Tactical Technical Communication and Player-Created (DIY) Patch Notes: A Case Study

Abstract

Relying on rhetorical analysis, this article explores the rhetoric and ethics of a particular type of designer- and player-created technical communication genre, video patch notes, to further explore how various technical communication genres structure the experience of play. By providing a case study of official video patch notes for the game Overwatch in combination with Youtube user dinoflask's satirical fan made videos, the article examines both developers’ communication practices and the ways in which players creatively negotiate and re-purpose these practices in order to illustrate how such tactical technical communication remixes sustain a subtle dialogue between players and developers. This dialogue in particular illuminates pain points between stakeholders (in this case, discrepancies between developer intent and player experience) in ways that could potentially offer a means of persuading particularly ideologically fixed audiences, highlighting how practitioners might use tactical technical communication with activist intent.

Introduction

Many rhetoric and technical communication researchers have shown how videogames make arguments and participate in the broader structuring of rhetorical, cultural and political meaning (McAllister, 2004; Bogost, 2007; Paul, 2012; Holmes, 2017). Contributors in both deWinter and Moeller’s (2016) edited collection and a Technical Communication Quarterly special issue on videogames (deWinter & Vie, 2016) have also explored how various technical communication genres structure the experience of play, including developers’ communication practices and the ways in which players creatively negotiate and repurpose these practices. As an example, Thominet (2016) has studied the stylistic differences between player-created online videogame reviews and professional industry writers’ reviews, with the latter employing more informal and playful styles of communication in comparison to the former. Building on these efforts, this article explores the rhetoric and ethics of a particular type of designer- and player-created technical communication genre: video patch notes posted to social media video hosting and streaming sites. In particular, we argue that by understanding the subtle dialogue sustained between player and designer via remixed visual technical communication provides an avenue for subversion through tactical technical communication particularly useful to practitioners seeking to use tactical TC for activist purposes.

Patch notes offer a summary of significant technical revisions to the code and operation of any computational system in both videogames and non-videogames alike. The earliest videogame patch notes were often aimed at audiences with coding literacy due to their technical specificity (Sherlock, 2014). However, Sherlock (2014) has documented how the function of contemporary patch notes as a technical communication genre has shifted. Popular videogames with global user-bases frequently post patch notes with fewer technical details on their company websites and social media accounts. Broadly speaking, the purpose of these notes remains player instruction, but also can include implicit or subtle forms of persuasion about the benefits for, say, a potentially unpopular update to ensure more competitive balance. As Sherlock described, “Patches have shifted away from being understood as version updates into player-developer negotiations tied to the development of each patch” (2014, p.157). As a result, patch notes have become a “pivotal moment in ethos construction” for videogame designers and companies (p. 158).

One example of this particular kind of ethos construction comes from Jeff Klaplan, Blizzard's lead developer for the team-based multiplayer first person shooter videogame Overwatch, began releasing “Developer Updates’' on YouTube on November 18, 2015 (“Matchmaking”) in the form of personalized narrative and explanation. In doing so, Kaplan has taken the shift from instruction or archival to implicitly persuasive to its culmination. That is, his patch notes are explicitly persuasive and designed to create a more favorable player reception to a given patch, as well as make the technical details more personal by having Kaplan explain the changes himself with visual aids from the game. In addition to the official updates channel, the decision to communicate visual persuasive patch notes in an online medium has also resulted in remixed player video responses to Kaplan's efforts to control the narrative of a given patch. That is, each Overwatch update results in many player-created videos on YouTube and Twitch that try to contextualize the patch in a different way to the same audiences of Overwatch players; this is especially true when developer changes seem at odds with player desires. Here, we argue that technical communications researchers in particular can examine these player-created counternarratives as a genre of tactical technical communication, especially when considering the often subversive potential such remixes create.

Exemplifying the above, we compare Kaplan's original rhetorical efforts to counternarratives remixed by a popular videogame YouTuber with over 200,000 subscribers as of 2020: dinoflask. Within a few days of Kaplan's video updates, dinoflask often composes satirical remixes to provide what he calls a “more accurate” narrative of the motives and consequences of implemented changes to Overwatch. Since he creates these narrative explanations of technical changes to the code outside of an institutional Blizzard social media account, dinoflask's compositions are what we call, referencing Kimball (2006), a form of “tactical technical communication” (tactical TC) wherein users resist dominant strategies of control (including symbolic and narrative) by appropriating official discourses and genres for their own purposes. In many ways, dinoflask embodies Thominet’s (2016) observation through a different media (social media videos) that player-created videogame reviews can be more playful and informal than professional reviews (or institutional patch notes in Kaplan's case). Further, we contend that player-created DIY technical communication of any nature—tactical or otherwise—function as important parts of videogames’ genre ecologies and rich multimodal world (Spinuzzi, 2003). As a result, any discussion of technical communication genres in videogames must be broad enough to account for both official and informal forms from patch notes to player-created reviews and YouTube walkthrough videos, paying particular attention to how both respond and converse with each other.

