In this webtext, we explore how Magic and other complex analog systems operate rhetorically as activity networks. Our scrutiny of Magic’s protocols leads us to consider and compare the game’s anticipated activities (as described in its game rules and our social expectations, conventions, and norms involved in playing the game) with its realized expressions of those activities (as encountered when actually playing one or more iterations of the game itself).

This article argues that anti-vaccinationists pose an ethical challenge to researchers. On the one hand, research practices in narrative medicine push us to empower illness narratives. On the other hand, empowering some illness narratives may be misleading if the narrator is misinformed. By combining approaches to ethics found in medical humanities, medical ethics, and rhetoric of health and medicine, we can more accurately and ethically unravel how these skeptics are persuaded to hold their attitudes.