viz.

Image source: Thatgamecompany.

Probably all illustrations, and certainly the animated images I’ve discussed in Frozen and Lilo and Stitch, come freighted with a vast history of associations. Striking images can literally provide worldviews—complex perspectives from which to view matters ranging from gender roles to cultural identities to ideal body types. Frozen’s visual aesthetic offers a triumphantalist account of traditional images put to new uses, while Lilo and Stitch offers a harder-edged criticism of our lazy, self-indulgent ways of looking at the world, for instance. Yet both deliberately and meaningfully comment upon the mediating power of their own iconography. Both films are, in short, particularly focused on understanding how images have worked in the past, and how they can be made to work differently in the future.

Journey is a video game whose cartoon-like visual aesthetic draws strongly from the same animated tradition as the first two films, yet its aims are quite different. In both its gameplay and its visual design, I will argue, Journey is not focused on what it means, but rather on the raw experiences it can provide. The game reminds us, in short, that while images have deep and rich rhetorical histories, they are also something more than mere arguments.

(Image Credit: Techanbob)

Typing, for me, has long been tied up with game playing. Before keyboards were tools for productive labor they were complex controllers for beating monkeys in vine races to bananas and outrunning pirates to the buried treasure. When I first encountered computers in the early 90s my parents, and later the public school I attended, took care to teach me how to type. I was told stories about aging businessmen that floundered when forced to type their own memos and warned about the impending importance of touch typing. So, in what seems to be a fairly common experience, I spent afternoons at home and computer sessions in school playing lots of Mavis Beacon. This ongoing utilitarian interaction with games, though, wasn't an early form of gamification.  

In 21st century rhetoric and writing departments, we don't teach geometry.  But like the sciences, we are developing computer games.  Here in the DWRL, graduate student developers have created Rhetorical Peaks, an interactive game, where students practice rhetorical terms and strategies. It's interesting, then, to compare how different fields use different kinds of computer-assisted gaming.  On Thursday, I saw these geometry games, which are visualizations for outer space created by Jeffrey R. Weeks.

Image credit: Screenshot from Geometry Games H/T to Jeffrey Weeks

If you teach rhetoric and technology, you might be interested in “Googolopoly,” a version of the classic Parker Bros. game that charts the search giant’s quest for web-wide domination.

FYI: Rich Uncle Pennybags’ pitchfork is a clue that the creators are ambivalent about Google’s quest to “organize” your data and “make it universally accessible and useful.”

Those of you who have time to kill in during these last few weeks of class can download the entire game here.

via TechCrunch