While a number of rhetoricians have connected satire to epideictic rhetoric and politics, satire narratives are not always an explicit object of interest within these scholarly interests. Fiction and satire, let alone re-mixing and/or parodying, may not be common threads in technical communication, but our argument is that the former nevertheless demonstrates a need to theorize the broad array of aesthetic and political spaces in tactical TC. The ethical purpose of tactical TC may not always help users accomplish an actual technical end, but can also open up what Edenfield et al. (2019) have called “slender intervals” for reflecting and inventing new technical forms in relation to resisting and appropriating the authenticity of strategic (official) source material (p. 184). In other words, by examining dinoflask’s execution of tactical TC, we can unpack how his remixes subvert Overwatch’s dominant narrative and potentially even borrow and/or teach these practices as technical communicators as a means of producing change, especially in more hegemonic narratives such as the videogame industry.

Player-Made Patch Notes as Transformative Locales

As Sherlock (2014) has demonstrated, many patch notes, before the popularity of social media, were written in the style of an “archive” and not a persuasive “presentation” (p. 157). As an archive, patch notes were written in an “access as needed” style where players, if they had the time or interest, could wade into the precise details of the code expressed in minimalist technical language. Tracing the shift away from the archive model, increased player-designer interactivity through official and DIY online forums as well as the rise of social media subsequently caused a distinct shift in patch note style and purpose. Presently, designers commonly include audience considerations and other persuasive elements in their patch notes such as rationales to convince players of the necessity of a given change. For example, in a study of patch notes in three different video game companies (Riot Games, Blizzard Entertainment, and Grinding Gears Games), Sherlock (2014) demonstrated that each company has its own rhetorical style of persuasion relative to their particular company ethos and player audience.

In addition to encompassing implicit argumentative functions, contemporary patch notes can also incorporate multimodal elements aimed at social media circulation. Consider a representative example from Epic's Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017). Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017) has remained the most popular multiplayer battle royale videogame in the world since its release in 2017 with a high of 78 million monthly users in March, 2018 and a total of 250 million active player accounts as of January, 2020. Like any iterative videogame, Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017) updates its play environment on a regular basis and posts patch notes to alert players to the changes. As an example, Patch v6.01 (Epic Games, 2019) has a “Gameplay” subheading that described one significant change: “Pets are now hidden along with your character when the camera is too close to you.” An embedded video lies underneath this subheading. The video content re-mixes recorded play footage to demonstrate the altered in-game landscape for a new “Chiller, Battle Royale'' winter-themed event, allowing players to see how the change may affect gameplay, rather than leaving readers with only a textual explanation. As such, in terms of highlighting the shifting role of patch notes, this example simultaneously functions as a supplementary marketing effort to generate excitement for given code change by providing a visual advertisement for the technical change. Explained in more detail later, the visual delivery of these notes in particular also grants players a particular effective and potentially subversive way to converse with developers about how these games change over time.

Yet, while Sherlock has examined such rhetorical roles from the perspective of how designers frame their arguments, it is also important to consider how players’ DIY activities propose counter-narratives in response to officially-sanctioned patch notes, and how, especially when executed through a visual medium, the two narratives converse. As noted by Zimmerman (2014), “At its core, the relationship between developer and fans is transactional, with both the developer and the fan taking part in a subculture where access to the inside of the development structure is valued as a form of cultural capital” (p. 145). In this way, then, both developers and players can be considered stakeholders for the game itself, and as such must maintain some sort of persuasive dialogue about how the game should change over time. This cultural capital gains value when patch notes include not only the technical documentation, but also “reveals the emotional and ideological stakes of computer games as designed experiences that accumulate their own histories” (Sherlock, 2014, p. 158). For Sherlock, patch notes become a site of rhetorical significance because they allow developers to provide their own rationale for the changes made in a game in a more persuasive manner; as such, remixing this rationale subverts the control developers attempt to exude over the game’s narrative. To take this a step further, making patch notes more accessible and designed for broad social media circulation through the use of videos, videogame companies also provide players with new and more accessible transformative locales to respond to, interact with, and even critique the changes made to the game for their own purposes.

Such claims as the above build on previous concepts such as McAllister’s (2005) “transformative locales.” Transformative locales are sites where videogames’; ideologies and rules alter in dialectical tension with player’s emergent agency both to play a game differently than a developer intended (Sicart, 2005) as well as to create new forms of meaning through mods and player created texts., especially in particularly hegemonic narratives produced by the larger videogame industry, counternarratives seeking to subvert such narratives must often rely on subtler means of creating change, especially if they want changes made to the game relating to social justice, diversity, and inclusion. That is, because the visual medium of both the formal and informal patch notes seek to reach the broadest player audience possible (and in fact, an audience often skeptical of the need for diversity in videogames writ large), remixes seeking to address social change in videogames must do so subtly, lest they risk losing viewership. Thus, as teachers and scholars of technical communication, studying the means through which these subtle critiques are made using tactical TC offers a means of persuading more ideologically fixed audiences.

