.

Why Scholars? Why Game Developers? Methods for Studying Feelings and Practices

Now for a bit of history about how this book came together. In light of locating emotional work in narratives and behind-the-scenes stories of digital media scholarship (i.e., those in Kairos’ “Inventio” section), I studied and analyzed interviews with writing studies scholars who authored digital media texts and books. In 2017, I chose this community of creators because our field had relatively few stories of digital media scholarship processes from the author perspective. Using their public email addresses, then, I recruited scholars who have published digital media texts since 2015, yielding more than 20 interviews and artifact collections (e.g., drafts, letters, media assets). My participant pool ranged from graduate students to tenured writing studies scholars who recently composed digital media texts. I conducted semi-structured interviews through in-person and online meetings and in locations and times of the participants’ choosing, working from an interview questionnaire on their digital media practices and their feelings related to a project. Participants met with me on video-based platforms such as Skype and Google Hangouts and at professional gatherings, such as the 2018 Conference on College Composition and Communication; the 2018 Computers and Writing conference; and the 2018 Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC), a two-week workshop on digital media at The Ohio State University designed for writing studies and humanities scholars.

For comparison purposes, I later studied and analyzed stories of independent game developers. Hundreds of games are released every month by solo developers and small-team studios. Like scholars, independent game developers practice what Eyman and Ball (2014) call “rhetoric, design, code,” handling most, if not all, major tasks behind a production: textual writing, interface prototyping, and programming. They also seek feedback and write documentation for internal and public audiences. They’re invested in process and iterative composing. Furthermore, scholars in our field have developed games-as-arguments (Jeng, 2018; Helms, 2019). Parallels are there, waiting to be questioned.

Following similar methods of public recruitment in 2019, then, I contacted game developers whose games were nominated for the Independent Games Festival and who had been invited to showcase their projects at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Much of this latter research happened amid the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting me to conduct remote interviews with participants until lockdowns and restrictions were lifted. I discuss the methodological shifts of Living Digital Media in “Ephemera: Chapter Three.”

In order to capture creators’ stories and thus the practices and feelings that circulate in digital media production cycles, mixed methods were necessary for my research. Methods from rhetoric and literacy studies (Ridolfo, 2012; Prior & Shipka, 2003; Berry, Selfe & Hawisher, 2012) and emotion studies (Wingfield, 2010; Kurtyka, 2017) positioned me to interview creators, take stock of their composing practices (e.g., collecting project artifacts), and co-review data generated from interviews and observations (i.e., participants were allowed to review transcripts and respond). As indicated in Figure 1, mixed methods were ideal because they enabled me to seek out multiple data sources, such as text, audio, and video, that contributed to productions. My overall methodological goal was, in fact, to answer Jim Ridolfo’s call to writing researchers to pay closer attention to “the missing element, a rhetor’s own perspective on her strategy” (2012, p. 127). I sought to address Ridolfo’s concern that if I were “to take a bird’s-eye view of all these [digital media] texts,” I would have a limited view of creators’ experiences. Interviews with creators kept me on the ground and closer to their perspectives (p. 127).

Figure 1
Interviewing Creators

When analyzing the transcripts of interviews with my participants, then, I treated “digital media practices” and “feelings” as the primary categories of analysis. In order to contextualize practices and feelings that circulate with such practices, I also created a tertiary category titled “materials.” Put together, the categories enriched the creators’ stories I relay in this book.

“Digital media practices” was a flexible unit of analysis. Practices could encompass “rhetoric, design, and code” (Eyman & Ball, 2014), by which I mean that I paid attention to creators’ discussions of anything from content writing, video editing, and paragraph arrangement, to revision, HTML coding, and file hosting. “Practices” included but were not limited to strategies and terms from digital rhetoric and technical communication, such as “invention,” “arrangement,” and “accessibility.”

For “feelings,” I started by accounting for a range of terms and phrases used by the creators, from “interesting” to “terrifying.” I later folded terms and phrases into subcategories by using Kurtyka’s (2017) coding of “positive,” “negative,” and “conflicted” feelings discussed in conversion narratives of sorority women (p. 107). Kurtyka, Micciche, and others have drawn from Ahmed’s (2010) theories of positive and negative affective values that stick to and swirl with objects, bodies, and signs. By and large, emotion studies researchers have paid attention to what and whom we assign affective values in lived experiences, namely writing projects and community building. To that end, I paid attention to the feelings that authors assign to practices and materials.

