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Voice and Subjectivity: A Rhetorical Analysis of Video Games as Multimodal Texts

In her essay When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own, Jacqueline Jones Royster
argues that subject position really is everything and intrinsically defines ways of knowing,
language abilities, and experience (1117). For Royster, the critical exploration of subjectivity
has the consequent potential to deepen, broaden, and enrich our interpretive views (1117). In
particular, Royster hopes to persuade her audience to reconsider the beliefs and values which
inevitably permit our attitudes and actions in discourse communities (including colleges,
universities, and classrooms) to be systematic, even systemic (1118). Advocating for a shift in
the academic paradigm, specifically the notion of voice as a central manifestation of
subjectivity, Royster suggests that individual stories placed one against another against another
build credibility and offer a litany of evidence from which to call for the transformation in theory
and practiceto suggest that stories in the company of others demand thoughtful responses
(1118).

My intent is to suggest that video game experiences, specifically the audiences

response to subject position, demand thoughtful responses that should be critically examined in
composition classrooms. More importantly, I advocate that video games can be used as
multimodal compositions to examine how one gains a better understanding of voice as the
result of rhetorical situations.
Although Royster is primarily concerned with the effects of academic discourse on the
authentic voice of experience in African-American communities, her theoretical framework can
also be applied to the subjective experience of video games. Just as Royster advocates that
personal experience has a legitimate place in academia, in spite of the institutionalized writing
practices that suppress such a voice, video games as texts both privilege and qualify the

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subjective experience as a critical piece of the composition making process. As a result, video
games are ideal texts to apply writing practices such as, reader response, personal narrative,
personal literacy experiences, and various other genres of writing assignments that are common
pieces of composition curriculum. First I will lay out how video games as texts fit into Royster
vison of a redefined academic paradigm that emphasizes the importance of subjectivity and not
simply systematic or systemic pedagogy practices. I will then explain how video games can be
used in a social epistemic setting to explore ideology and the shaping of voice.
Royster contends that the nature of voicing is problematic and that critical approaches to
voice are skewed toward voice as a spoken or written phenomenon (1118). She advocates that
theory and practice should be transformed to include voicing as a phenomenon that is
constructed and expressed visually and orally, and as a phenomenon that has import also in being
a thing heard, perceived, and reconstructed (1118). As multimodal texts, voicing in video games
is a phenomenon that is heard, perceived, and reconstructed in ways that complicate and
empower the subjective position. In other words, videogames offer agency to the player,
rhetorical possibilities that complicate the subject positioning of the audience in the overall
composition making process. Simple statements like: I beat that levels boss!, I learned a new
move!, I solved the puzzle!, I managed to figure out how to finish that stage!, I had to do
this in order to get that!. become far more complex because the sense of presence and
ability to affect change within the gameworld doesnt mesh with the aesthetics of film, literature
or most forms of theatre- this makes narrative as lived praxis a way of interpreting reality one
that is not quite real but not simply fiction (Owens 210).
David Owens suggests that video games allow one to feel present in a mediated space
and project not only the gamers sense of being there but also the identity of the gamer there

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(206). As a result, gamers are not just passive observers in the paradigm, but empowered
participants and witnesses in the creation of the gameworld as it unfolds. Turning to David
Hume, Owens establishes that in video games, the entity I identify as me is a collection of
experiences accumulated over time (207). The above I statements are true and equal parts of
my experience. This has heavy implications for video games as multimodal texts, because they
legitimize the phenomenological I experience in a way that allows personal response to a
narrative or text in an academic setting to hold merit. In this sense video games allow for a
variety of critical subjectivities, what Royster calls simple stories, that not only delight and
entertain, but are also vital layers of the transformative process, an analytical lens that incudes
the process, results, and impact of negotiating identity, establishing authority, developing
strategies for action , carrying forth intent with a particular type of agency, and being compelled
by external factors and internal sensibilities to adjust belief and action (or not) (1117,1122). In
playing a game, you are as much a reader as you are an author, making your experience and
response to the text authorative.
As David Owen suggests in his article Cyber Narrative and the Gaming Cyborg, video
gamers are creating cybernetic dramas that push notions of presence into new disembodied
territories where speech and writing, body and idea, presence and print, know nothing of
former boundary disputes and appear in post-deconstructionist fusion( Owen 209). In this
sense the I (or subject position) becomes vital to the composition making process and reports
of ones personal experience carries a merit that Royster seeks to advocate for the subjective
experience as academically viable. For example, a popular game franchise such as Fallout
allows for the critical examination and manipulation of procedural rhetoric, specifically the unit
operations, systems, and rules that are intended to inform the gaming experience (Colby 44).