While McAllister was addressing rhetoric audiences, there are recent and highly relevant ideas in technical communication that can help extend the idea of a transformative locale with respect to the type of satirical relationship we are discussing in dinoflask’s response to Kaplan’s videos. Jones, Moore & Walton (2016) defined the role of antenarratives in technical communication. Antenarratives disrupt past received (and exclusionary) meanings to help embrace new futures (of social justice, in their case). Among other issues, their specific area of inquiry lies in engaging how larger field-spanning narratives, such as technical communication's default orientation toward “objective, apolitical, acultural practices, theories, and pedagogies” (Jones et al., 2016, p. 212). What they call “antenarrative” as a practice and methodology “allows the work of the field to be reseen, forges new paths forward, and emboldens the field's objectives to unabashedly embrace social justice and inclusivity as part of its core (rather than marginal or optional) narrative” (p. 212). Some may be tempted to think of antenarratives akin to what postmodern theorists such as Lyotard (1984) decades earlier criticized in his critique of “master narratives” (capitalism, liberal democracy, etc.). Lyotard encouraged us to “bear witness to differences by finding idioms” for the marginalized. The word narrative in “antenarrative” reminds us that “rhetoric” has always had a historic root in poiesis (poetic world making)—a realization that scholars in the present have more directly engaged in Vealey and Gerding's (2021) special issue on storytelling. Thus, antenarrative as Jones et al. (2016) explore it offers a more direct connection between this sort of invention of new aesthetics (concepts help us sense the world in new ways after all) and social justice practice and method. As we note below, we will not see as direct of a social justice emphasis in dinoflask's efforts to create new idioms or antenarratives (if we’d even call them that). Instead, what we see is something valuable in that technical communicators are likely trapped within our own terministic screens of language. We want to critique objective discourse but perhaps we’ve replaced a focus on serious technical communication with serious politics in technical communication. Our relatively simple point is that there are non-serious and informal starting places to think about locating and even participating in the formation of conditions of possibility for industry antenarratives. Unsurprisingly, postmodernism was marked by an insistence on irony and satire (both aesthetic modes) (Hutcheon, 2003). Simply put, thinking through satire in relation to serious technical communication discourses offers us new available means of persuasion through which to pursue the creation of antenarratives more specific to social justice.

Analyzing Kaplan’s Ethos Construction Through Developer Updates on YouTube

Since its first patch on March 26th 2016, Overwatch is currently on Patch 1.48, meaning that there have been at least 48 full patches, or major changes made to the core game, heroes, maps, and/or mechanics themselves, since the game's release, and a number of additional micro patches that either fix small or specific bugs or make other smaller tweaks. In addition to full patches, halfmark patches, or patches where the third number is a “5” (ie, Patch 1.0.5) also often mark the addition of new features, as these patches are frequently used as stepping stones to transition from one full patch to the next. Frequently coinciding with either full or halfmark patches, Kaplan has posted 47 Developer Update videos on Blizzard's official Overwatch Youtube channel, PlayOverwatch since June 17th 2016. These videos can either stand alone or be watched concurrently with the patch notes, but in general explain the technical changes made to the game for broader, non-technical audiences. In addition, rather than focusing on the changes themselves, these videos often spend more time explaining the developer team's rationale for making said changes, as well as pointing out how specific changes were meant to address player feedback. With that in mind, the following analysis provides a thorough examination of the ways Kaplan purposefully constructs his ethos through the formal narrative these videos create. While such detailed rhetorical analysis is not often found in technical communications scholarship, because we are arguing specifically about the subtle dialogue between the formal and informal patch notes, we give special attention to how both Kaplan attempts to establish his credibility as the perpetrator of the game's narrative, and later, how dinoflask subverts these strategies to construct his counter narrative in response.

Moving to the specific ways Kaplan develops his ethos as through these videos, we begin where he does: the start of each video. Prior to Kaplan speaking, each Developer Update includes a brief image of a particular character, often related to the updates themselves, with a small title card addressing the topic of the video itself. As this image fades out, Kaplan comes on screen, usually wearing Overwatch or other Blizzard/videogame related t-shirts. In every single Developer Update, Kaplan begins by introducing himself, and does so quite casually. The very first video, for example, begins with “What is up everyone, this is Jeff from the Overwatch team. [5]” The following video, released a month later, starts similarly: “Welcome back for another developer update, my name is Jeff, I’m one of the guys from the Overwatch team [6],” and the most recent video starting with “Hi everyone, this is Jeff from the Overwatch team. [7]”

Coinciding with his attire and the overall tone of the update videos, this casual greeting has become a staple for these updates, but also indicates how Kaplan intends these videos to reach a larger audience. That is, rather than preparing a polished or otherwise impartial description of the changes made to the games, Kaplan instead creates a laid back and approachable persona, often misspeaks or has to take pauses to consider his explanation of a given update, and makes sure to indicate at the beginning of every video that, despite being the lead developer for the game, he is also representing the larger development team. In even just his initial greeting and overall appearance in these videos, Kaplan clearly illustrates that he is speaking to a broader audience, and wants to do so as both a player and human being who is a member of a larger team of developers, rather than a technical expert speaking only to other technical experts as most typographic patch notes tend to do.

Addressing Kaplan's dual role as both developer and player, we see him use this as a means of ethos development from the very first Developer Update, and he continues to rely on both his and other players’ experiences playing the game when providing rationales for changes throughout all the subsequent updates. That is, he builds his ethos as a player of the game by specifically gesturing to feedback received by players that lead to technical changes. For example, when discussing some of the changes made as of the very first Developer Update video, Kaplan states that he is going to discuss “some of the high level goals and problems as you guys had seen them and hopefully we’re addressing those” (our emphasis).