Designed to add context to my primary categories, the “material” category accounted for any human and nonhuman actors and actants involved in an author’s practices and associated feelings. I paid attention to discussions of the author’s body, fellow bodies (e.g., peers, editors), and specific composing tools. This category took cues from recent theories on the “thickness” and “withness” of composing scenes and spaces (Rule, 2018; Micciche, 2017; and Alvarez et al., 2017). My assumption was—and continues to be—that digital media production is not immaterial but is lively with full-feeling bodies and entities that shape productions. Materials writ large are entangled with practices and feelings. Put differently, practices are always already in relation with materials and feelings. Table 1 depicts the way I arranged the research categories on a coding sheet; under each category, I have placed interview excerpts and commentary.

My two primary categories of analysis—digital media practices and feelings—helped me achieve two goals: to provide a snapshot of common practices and feelings among all participants, and to help me focus on affectively charged practices that I could elucidate in my findings. What about the scholarly production experience was most negative for participants? Most positive? How might I show, through thick description, the positive and negative feelings that arose and swirled in the production cycles of scholarship and games?

Table 1: Example of Coded Interview Transcript, Based on Kurtyka’s (2017) Coding Scheme

The aforementioned coding scheme and questions above warrant a brief discussion on the challenges and limitations of analyzing feelings. Kurtyka (2017) echoes previous concerns that emotions are difficult to study and code because they are socially constructed and subjectively understood; she elected to work with collaborators to reach agreements on emotional coding (Kurtyka, 2017, p. 106-7). Rather than work with collaborators, I attempted to remedy that difficulty by sharing transcripts and preliminary coding with participants so that they understood which feelings I was identifying in our interview. The transcript and coding samples were places to find common ground, resolve misreadings, revise excerpts (e.g., typos and intentions), and add new thoughts on feelings as well as practices. For example, here is a follow-up comment from one participant:

Shivener: My research question concerns the relationships between digital media practices and feelings. You will notice that I underlined passages with green, yellow, or red to code for positive, mixed, and negative feelings that accompanied this project. How does this coding strike you?

Laurie E. Gries: Coding seems fine. I added some places that I thought you could mark as green/positive. I am not sure negative is the best way to describe my feelings about the research, but that works fine enough. Beneficial, neutral, painstaking, or difficult seems more apt, but again I’m fine with it.

The participant’s commentary indicates the challenge of interpretation in qualitative research, namely emotion research. But it was a significant moment for me because it indicated that positive and negative feelings are always blending and overlapping, resulting in a messy production cycle. The hope of publishing an argument using multimedia might be dashed by reviewer commentary, becoming at once beneficial for future productions yet painstaking because the argument must start anew. As Table 1 indicates, an author’s web design is “weird” because it compounds their stress with reviewers’ approvals. Asking about and locating positive and negative feelings, then, is a starting point for trying to make sense of a rather fluid, mixed, and affectively charged production workflow.

With a commitment to storytelling and analysis, I acknowledge that my methods are overlapping between journalism and rhetoric and writing studies, and that they are more often than not in line with what recent field researchers have called participatory critical rhetoric. Participatory critical rhetoric encompasses “a range of research practices in which rhetoricians engage—depending on the type of projects they conduct and the kinds of questions they pursue—in extended forms of interaction, participation, and observation with the rhetorical communities they study” (p. xvi, Middleton et al., 2015). To me, emotion research is nothing without the voices of humans, people who are willing to speak frankly (or not) about their challenges and affective encounters that—in big and small ways—shape their lives, namely their writing practices. The research for this book, then, unfolded across months and locations across the world—in bars, coffee shops, conventions, Zoom calls, more Zoom calls, and phone conversations. Did I mention Zoom calls? I have hours upon hours of recorded interviews, screen recordings, and project artifacts that participants were willing to share. Indeed, my project folder is alive.

Research for a scholarly book is an interesting beast, much different than the kind of work I used to do as a magazine reporter. As I told many of my participants, I was trained to conduct an interview, dash off to write the story, and move on not long after the story was sent to an editor. This research is a contrast, and I argue it’s a bit more risky. What if someone reads their transcript and drops off? What if they don’t like what they said? These risks of dropping off and this project’s methodology demand considerable time and care, and rightfully so. By having a chance to review transcripts, and in some cases multimedia assets, participants can respond more productively. And I won’t lie—some totally called me out on errors, recommending I do a better read-through of their transcripts. But they also made my work, and thus the pages of this project, stronger than I could ever imagine on my own. I was willing to take that risk in service of honoring their time they gave to this project.

