The thing-power of Ring Fit Adventure as embodied play: Tracing new materialist rhetoric across physical and cultural borders

Abstract

• This study interrogates the affordances and constraints of an exercising game in affecting the embodied experience of diverse players. • Through a multimodal new materialist analysis, we highlight the active role Ring Fit Adventure plays in configuring and (re)writing the rhetoric of fitness. • The thing-power of embodied play demonstrated through our analysis invites a critical reading of new media ecology. • Our study reveals implications for the design of a more accessible gaming experience for culturally diverse players. Keying in on Ring Fit Adventure as a game of analysis, we trace the new materialist rhetoric and thing-power of gaming assemblage across physical and cultural borders. Our new materialist analysis at once builds on and extends beyond the existing scholarship on the hybridity of gaming procedure and bodily movement already made available through a previous generation of embodied gameplay. We take such materialist theorization a bit further to forward a co-constitutive examination of the game's design mechanism in relation to diverse players’ embodied gaming experience. Based on our multimodal analysis of the gaming procedure and diverse YouTube player video reviews of the game, this article reveals that a pluralistic perspective on embodiment—including linguistic, cultural, and corporeal diversity—have the potentiality to disrupt the dominant rhetoric of physical wellness. We conclude this article with implications for the design of a more accessible gaming experience that attends to the thing-power in exercise as well as suggestions for the development of robust digital rhetoric practices and pedagogies.