Journal 2

A piece of writing in my weekly life is the blog Extra Punctuation. It’s a blog run by a man who specializes in English literature and grammar that examines video games in the same manner that one might critique a new book. The blog runs in tandem with the man’s vlog called Zero Punctuation which is also about critiquing video games. The two are fairly different but almost always related to each other based on what the other is covering that week. Zero Punctuation focuses on a single, recently released game and critiques that specific game in a very fast paced manner, hence the title. Extra Punctuation slows down and discusses a topic that relates to the game discussed that week but puts emphasis on expanding out from the specific game to talk about games, and often art, as a whole. The most recent release of both “texts” dealt with a comedy game and comedy in artwork for Zero Punctuation and Extra Punctuation respectively. The author’s main argument in both works is that a comedy is different from an artwork that has comedic elements or lightheartedness because in a comedy, excluding deadpan comedies, it is apparent that it is a comedy from even a mere synopsis. Simply stated: a comedy is funny because of the story, not in spite of it. He used Ghostbusters as an example summarizing the plot as: four nerds capture ghosts with experimental technology which culminates in a fight with a giant marshmallow man on top of a skyscraper.

Bitzer’s interpretation of the piece would likely be more narrow than that of Edbauer’s as Bitzer tends to lean more towards specificity and Edbauer seems more interested in future effects and interactions between texts. I would imagine that Bitzer would look towards the breakdown of the blog with the exigence being what determines a comedy, the audience being people who analyze and enjoy video games, and the situation being the release of the game that the Zero Punctuation video discussed.

Edbauer would likely be more concerned with the examples that the author uses to make his case as he discusses Ghostbusters, Airplane, and several video games that range from comedy games to games with comedic characters. This mixing of mediums and specific texts speaks fairly plainly to the idea of Rhetorical Ecologies and I would think Edbauer would see the article as a discussion into the idea of comedy as a whole rather than comedy limited to video games or even a specific game.