Several folks in the 805 seminar commented on the fact that Laurel, Poster, and Kaplan were all works from the early 90's, raising the question of whether the ideas they discussed there are relevant to digital rhetorics today. Here's a talk from July 2010 in which the speaker, Seth Priebatsch, makes a number of claims about what happened during the last decade and where we're going in the next decade.
http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world.html
What I would argue is that, although I share the excitement about using gaming principles to build "persuasive interfaces" (or what Alicia Hatter and I are calling "interpellative designs"), we're really not talking about new ideas. Laurel's use of Aristotle's Poetics to make theater a metaphor for HCI isn't fundamentally different than talking about putting a "game layer" on the world in order to market credit cards more effectively. More importantly, Poster and Kaplan provide us with the tools for talking about the hegemonic impact of doing that type of design far more critically than Priebatsch does (though he does make an a occasional nod toward the issue of control and power in interface design).
So in asking whether Laurel, Poster, and Kaplan are relevant to user experience design today, I'd ask whether or not they offer explanatory power into Priebatsch's talk (and I could have used Amy Jo Kim's work to make the same point [e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcZVHSBTc5k]).
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