Video game rhetoric and materialist contingency: genre, circulation, and narrative

As technology changes, people find new ways to entertain themselves, tell stories, and create imaginary worlds. This dissertation examines the development of Dragon Quest, a video game created for Nintendo’s Famicom game console. I argue Dragon Quest provides insights into the rhetorical techniques that comprise video game design. Attending to Dragon Quest as digital rhetoric highlights how rhetorical contingencies shape the invention of, engagement with, and circulation of video games. This rhetorical analysis analyzes technical documents, business contracts, and popular video game press to provide a historical understanding of the economic, social, and aesthetic exigencies that shaped Dragon Quest. In the first chapter, I trace the emergence of the role-playing game (RPG) in the United States, how it traveled to Japan, and the ways Dragon Quest utilized conventions of this genre. In the second chapter, I attend to the patterns of circulation that Dragon Quest traveled once it left Japan and Enix sold it to North Americans as Dragon Warrior. Chapter three looks at how Dragon Quest creates a linear narrative form through the management of game spaces. The dissertation concludes by arguing that rhetorical analysis of a video game as rhetorical history brings new understandings to how critics might engage the material and economic components of genre, circulation, and narrative. The contingent materials that constitute digital media both allow for and delimit how game designers might approach the creative process. The relationship between technology and human being, however, allows for new rhetorical possibilities, even as other rhetorical possibilities become negated, disadvantageous, or impractical.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communication

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Boone, George W

Contributors dc:contributor

• O'Gorman, Ned
• Finnegan, Cara A.
• Davis, Susan G.
• Hamilton, Kevin

• circulation
• video games
• Genre
• Narrative
• materialism
• contingency
• Actor-Network Theory
• Dragon Quest
• Dragon Warrior
• rhetoric
• technology
• rhetorical history

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2015 George W. Boone

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/88061

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/88061