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By manipulating the procedural rhetoric of the text player agency leads to unique interpretations
of play experiences, such meaning generation is spurred by the knowledge that a specific human
being set the works processes into motion (210). In the case of Fallout 4, one player was able
to complete the entire game without registering a kill. To accomplish this, the player had to
manipulate the intended procedure of the game and strategically formulate and make the
rhetorical moves that would register his actions as non-lethal. (Play Video 3, 0:00-1:19) If we
define agency as the expression of intelligence in needful or useful action, then video games
are full of useful actions and calls for expression of intelligence (210). Through playing the
game, gamers come to experience and identify with various positions of characters through
terministic screens that allow for agency and action, rhetorical moves with an exigency created
beyond and in conjunction with the text.
In some cases games can be an extension of ones voice, and can be used to express
audience dissatisfaction. Audience created game modifications reveal that agency can extend
beyond the rhetoric of the text. Just as Royster expressed her dissatisfaction with academic
discourse and the suppression of the subjective experience, gamers too use existing texts and
available discourses to subvert and challenge the dynamic between audience and author, product
and consumer. These modifications to the text redefine the role of not only the author but the
audience as well. Although these modifications rely on the available mechanics of the text the
gamer seeks to improve, agency is achieved through the clever manipulation of the games
internal systems or intentions of the rules. In this sense, the gamers alienated voice is not only
realized, but in conversation with and against the hierarchies of textual design.
One example of this textual agency and reconstruction of voice is the popular
modification of adding superheroes as playable characters to games such as Grand Theft Auto.

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This popular modification allows the audience to experience the streets of what is supposed to be
Los Angeles as either Iron-Man or the Incredible Hulk. Though the example may appear trivial,
it is a prime example of the range of agency afforded to video games as multimodal texts.
(Play Video 2, 29:00- 30:20)
Recreating the intent of the game as an open world superhero battle royal not only
demonstrates the expression of intelligence in needful or useful action, but also provides an ideal
site to critically examine the rhetorical implications of the process, results, and impact of
negotiating identity, establishing authority, developing strategies for action , carrying forth intent
with a particular type of agency, and being compelled by external factors and internal
sensibilities to adjust belief and action (or not) (1117,1122). By reimagining and redefining the
rhetorics of GTA, superhero modifications demonstrate a type of agency that is both alienating
and liberating to the identification of ones subjective position in the overall composition and
meaning making process. This unique subject position is ideal for critical and reflective writing
practices that can be applied to composition classrooms.
To quote Ira Shor, students must be taught to identify the ways in which control over
their lives [and voice] has been denied them and ought to be their own agents for social
change, their own creators of democratic culture (Berlin 680). Critical exploration of video
games as well as video game modifications, then become a means to subvert the intended
capitalistic bombardment of the textual genre and extraordinarily reexperience the ordinary as
well as address the self-in-society and social-relations-in-self ( Berlin 681). Critically
examining the I experience in the composition making process as well as the extension of
voice that is advocated by video game modifications, promotes the resistance of social
influences that alienate and disempower, doing so more over by social activity (Berlin 681). As

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multimodal texts, video games enable one to manipulate objects into active critical subjects by
engaging in the composition process similar to a writer, director, production crew or actor
(Owen 210). Agency, voice, and ideology can be critically highlighted by the rhetorical
implications of video game mods and the agency and conversations that such texts consequently
generate. Subsequently, the theoretical implications of video games as multimodal texts are ideal
for composition applications.
Royster essentially advocates that the subjective, personal experience should hold merit
in academic scholarship. Subsequently, personal narrative/ reflection is then made a legitimate
writing practice. The complicated subjective experience of the audience, makes video games an
ideal site for rhetorical analysis and reflective writing. These texts demand that the I
experience be talked about in terms of subjectivity. In other words, video games privilege the use
of I in academic writing. Authority is then subverted from the institution or hierarchy of form
and is attributed to the student. Their voice and recollection of experience matters and should be
expressed. As Royster states, I speak, but am not heard. Worse, I am heard but not believed.
Worse yet, I speak but am not deemed believable (1123). These are sentiments many students
may feel when being indoctrinated into academic writing. If I use my voice will I be perceived as
credible? If I dont use my voice, whose do I use? Is this my voice when I write? By adding
video games as rhetorical texts that students can use to negotiate the process of voice
development, we provide texts that promote conversations of subjectivity and agency through a
medium that rhetorically creates meaning by the negotiation of various subjective positions.
More importantly, the inclusion of video games as rhetorical texts of study will aide in our
disciplines goal of keeping boundaries fluid, discourses invigorated with multiple perspectives,
and our policies and practices well-tuned toward a clearer respect for human potential and

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achievement from whatever their source and a clearer understanding that voicing at its best is not
just well-spoken but also well-heard (Royster 1126).