Metaphors and Emotions in Advertising: A Rhetorical Analysis of Audi’s Online Video Commercials

Advertising often employs metaphor because of its rhetorical utility. By drawing on analogous imagery and language, metaphor has the potential to elicit emotional responses. As the digital age is increasingly saturated with commercial messaging, advertising experts leverage the persuasive power of metaphor and emotion to produce creative, compelling, and memorable commercials. German automobile company Audi employs metaphorical language and imagery in their video advertisements to arouse consumer emotions. In this study, I conduct rhetorical analyses of Audi’s online video commercials in order to: identify instances in their ads that employ metaphorical language and imagery; investigate how those metaphors function rhetorically; and discuss the complex rhetorical interplay between metaphor and emotion. My findings suggest that Audi leverages the power of metaphor to build audiences’ emotional investment in the brand, and therefore, be more likely to purchase Audi vehicles

Time and Space in Video Games: A Cognitive-Formalist Approach

Video games are temporal artifacts: They change with time as players interact with them in accordance with rules. In this study, the author investigates the formal aspects of video games that determine how these changes are produced and sequenced. Theories of time perception drawn from the cognitive sciences lay the groundwork for an in-depth analysis of these features, making for a comprehensive account of time in this novel medium. This book-length study dedicated to time perception and video games is an indispensable resource for game scholars and game developers alike. Its reader-friendly style makes it readily accessible to the interested layperson

Disciplinary Mythologies: A Rhetorical-Cultural Analysis of Performance Enhancement Technologies in Sports

In sports discourse, the relationship between athletics and technology is often paradoxical. On the one hand, modern sports rely on technology at every level, from training and tracking of players to the equipment and apparel used by athletes to the game strategies and playing fields themselves. Nearly all of these technologies are intended to increase athletic performance on some level. And yet, certain performance enhancement technologies can be criticized for being antithetical to the spirit of sports, which is framed as being a strictly natural and pure human endeavor. Using a rhetorical-cultural methodological approach, popular sports discourse is analyzed to investigate how arguments in contested spaces between sports and technologies get (re)negotiated and (re)articulated to fit within a sports social language that emphasizes pure and natural ideals of sport. This often results in a dichotomy where the sport/technology relationship is either black boxed, thus being subsumed in the sport social language and becoming transparent and the relationships unarticulated, or the technology is regulated out of the sport through rules and bans. The reason for this articulation is attributed in large part to the deep humanism embedded in the sport social language. How a shift to a posthuman perspective would effect sports discourse is explored. These conclusions about underlying values in sports discourse lead to the formation of a new theoretical framework called disciplinary mythologies. Building off of Foucault\u27s disciplinary power, Scott\u27s disciplinary rhetorics, and Barthe\u27s mythologies, disciplinary mythologies are discrete units of persuasion that both construct and constitute claims by drawing upon layered narratives and shifting associations that lose their context when entering the realm of myth. Two specific disciplinary mythologies are discussed—the level-playing-field topos and the nostalgia enthymeme—and it is shown how sports discourse often draws upon them to shape arguments and actions

Mass Media and Representation: a Critical Comparison of the CCTV and NBC Presentations of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Summer Games

A critical comparison of the CCTV and NBC broadcasts of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics demonstrates how two sets of narratives that on the surface glorify China and the long Chinese cultural and historic tradition offer very different ideological projections about China\u27s rise as a power and engagement with the wider capitalist world. For CCTV, China has finally righted a longstanding historical injustice and established itself as a co-equal nation among nations. For NBC, ambivalence about China is the watchword, and further reforms that by implication will help clear China of its non-democratic, totalitarian, and economically mercantilist sheen are needed if the country is to be fully embraced. The ideological construction is more hidden in the NBC broadcast, but both depend on massive erasures of history and blurring of contemporary issues, causing both sets of narratives to fail tests of narrative coherence. Discursive struggles over the authorship of the Opening Ceremony underlie both media texts and expose their ideological positioning

Encoding chance: a technocultural analysis of digital gambling

This thesis explores how gambling and gambling-like practices are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. Digital gambling brings gambling closer to the practices and features of videogames, as audiovisual simulations structure users’ experiences. New forms of digital gambling have clear political implications and institute new economic dynamics, as operators increasingly rely on the exploitation of constant interaction, as well as fostering compulsive play. By studying digital gambling from media studies, videogame and cultural studies approaches, this thesis offers a new critical perspective on the issues raised by computer-mediated gambling, while expanding our perspective on what media and gambling are. Current research on gambling practices and markets in disciplines such as psychology, sociology and law has positioned wagering as an exceptional activity because of its association with problem gambling, taxation and financial loss. The increasingly malleable nature of digital gambling media complicates these understandings. Digital gambling and play take a number of shapes: state-of-the-art slot machines, desktop platforms and mobile apps for smartphones and tablets. These cultural forms involve both gambling companies such as Aristocrat and IGT, and videogame companies such as Atari and Zynga. Digital gambling products are consumed by millions of users, primarily in Australia, Europe and North America. In contemporary forms of digital gambling, many users have a gambling or gambling-like experience with or without real money involved. Consumers pay with money and/or labour and/or time and/or access to their digital social networks and contacts. These dynamics represent a significant departure from previous gambling studies, which only consider gambling as those games that involve real money and are demarcated from everyday life. The development of digital gambling sees new cultural forms, including gamble-play media (gambling and gambling-like platforms constructed as videogames), the procedure-image (images that articulate interactive rhetoric), mobile social gambling (the practice carried out through social casino apps) and gambling-machines (an iteration of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines). Digital gambling operates through assemblages that are materially heterogeneous and increasingly deterritorialised. Through a selection of case studies – including the 3D online casino PKR, the mobile apps Slotomania and Slots Journey, the Electronic Gaming Machine market in New South Wales, Australia, and the online casinos PokerStars and 888 – this thesis analyses the interplay between various digital gambling assemblages and their relations to other media such as videogames and social networking sites

