The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice Procedural Habits Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication Series

The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice offers a critical reassessment of embodiment and materiality in rhetorical considerations of videogames. Holmes argues that rhetorical and philosophical conceptions of "habit" offer a critical resource for describing the interplay between thinking (writing and rhetoric) and embodiment. The book demonstrates how Aristotle's understanding of character (ethos), habit (hexis), and nature (phusis) can productively connect rhetoric to what Holmes calls "procedural habits": the ways in which rhetoric emerges from its interactions with the dynamic accumulation of conscious and nonconscious embodied experiences that consequently give rise to meaning, procedural subjectivity, control, and communicative agency both in digital game design discourse and the activity of play.

Introduction

Part I: Theorizing Procedural Habits

1. Persuasive Technologies in the Rhetoric of Videogames

2. From Persuasive Technologies to Procedural Habits

Part II: Thinking Persuasive Technologies Differently

3. Affective Design and the Captivation of Memory in First-Person Shooter

Videogames

4. Gamification and Suggestion Technologies (Kairos)Beyond Critique

5. Achieving Eudaimonia in Free-to-Play Social Media Games

6. The Habits of Highly Unsuccessful Nonhuman Computational Actors

7. The Materiality of Play as Public Rhetoric Pedagogy

Conclusion

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