Here are some of my key takeaways from Ian Bogost’s “The Rhetoric of Video Games”
- Games aren’t just entertainment – they can make real arguments about how systems work in the world through their rules and mechanics
- Key concept: “Procedural rhetoric” = making arguments through processes/rules rather than words/images
- Animal Crossing case study shows how games can model real systems (capitalism/debt) in a way players naturally discover through play
- Interesting definition of play: “free space of movement within a more rigid structure” – not just about fun/leisure
- McDonald’s game forces players to make unethical choices to succeed – critique business practices through gameplay, forcing player to become culpable
- Games excel at “process intensity” – they emphasize rule-based systems more than other software
- America’s Army shows how games can embed institutional values/ideology into their systems (military honor, chain of command)
- We need new kinds of literacy for understanding games – not just reading/writing but understanding systems
- Parents/educators should engage with games critically, not just see them as distraction or pure entertainment
- Programming education should teach kids to make arguments through processes, not just technical skills
- Games can be subtle (Bully’s social commentary) or direct (Take Back Illinois’ policy arguments) in their rhetoric
- Important that we learn to “read” games critically as they become more culturally significant
- Games don’t automatically make meaningful arguments – they need to be designed and engaged with thoughtfully
- Growing importance of understanding procedural systems as computers/games become more prevalent in society
One of my most important takeaways from this reading is that the message or meaning from a game should be emergent. Of course I don’t think that it’s ever particularly effective to shoehorn preachy messages into any form of media, but games have a particular way of guiding a player to learn for themselves without the prescription. I’m not quite sure how to apply this message to my IF. In some sense, it makes me want to be more subtle with the words I use to tell my story so the player is more engaging with the raw content rather than my idea of what they should be getting from the game, but unfortunately I don’t think that the mechanics can really do that work themselves. Since I’m making a parser fiction, and it pretty much just uses all of the mechanics of a parser fiction, theres some subtler middle layer between the words and the mechanics that I need to use to make my game mean something.