Chapter Outlines

And now for some chapter outlines.

To establish the premise of living digital media and rhetorical-affective practices, Chapter One begins with an extensive discussion of scholars who have experimented with and created digital media scholarship since 2015. Its purpose is to outline the practices I expand on in the subsequent chapters: collaboration, revision, and delivery. These practices are some of the most felt by scholarly creators, raising questions about how such creators can better attend to feelings. In addition to suggesting field-specific approaches to addressing feelings that circulate with feedback, collaboration, and delivery, I close by suggesting we turn to independent game developers, who often put themselves in more vulnerable positions yet advance their creative visions and engage with vibratory affects in public, emergent settings. How might scholarly creators better attend to, and anticipate, feelings throughout production cycles, especially when we look beyond the field?

Chapter Two begins my organization pattern of telling stories of lively game development and their implications for writing studies. This chapter focuses on feedback in remote contexts, insofar as online publics are helping creators work out problems with text, design, code, and more in real time. However, a number of scholarly and professional creators have spoken at length about the need for what Kara Poe Alexander and Danielle M. Williams (2015) call “proximal composing,” of being near bodies, whether with content collaborators in work spaces or public audiences at conferences, to really feel their way through projects—to share immediate feelings of confusion, surprise, and the like. This chapter, then, tells stories of game developers who work together in remote and physical contexts.

Chapter Three turns to game developers who spoke at length about livestreaming their work in real-time with public audiences. I focus on their commentary about such practices, and I cite examples from their communities in public. These practices are vulnerable acts for creators, yet they establish more public, real-time communities of feedback. Engaging in such practices might help scholars increase the visibility of their work, cultivate affective encounters in real-time, and enrich their projects in its early stages. Such practices might be productive counter-acts to the long tail of academic publishing, where months of composing digital media and then awaiting peer-review feedback add gravity to feelings of impatience and uncertainty.

Chapter Four tells stories of creators who deliver and help circulate digital media, who serialize and continually update their digital work long after its initial delivery. For many scholarly creators with whom I spoke, when a digital work is published, it’s announced on social media and, in some cases, receives accolades at scholarly conferences. Scholars archive a copy for their professional dossier, moving on to the next project. It’s no surprise that positive feelings run high, then. However, responses from audiences—and the feelings creators get from those responses—are thus tethered to a stable digital media project. Under the auspices of living digital media, delivery moves a project forward while still keeping it open to new responses and updates. Furthermore, living delivery is an embodiment of Teresa Brennan’s (2004) view that bodies and entities are porous, meaning that feelings circulate between them. As I suggest in closing, scholars ought to consider releasing serial installments of their work to establish formative, affective encounters with audiences. This practice is already being done to some extent in open-access projects such as University of Minnesota Press’ Manifold series and Jeremy Tirrell and Nathaniel Rivers’ ongoing project Following Mechanical Turks, but it is largely unseen in journal publications. To publish three installments or updates of one webtext, that is, might invite more commentary from peers and publics.

Serving as a collective Chapter Five, the “Ephemera” inter-chapters between each main chapter offer my behind-the-scenes commentary on creating and revising Living Digital Media. How are the aforementioned practices and feelings of collaboration, feedback, and delivery rendered from my point of view? How did I live with and work through the many practices and feelings of a digital productive cycle? This final chapter reports the results of my own rhetorical-affective practices based on composing this book and its multimedia material. The Ephemera inter-chapters stem from my appropriation of what game developers call the “post-mortem,” a discussion of what went right and what went wrong with a project. While writing chapters and designing the book, I recorded my screen for more than 20 hours and livestreamed work sessions on Twitch. I quote generously from my documentation material as well as the commentaries from those with whom I interacted. This approach is not meant to be an act of navel-gazing but rather to put into action the rhetorical-affective practices of production. Scholars who compose with digital media often fail to document their own practices for public consumption. This documentation simply isn’t an expectation in our field. This “Ephemera” approach, in other words, is a trial run of embodying what I’ve researched. Of putting my lived experience on full display. It’s what Micciche (2007) calls moving “around the world in a different body,” dwelling and feeling the actions of others (p. 60).