After making this explicit gesture to player concerns, he goes on to address players’ specific complaints that the game would go into Sudden Death too often. Even though he also takes the time to explain that as far as the backend was concerned, statistically players were being put into Sudden Death 35% of the time, in practice even he noticed that Sudden Death proqued more often than felt necessary. As the purpose of sudden death was meant to be “when it's a very close match, it's a cool moment to have, where it's a coin toss which team is better, both teams competed at a really high level, great let's go to Sudden Death” PlayOverwatch (2016, July 19) [8], he then goes on to discuss some of the changes his team made so that this mechanic would happen less often, thus allowing it to be experienced as intended.

In this particular example, Kaplan does not provide details as to what backend changes were made to make the Sudden Death mechanic more palpable to players; in fact, he gestures to the traditional patch notes for players who are interested in the more technical descriptions of these changes. Instead, he relies on both his own and other players’ experiences with the mechanic while playing, and uses those experiences as the rationale. This provides the first instance where Kaplan establishes himself as both a player and developer for Overwatch to develop his ethos; rather than someone removed from playing the game itself or someone who sends his code to outside play testers, Kaplan is an active player of the game, and thus makes changes to the game as they are informed by both his own experiences playing as well as the concerns of the game's larger player base. Furthermore, the importance of player feedback to the game's development is accentuated by the ending of each of the Developer Update videos, where Kaplan reiterates his own playing of the game by thanking watchers for “playing alongside” his team, and also provides links or other information for places where Overwatch players can go to ask questions about the changes made to the game or express other concerns with balance, bugs, or quality of life mechanics.

In addition to positioning himself as both player and developer, Kaplan constructs his ethos through these videos by using them to explain technical changes made to the game to and for non-technical audiences. Even in the above example, he gestures to the written patch notes for players who want more technical explanations of changes, and relies on the videos to instead give explanations and/or visuals as to why or what effect such changes intend. In doing so, not only is Kaplan able to couch each update within the questions, concerns, and experiences of the larger player base, he is also able to explain to players what different technical changes actually look like while playing. In a video released on August 24th 2017, Kaplan addresses major changes made to a beloved Overwatch character, Mercy. As a number of players “main” as Mercy, or, their most frequently played character is Mercy, there was tension between the players and developers as soon as it became known that her character was due to be rebalanced in an upcoming patch. In this video, though, rather than explaining the technical changes being made to her character, Kaplan instead begins the video with the team's rationale for making changes to her core gameplay mechanics and abilities.

One major cause for concern for players maining Mercy was the knowledge that her Ultimate Ability would change as part of her rebalancing. As Kaplan notes in the video, “Overwatch in a lot of ways has heroes who are defined by their ultimate abilities [9],” and by providing this update through a video rather than a textual model, Kaplan was able to maintain his ethos as a developer by being able to provide not only an explanation as to why these changes were being made, but also because he could immediately follow up this explanation with a detailed description of what would be replacing her original Ultimate Ability, explained in non-technical terms. In other words, Kaplan was able to emphasize that, despite the technical changes, playing Mercy would still feel like playing Mercy, even after the rebalance. In doing so, Kaplan is able to explain exactly how these changes will affect her gameplay, finishing his description with the rationale that said changes will make Mercy “feel a lot more engaging to play than standing around in the corner, hiding. [10]” In addition, because he is able to express these changes in a way that addresses the feeling of playing her in this case, rather than only being able to provide numbers or statistics relating to her increased speed or damage mechanics, he maintains his ethos because he can address player anxieties about the changes before players experience the changes for themselves. Through the video genre, he is able to directly address these concerns, stating, “We really hope you respond well to these changes to Mercy. We know that she is a character that's played almost second-to-none, so we think we’re going to get a ton of feedback from you, and we’re really eager to hear [11].” Here, not only does Kaplan reiterate his awareness of the love that Overwatch players have for Mercy, he also provides a means for them to provide feedback to the major changes made to her character, based more on feeling and emotional attachment rather than technical expressions in order to ease some of those anxieties in a way that would not be possible through traditional patch notes.

In addition to the above, there is another way that Kaplan builds his ethos through the Developer Update videos, and that is in how he addresses changes that were not, or could not, be made, despite players’ demand for them. That is, rather than positioning himself as the proverbial “be all end all” of decision making for the game, as previously mentioned, Kaplan frequently reiterates that he is a member of a larger team of developers. In addition, there are rarely any instances where Kaplan refers to himself as “I” in these updates; rather, he uses “we” whenever he talks about hearing back from players or any changes made to the game.

Kaplan also does what few, if any, traditional patch notes are able to do: connect the reasoning for a particular change (or lack of change) with stakeholders outside of the development team. For example, in a video released on October 26th 2017, Kaplan addresses some of the concerns and patch changes made when Esports began taking an interest in Overwatch. One such concern voiced by players that Kaplan addresses is the concern that sometimes when “watching Overwatch Esports, it can be very challenging to follow the action and know what's going on [12].” He goes on to explain that this particular update video will walk viewers through some of the changes made to address these concerns. He then immediately hedges this statement by explaining that “When I mention a lot of these features, they’re gonna sound really cool, but it's important to understand who they’re targeted at.” He then gestures towards the other teams Overwatch's core development team must work with when making changes related to Esports, making it clear that the decisions being made in this particular case are not entirely left up to him or his team, but rather result from a compromise between multiple teams. Through this process, Kaplan can clearly indicate when alternate stakeholders exert control over in-game changes, especially when the stakeholder is different from the main player base.

