Rhetoric of Video Games (jason)

TLDR: Games hold a unique power to leverage a novel type of rhetoric called “procedural rhetoric.” Through the activity of engaging with the mechanics, dynamics, and processes of the game, the player comes to understand the systems within which they engage, and potentially critically engage with them. Bogost provides several examples of games which leverage procedural rhetoric (like the somewhat anticapitalist message of animal crossing), and argues that designers should deliberately construct the mechanisms and processes of their game to leverage the power of procedural rhetoric.

Intro

  • animal crossing has somewhat whimsical and mundane life for main character (paying off mortgage debt etc)
    • Tom Nook gathers wealth — “is a condensation of the corporate bourgeoisie”
    • game covers themes of life in a small town, long-term debt, caring for an environment
    • forums like ACC have affordances to enhance community (like veterans adopting newcomers)
    • these affordances can be deliberately chosen to make “deliberate expressions on the world”
  • play is traditionally considered to be a trifle, an area of the “entertainment industry”, an area of leisure
    • Katie Salen and Zimmerman offer an alternative: “play is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure”
  • key idea: explore the possibility space of a structure (like a haiku, Oulipo, etc)

Procedurality

  • practice to craft representation through rools
  • Murray defines digital artifacts needing: procedurality, participation, spatiality, encyclopedic scope
  • Burke coins concept of symbolic systems, which encompasses visual rhetoric and digital rhetoric
  • procedural rhetoric: using processes persuasively, through the usage of models which exist in games
    • example: McDonalds videogame satirizes mass farming etc
    • example: Illinois policy reform games re: healthcare
    • example: Bully simulates bullies in videogames
    • example: spore explores the development of a microorganism into a complex creature
  • procedural rhetoric means games are not automatically rich, but have this unique ability to educate about methods and functions

Applying this to my game

Regarding applying procedural rhetoric to my game: I think my game already leverages certain elements of this. The process of taking a birdseye view on your own life to convince an AI you ought to be spared forces the player to reckon with their life choices and the possibility of being judged by a “machine”. If I were trying to leverage more of procedural rhetoric, I could consider making the AI’s judgement metrics more transparent (i.e. “we do not value these certain areas of skills in the future economy), or even encode biases in the judgement to demonstrate the fundamental bias in training a decisionmaking system from the sum of existing biased human knowledge.

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