Cultivating ethical gameplay dispositions through the materiality of gameplay in Illuminati

• Published in: Computers and composition 2022-09, Vol.65, p.102724, Article 102724
• Main Authors: Colby, Rebekah Shultz, Holmes, Steve
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Attractors; Dispositions; Ethos; Hexis; Metis; Phronesis; Virtue ethics
• ISSN: 8755-4615; 1873-2011
• DOI: 10.1016/j.compcom.2022.102724

•This article examines not only how phronesis and metis operate in games, but also how players negotiate them to construct their gameplay ethos, or ethical dispositions, through play.•This article examines how game mechanics and rules operate as attractors for specific forms of gameplay that construct ethical dispositions, ethos, for players.•This article examines how gameplay acts as a materially embodied rhetorical force.•While invented and situated ethos have been examined in written texts, this article examines how both operate in games.•By examining how material attractors in games construct dispositions, it explores how notions of the self are never stable but constantly negotiated for players as they use both metis and phronesis to construct ethical narratives of the self within the game. We examine how rules and mechanics act as attractors, or stabilizing end points within the multitude of trajectories in a possibility space, within games that form dispositions through the habits of material gameplay, which players can either resist or accept through a process of phronesis and metis. We videotaped a playthrough of the card game Illuminati and interviewed four players before and after the game. We discovered that the rule of allowing cheating and a player role with an unbalanced mechanic acted as material attractors (DeLanda, 2013; 2016) for gameplay dispositions. However, through a process of metis and phronesis, players resisted the dispositions of cheat and spoilsport and materially played the game so that they embodied the Aristotelian virtue of friendliness instead.