The above gives Kaplan the room to express when he himself disagrees with or wants a particular feature added that the development team is not able to implement because of these additional stakeholders. Near the end of this same update, Kaplan explains that a particular addition requested by players to improve the viewing experience cannot be implemented even though he wanted it as well because the broadcasting crew did not have the ability to integrate said change. Rather than having players read the traditional patch notes and be left wondering why such a popular change was not implemented, Kaplan's updates provide them with a satisfactory explanation, thereby improving his ethos with the larger player base, especially because he admits that it is a feature he would have liked to implement as well. Especially through the visual medium, Kaplan uses these updates to purposefully construct a particular narrative and rationale for both technical and aesthetic changes made to the game while simultaneously giving players a new means to respond to these changes by crafting counternarratives that can potentially reach the same broad audience as the official videos rather than only a select, probably already like-minded few.

The Transformative Locale of Dinoflask’s Response

Asking for player feedback after each patch release is not a new concept. Most iterative games include at least one official forum where players are encouraged to provide feedback on the most recent patch release, and in places where official venues are not offered, player communities will often create their own spaces to discuss these changes. Even in Overwatch's original style of patch notes, for instance, they included a link to a specific forum encouraging players “to share [their] feedback.” However, as the genre of these patch notes have shifted to include visual forms, so too has players’ response.

Released almost six months after Kaplan's first Developer Update video, YouTube user dinoflask has posted 32 parody update videos as of June 2020. Though these videos often also include edits or other meme-style references, for the most part they consist of cuts from the original Developer Updates, edited so that it seems as though Kaplan is saying something different from his original videos. That being said, these cuts are left obvious to viewers, as both the audio and video uses hard cuts, clearly illustrating where Dinoflask took different parts of various Developer Updates and brought them together for the parody. For example, in dinoflask's first video, within the first 20 s, scenes from at least 3 of Kaplan's Developer Updates are meshed together to make it seem as though they are connected, but the videos are clearly not intended to appear real or official in any way. With these hard cuts in mind, when providing quotations from dinoflask's videos, we have marked with a “/” symbol where these cuts appear, so that readers can better visualize how dinoflask remixes different parts of the Developer Updates together for satirical purposes. However, echoing Kaplan, even dinoflask begins each response with some iteration of Kaplan's standard greeting and note that he is from the Overwatch team, since this greeting is an essential part of the source material.

Reinforcing the key points of ethos construction mentioned in the section above, the means through which dinoflask establishes his own ethos in response to Kaplan illustrates the same three key areas of importance, as these are also the same places dinoflask's videos subvert the original material for satirical or otherwise humorous purposes. To begin, dinoflask's videos poke fun at the number of times that Kaplan requests and encourages player feedback after each patch. For example, in dinoflask's first video, titled “Jeff Kaplan: the secret behind Overwatch's competitive matchmaking,” the video focuses on the same topic as Kaplan's first Developer Update: changes being made to competitive play. However, rather than relying on player feedback and experience as rationale for technical changes as Kaplan does, dinoflask's video edits together the following rationale for changes made to competitive play, as if it were said by Kaplan himself:

Something that I hear a lot from people / is competitive play is completely unbalanced / but the reason / you get matched / you know / against the best pro gamer esport / enemyteam / and you feel like / your teammates / they’re all / playing the game / with / no / hands / is because / all of us on the Overwatch team and at Blizzard / we feed / on your / negative experiences / so / we want you / to feel really / frustrated and angry. (dinoflask, 2016 December 23)

In this particular example, dinoflask's response to some of the changes made to competitive play echo the concerns of other Overwatch players in and around competitive play that they felt the developers were not addressing at that particular time. Scrolling through the comments section of this video, for instance, illustrates some of these frustrations, as players were concerned with the algorithms responsible for building teams within the game. For example, YouTube user TheKhopesh commented, “The enemy team is always a bunch of pro never-miss Esports players all in the top 500 even though you just started playing a week ago and you’re not even ranked yet.” In general, Overwatch is meant to put players with teammates of comparable skill, but, as indicated both bydDinoflask's video and responses such as TheKhopesh's, clearly players did not feel this was the case. Thus, we can see how dinoflask uses such parodies to subvert Kaplan's usual ethos strategy of connecting with players as a player himself to instead illustrate some of the ways that the game is not addressing player concerns, such as in the case of unbalanced competitive team matchups.

Similar to the example above, dinoflask also subverts Kaplan's other frequently used means of ethos building: explaining technical changes to and for non-technical audiences. In a video titled “Jeff Kaplan: the truth behind developer PTR decisions & Chinese New Year” released January 20th 2017, dinoflask takes Kaplan's usual process of defining jargon for players, and immediately makes it seem as though Kaplan is providing false information. In this case, dinoflask has Kaplan define PTR, or Public Test Realm. However, in the remixed video, Dinoflask has Kaplan introduce and define PTR as follows:

“So first off, for those of you who don’t know what the PTR is / it stands for / ‘Patch Notes / Totally / Random’ / or sometimes / the / ‘Player Tears / Region’” (dinoflask, 2017 January).

In general, PTRs exist as places where players and developers can test and try new features outside of the actual game itself. However, by having Kaplan define PTR as either “Patch Notes Totally Random” or “Player Tears Region,” dinoflask illustrates some of the tensions that rise when players dislike or disagree with a particular change in the game. In addition, the implication that some changes are made randomly contradicts the larger purpose of Kaplan's Developer Updates, in that they often focus on the rationale behind such changes rather than the changes themselves.