Narrative Change in Professional Wrestling: Audience Address and Creative Authority in the Era of Smart Fans

This dissertation project provides a methodological contribution to the field of critical rhetoric by positioning narrative theory as a powerful yet underutilized tool for examining the power dynamic between producer and consumer in a participatory media context. Drawing on theories of author and audience from rhetorical narratology, this study shows how producers of media texts provide rhetorical cues to audiences that allow them to reassert their power in the form of creative authority vis-à-vis consumers. The genre of professional wrestling serves as an ideal text for examining such power dynamics, as WWE has adapted to changing fan participatory behaviors throughout its sixty-year history. Focusing on pivotal moments in which WWE altered its narrative address to its audience in order to reassert its control over the production process, this study demonstrates the utility of narrative theory for understanding how creative authority shows power at work in media texts. Further, this study situates rhetorical narratology in conversation with theories of rhetorical persona, scholarship on subcultures, and the discursive construction of the “people.” In so doing, I show how a nuanced understanding of author and audience augments critical rhetorical scholarship’s focus on power. Finally, by applying narrative theory as a method for both close textual analysis of single texts as well as a tool for piecing together a critical text from narrative fragments, I also address questions of the role of the text in rhetorical criticism and the role of authorship in an era when audiences exert influence on media texts as they are produced

Chinese Reality TV- A Case Study of GDTV’s The Great Challenge for Survival

The emergence of reality programming has a parallel development with Chinese television media at the beginning of this century. This study of Chinese “Reality TV” is based on a case study of a pioneer Chinese reality production, namely The Great Challenge for Survivor (GDTV, 2000-2006). The general concern of this thesis is an examination of the localizing of popular foreign outdoor survival formats (the Japanese top-rating Airway Boys and the international format Survivor) within a Chinese context. The study of this subject consists of field research into a major Party-state owned television broadcaster and a comparative analysis of the six broadcast seasons of the selected example. The research outcome presented here highlights some distinctive Chinese patterns in the outdoor survival reality strand prevailing early in this century and articulates the complex roles that a nationalized television station was required to play in the industrialized reform era. By recognizing the GDTV crew’s continuous efforts to improve production quality and to satisfy their assumed audiences’ needs, the thesis further addresses some key factors of the specific institutional system and broad media environment shaping local reality programme makers' decision making. Facing a “special television zone” in China, the local producer’s continuous modification of their reality programming was on the cutting edge of commercialization and globalization in the early 2000s. The production of the studied case was an exploratory enterprise which involved a set of negotiations, arguments and compromises while dealing with a range of issues which emerged in such areas as the cultural landscape, social environment, political discourse and economic power. To a large extent, the manifested transition taking place in this studied local production mirrors unprecedented social and economic changes occurring in contemporary China

Framing Strategies in Role-Playing Games. 'My Pleasure': Toward a Poetics of Framing in Tabletop Role-playing Games

The dissertation discusses the use and impact of “literary” framing (as by Werner Wolf) in generating and negotiating fictional spaces, narratives and meanings within the medium of tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs). In a second step, the text describes some of the specific and most salient framing features and strategies used by players during game sessions. By analyzing these through actual gameplay it is possible to identify the ‘transceptional’ border (Bunia) between reality and fiction to be the constitutive moment of role-play where players are both aware of, and immersed in, the fiction they collaboratively construct. Finally, the dissertation adapts Wolf’s theoretical framework in order to discuss and analyze the often overlooked category of “storytelling” TRPGs - one that, as the text argues, rather than focusing on narrative as such, aims at creating gameplay texts with heightened aesthetic and literary value while also enabling players to experience particular forms of immersion and deep emotional involvement. In the conclusion, the dissertation proposes re-conceptualizing literary framing as a defining characteristic of the fictional practice in general across media. In this regard, the dissertation argues, TRPGs reveal how framings are used and adapted in order to enable a specific mode of human interaction which is based on the figuration of emotional complexes via fictional “masks.

Slack Cinema: Notes on Genre and Culture

Slack Cinema: Notes on Genre and Style This thesis examines films that attempted to cash in on slacker characters in cinema immediately following the success of Richard Linklater\u27s Slacker. Chapter One adduces Slacker as prologue to discussing aspects of slack style and its origins. Chapter Two offers far more detailed discussions of Kevin Smith\u27s Clerks and Mallrats in light of Lawrence Grossberg\u27s concept of everyday life, a paradigm that helps account for the maturation of the Hollywood slacker from oppressed, indecisive store clerk to charming romantic lead. Chapter 3 discusses a range of slack-inspired films-Empire Records (1995), Singles (1992), Reality Bites (1994), and Knocked-Up (2007)-as a way of applying to slack cinema Rick Altman\u27s theory of film genre and offers some tentative conclusions about the future of slack film as a genre