In closing this book, I will revisit my primary findings on collaboration, feedback, and delivery practices by digital media creators and myself, then reconsider a theory of living digital media and rhetorical-affective practices not discussed in this book. This purpose is to theorize where practices such as real-time composing, emplaced composing, and serialization/post-mortem work fit into such a frame, and how future research might deploy and complicate such a frame.

Integrating Anti-Racist Writing and Editing Practices

In April 2021, a group of scholars in writing studies announced the publication of a Google Doc titled “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors” (2021). As they argue, anti-racist reviewing practices are crucial for reviewers as much as they are for editors and authors. The collaborative text suggests practices such as:

• Reviewers and editors recognize that citation practices are political. We form communities of practice/discourse communities in how we cite, excluding and including particular ways of knowing. We give particular ideas power and visibility in how we cite. We decide whose work matters, who should be tenured and promoted, who belongs.
• Reviewers and editors recommend that authors consult existing lists of marginalized and/or underrepresented scholars. Scholarship that does not cite inclusively must be revised to be considered for publication.
• Editors create, share, and enforce an accessibility policy, such as requiring alt text for images and transcripts for multimedia, which enables disabled scholars to serve as reviewers and editorial board members. (“Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices”)

Below, I want to address some ways in which this book responds to this heuristic endorsed by the field.

First, this book has committed to accessibility from the start, when I imagined it as an open-access text with media that would include transcripts and descriptive captions. If I’m going to claim that we need more behind-the-scenes stories of digital argumentation, then to do otherwise would be a contradiction, a disservice in the form of delivery for audiences. Antonio Byrd (2020) has warned us of the consequences of creating barriers for adult learners of computer programming, particularly Black coders. Open-access is a means of addressing this warning. Accessible and open-access work might afford more updates and adaptations. I welcome any and all responses to this open-access approach, and I thank Computers and Composition Digital Press for valuing them.

Secondly, this book foregrounds stories of independent creators, namely those who experiment with form and design and who do not work for major corporations or large studios—entities that can afford to make their presence unavoidable in digital and physical spaces. Within the scope of independent creators, I committed to focusing on stories of women and BIPOC developers and of creators across international borders and time zones to understand their practices and feelings. The Independent Game Festival (IGF) at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) was a great start to widening my research demographic beyond North America. The nominee list that I began with was already diverse, with more than 10 countries represented. However, that observation alone isn’t enough. I gathered many interesting stories but decided to prioritize the stories of creators who I felt were likely encountering more gendered, racial, and political barriers than their peers. I admit that my book does not focus deeply on these barriers, nor did I ask any of my participants to disclose their race or gender, but its commitment to representation should be apparent. Simply put, a book about scholarship and game development need not be a book concentrated on white dudes and written by a white dude, the primary demographic of gamers and game developers that, historically, has sidelined Black and people of color (Gray, 2020). Below the surface of game news and sales platforms lie the work of what I think are compelling games and creators. As my editor for a community newspaper once told me, “Don’t go for the usual suspects,” the people who already get plenty of attention because they are in power and therefore most visible in public (e.g., a city manager). He encouraged me to hit the pavement a bit: talk to locals on the street, in bars, in the last row of the council meeting. Whenever he encouraged me to do so, I remember being annoyed because it took time away from writing, but I’m grateful for his insistence that I go beyond the obvious. Maybe it was his way of prompting me to “recognize, intervene in and/or prevent harmful scholarly work—both in publication processes and in published scholarship. Stories and topics can have so much more depth when they draw out a range of perspectives, perspectives that are easy to overlook” (“Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices,” 2021). Granted, the IGF nominees were more visible than their peers, but IGF has been committed to showcasing work that isn’t breaking sales charts. As the GDC staff (2021) write, the IGF has been “about highlighting unique, up-and-coming, and otherwise standout projects” (“IGF Accepts Over 400 Entries for GDC 2022”). Festivals and nominations like those of IGF are ways to help independent games and creators circulate in larger public realms. I write more about IGF and circulation in Chapter Four.

Overall, my hope is that Living Digital Media aligns with calls for anti-racist writing and editing practices in our field and inspires new research questions of game development and emotion. The field’s recent calls for change and transparency in editorial realms cannot be ignored.