Similarly, seemingly arbitrary game changes are also why PTRs are sometimes jokingly referred to as the Player Tears Region, since they are where changes that would make some players “cry” are first tested before being implemented. Dinoflask's redefining of the term confronts Kaplan's usual attempts to provide an explanation for changes made to the game rather than just explaining the technical changes themselves by framing such changes as arbitrary or random. Dinoflask follows this with another edit, having Kaplan give a fake rationale:

“What I think is important to understand, is why we are making changes on the PTR to the heroes we’ve decided to make changes to / So / in the first of every month / we like do, / you know, / a coin toss, which/ heroes will we / wreck /this month, / you know it’s anybody’s / guess /to be honest.” (dinoflask, 2017 January)

Here, dinoflask purposefully leaves Kaplan’s usual full lead in, taken from the Developer Update video about Mercy mentioned above, and then re-mixes the explanation itself to make it seem as though these changes are determined by the toss of a coin, rather than the technical and experience based reasons provided in the source material. This re-mixing also shows a lack of respect for player experiences, something that Kaplan usually takes seriously, as seen by his handling of the major changes made to the beloved hero Mercy.

Dinoflask also uses these remixes to critique Kaplan's acknowledgement of other stakeholders and their role in Overwatch's development. For example, where Kaplan's videos frequently remind viewers he is a member of a team through his constant use of the “we” pronoun, dinoflask's videos instead position Kaplan as the “benevolent ruler [15] ” of Overwatch, often implying that as lead developer, he has final say and full control over the game itself, and even occasionally making jokes as to his level of importance within the larger Blizzard community. This can best be seen in the video “15th Kaplanniversary Special,” where dinoflask has Kaplan say the following about his time at Blizzard:

The truth is / when you’re / the figure / head / of the entire / Overwatch community, / Blizzard / will / invest / a lot / to keep / you / looking / young and fresh, making sure things aren’t getting stale… / Many of you know / I / started / out / creating / quests for World of Warcraft / and I think it was / very overwhelming to the entire / World of Warcraft / development team / to be / working / alongside / someone who / was / a grandmaster of / quest / design. (dinoflask, 2017 June)

We clearly see dinoflask's remix illustrating Kaplan as an overly egotistical developer, having him refer to himself as a “grandmaster” of quest design. He also implies Kaplan has firing power by following this bit with Kaplan saying “You’re / fired” to anyone who mentions a particular quest series he's known for (The Green Hills of Stranglethorn) that were not well received. The video continues on to have Kaplan explain that the reason he has lasted 15 years at Blizzard is through a process called “blame shift,” where “Let's say / you were / working on a game feature / and / there are gameplay issues and it's not working correctly, / what you can do is /push / your payload / of / bad design / decisions / onto someone else.” Dinoflask takes Kaplan's usual strategy of explicitly explaining outside stakeholders putting constraints on game development and makes it seem as though what Kaplan's real motives for giving these contexts is actually so that he cannot be blamed for some of the complaints about the game itself. In this way, dinoflask further accentuates the joke of Kaplan as benevolent ruler of Overwatch by once again subverting Kaplan's usual ethos strategies in the response videos.

At times, dinoflask's epideictic acts directly align with explicitly political topics, including body shaming and visual gender representations. ¹ The early iteration of Overwatch was unremarkable in terms of gender representation and diversity. Mercy, the healer, was a thin, blonde, and hypersexualized goddess and the epitome of what Mulvey called the “male gaze.” Over time, Overwatch has added cis gendered female characters from a variety of body shapes (Orisa, Zarya) and even ages (Ana). It was later revealed that Tracer identified as a lesbian. Currently, no African-American female characters exist. In any case, Mei (Mei-Ling Zhou) is a Chinese national. She is more than just a representation, however. Mei's background is as a Climatologist and she is distinctly chubby, unlike most female characters in both Overwatch and other videogames. She is also comparatively shorter than the other female characters, and most of her skins involve heavy coats, given that her abilities center on her freezing gun.

In a video entitled, “Mei's Body Shape Controversy,” dinoflask begins by raising the toxic behavior problem. He offers a speculative universe in which Kaplan has added a new feature to Overwatch: “Scum Browser. It's a really cool feature where people can mark other players for being a terrible member of the Overwatch community and then other people can find that player's BattleTag in a public list and then harass them until they improve their behaviour.” Here, he satirizes Overwatch's new feature which allows players to pre-sort team selections by certain behaviors such as “No snipers” or “No Bastions.” More to the point, he addresses the controversy over Mei's Lunar New Year skins. Part of the incentive to continue playing Overwatch is that different holidays around the world offer unique avatar skins that can only be earned (though loot boxes) during specific time frames. The controversy came because the Lunar New Year skin made Mei's waist slimmer (Plunkett, 2017). Even if it was unintentional, it undermined many players’ enjoyment of Mei's body positivity as a character. Dinoflask took on this shift directly, stating (through Kaplan's voice):

I know some players were really upset about her ass shape. / Uhm, the truth is we believe Mei can be a big, beautiful character / but still fit into Overwatch in a really positive way. / So we plan to grow Mei's ass in a really healthy, / sort of slow growth sort of way / so that by the end of June it will be large enough / to balance six Roadhogs on top of it.

(Roadhog is a very large character in Overwatch). This play jab at Kaplan was only a brief aside as dinoflask goes on to praise the Lunar New Year season and state some positive things about the (then) current play season.

What is interesting about this last example is that it emblematizes not just critique, but the imagination of a better or more body-positive vision of Overwatch. Hidden behind dinoflask's tongue in cheek description is an ethical goal of continuing some of the actual positive work on body image and gender that Overwatch is capable of promoting. Here, these are not technical descriptions of new patches but ways of trying to suggest new ideal procedures that Blizzard could and should continue adding to the game in dinoflask's opinion. As we will unpack in the next section, it is these types of moments that can give technical communication researchers some bearing on what types of theoretical approaches can be usefully employed to explain the ethical range of creators like dinoflask's satirical activities, even if dinoflask himself does not always utilize this range himself.

Dinoflask’s Player Created DIY as Epideictic Rhetoric

Ethics in technical communication (Katz, 1992; Markel, 2001; Miller, 1979) and games studies scholarship (Sicart, 2011) constitutes a large and by no means overlapping body of work. Fortunately, there is one theoretical approach that we see as most relevant to describing the Kaplan-dinoflask rhetorical situation: Kimball’s (2006) articulation of tactical TC via de Certeau's theoretical work on space and place (1984). Generally stated, strategies are systems of symbolic, embodied, and material control that range from the benign (crosswalks, parking meters) to the oppressive (prison). Tactics are the forms of everyday resistance that are manifested by affected individuals under strategies of control. Kimball (2006) tied strategies and tactics to informal or DIY technical communication genres that appropriate dominant discourses and styles such as Muir and Gregg (1971) Volkswagen repair manual which was aimed at enabling home hobbyists to repair their own vehicles. As illustrated by the number of cuts and other edits required to make these videos, dinoflask exerts an immense amount of skill both in the content and execution of his parody videos. In addition, with approximately 229,000 followers and over 4 million channel views, it is clear that the messages portrayed in these tactical responses resonate with the larger Overwatch community, and as such, these videos clearly have bearing on the broader audience's response to the official patch notes themselves.

Tactical TC exists in exactly the sort of resistance to officially sanctioned technical communication genres and content that dinoflask embodies. Dinoflask seeks to invoke and yet appropriate for his own ends Kaplan's already expanded genre of multimodal patch notes. Yet, dinoflask also defaces (like a graffiti artist) the discursive norms of officially sanctioned narratives by Kaplan and Blizzard by re-mixing their actual video; in fact, the description of dinoflask's Youtube channel states, “I make a grown man say things.” Muir and Gregg (1971) may not have had as much of an explicit anti-establishment attitude as dinoflask's compositions; however, one could argue that merely enabling users to circumvent a normal strategy of control (expensive manufacturer approved repair garages and procedures) calls into question the legitimacy of which ideal user type (a professional certified mechanic or a home hobbyist) is qualified to perform certain repair procedures. Dinoflask's satirical compositions explicitly foreground this dimension in a way that lies latent or implicit in Muir and Gregg (1971) manual.

Clearly, we should inquire as to what sort of ethical purpose satire adds to tactical TC and ethics. As Colton et al. (2017) reminded the field, tactics are not inherently ethical or unethical. Instead, researchers have to examine tactical actions on a case by case basis and articulate different ethical frameworks that we believe can help us make these evaluations. Here then, we see de Certeau's work on narrative as offering one route toward ethical judgment. In illustrating the concept of tactics, de Certau (1984) suggests at one point that narrative constitutes an important arena of social contestation wherein, he declares, “stories of journeys and actions are marked out by the ‘citation’ of the places that result from them or authorize them” (p. 120). The connections between narrative and non-expert forms of technical communication are numerous. Derek Van Ittersum, for example, has explored the use of personal narratives in instructions on the website Instructables.com. Thus, narrative—a clear breach of formal technical instruction writing—helps amateur craft enthusiasts connect with non-expert audiences. Similarly, Jones (2016) has examined the role of narrative in the technical genres of the Innocence Project Northwest. Indeed, her description about narrative in this context could almost be read as a gloss of what de Certeau is after with his discussion of narrative and tactics: “Narratives can create and alter reality and provide a means for the outside to turn in on itself. Narratives represent transformations and make apparent inner thoughts, motivations, desires, and goals” (2016, p. 298). We see this in Kaplan's reliance on explicitly explaining the developers’ motivations and goals when making changes to the game; however, dinoflask's remixes bring this narrative into question by offering an alternate view while still using the face and words from the original.

One way to think about the ethics of this situation lies in connecting satire to aesthetics and politics. First, it is important to note that satire is not inherently tied to a particular political orientation (liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist, etc.). In general, satirical cues are contextual even outside of videogames. The audience has to understand the context in order to make sense of a contradiction between what is said and what is meant by a satirical act. In dinoflask's response, viewers must have a shared set of social values or the contextual knowledge. It is because of this insider knowledge that satire marks norm violation. As a rhetorical practice, however, satire is also participatory. Much like a rhetorical enthymeme demands that an audience fill in the omitted premise, satire requires an audience's willingness to actively decode the context. Thus, while satire is not tied to a particular political orientation, it does have a particularly powerful effect when it works within the forms of meaning and identity within a particular community like Overwatch players. Because satire depends upon this knowledge it is at once constrained in a sense that clearly certain topics (feminism, racism) are difficult to broach. Thus, humor in general can function as a “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer, 1989) to help mediate and translate multiple viewpoints with an eye toward promoting in group cooperation.

Satire forces viewers to inhabit two worlds: Kaplan's serious technical communication world and dinoflask's claim that the former merits critique. Dinoflask's activities are similar to how other social media scholars have suggested that memes can both entertain but promote political messages by providing self-reflection on viewers and in group members’ experiences (Yoon, 2016) as part of what Jenkins (2006) called “participatory culture” which is linked to a real world industry. Convergence culture in general signaled an acceleration in opportunities for fans to become active participants in shaping the meaning of popular entertainment texts in ways that can be interconnected with designers’ or composers’ aims (The Talking Dead) or entirely separate (Harry Potter Alliance). “Modding” is a widely known way in which players shift their roles from consumers to co-producers (Postigo, 2007). Modders (and subgenres like “mappers”) alter the game environment whereas broader categories of what Postigo (2007) has called fan-programmers engage broad content world by producing wikis, tutorials, video walkthroughs, or other fan-produced activity (p. 302). In the case of Dinoflask, the type of participatory authorship occurs at the level of the supplementary technical documents produced by Overwatch's development team.

Participatory culture clearly applies in the case of the Overwatch fandom. Dinoflasks's compositions are part of how fans negotiate and contest the official sanctioned or intended meaning of the game to extend the content world and “life of a game” (p. 302) by giving fans’ collective frustrations an engaging deliberative orientation Kaplan has not and likely will not respond or acknowledge Dinoflask's participatory compositions. Yet, their very existence helps to add more fan interactivity outside of the immediate experience of playing. It is important to note that the goal of challenging an officially sanctioned meaning does not indicate that the former is ethica. Once again, satire for dinoflask in no way promises a more egalitarian politics. The ethics that motivates it is important: a case in point, online discussion forums like Reddit or 4chan have hosted numerous toxic subcultures both around videogames and other aspects of the culture wars largely through use of anonymous memes (Massanari, 2017).

Implications and Conclusion

The subject of future disruption has been raised in technical communication scholarship before. As we noted above, Jones, Moore & Walton's (2016) discussion of antenarratives in technical communication remains a critical lens for understanding our argument. In other words, creating utopian or dystopian historical markers or satirical responses to Kaplan is an active and ethical practice, one that is normatively grounded in identifying tactical forms that work against inegalitarian strategies of control, such as the corporate and state denials of damage of fracking or Blizzard's efforts to selectively acknowledge certain motives for its updates (respectively).

There is a danger in this extension that should be acknowledged. We readily concede that it may seem unproductive to place satirical player created patch notes on the same tactical ground as say, Edenfield et al. (2019) analysis of new material ethics in transgender online forums as a form of tactical TC or Jones (2016) analysis of narrative in more explicit social justice contexts. At the same time, we must always remember that de Certau (1984)very examples of tactics in everyday life, such as a secretary writing a love letter at work, were not always explicitly political in nature. de Certau (1984) first and foremost seeks to identify any form whatsoever of resistance to control regardless of political orientation because he's interested in trying to see if identifying these spaces can then align with (likely) broader forms of (for him) Marxist or leftist programmatic organization.

This article calls for further exploration of tactical TC and ethical practices to extend Sherlock's (2014) discussion of how patch notes in online spaces serve as a moment of ethos construction and negotiation. In particular, we call upon technical communications researchers to continue to examine player-created and DIY genres of technical communication discourse in order to help identify moments when epideictic (satirical) rhetoric crosses into strategic resistance. That is, this article unpacks one means of subtle resistance in the construction of these counternarratives that proves especially useful in highlighting pain points between stakeholders meant to be on the same team. Further, by analyzing not only how Kaplan attempts to construct his own ethos as a means to establish the dominant narrative but also how dinoflask remixes Kaplan's own words to critique said narrative, this work illustrates how tactical TC, though it is not always automatically ethical, can be used to subvert hegemonic standards.

We feel that there is something to be gained as our field continues to explore activities of everyday resistance, especially when they seem comedic and less explicitly “serious” than activism. Far from elevating one form over another, we highlight dinoflask's work as an important point of what Kenneth Burke would call identification for a generation of digital audiences who increasingly use DIY and hybrid technical communication genres to make meaning about videogames like Overwatch that will only continue to grow in popularity. It is vital that technical communicators continue to identify the types of technical communication genres that constitute these genre ecologies as well as to work on developing specific ethical frameworks to locate potential moments where tactical resistance and nonsense may translate into broader ethical and political awareness. Along these lines, it may seem as though we may be placing words in dinoflask's mouth by connecting his efforts, which may simply be directed at trying to garner public support to improve gameplay conditions. Nevertheless, it's been the 2000 + year premise of Western rhetoric that as Miller (2010) says, if we can “name the tools’' of even unintentional acts of effective rhetoric, then we can “conceal them again in use.” There are undeniably the seeds or conditions of possibility for connecting this resistance to more explicit forms of activism, while still maintaining the subtlety that such satirical responses employ. As illustrated by dinoflask's remixes, these subtle pushes, in fact, can sometimes be more effective in changing ideologically fixed audiences, and tactical TC in particular can be used in this way to produce real, actionable change.