Overview:
- Games communicate ideas through their rules and systems, “procedural rhetoric.”
- Games make arguments by simulating processes and social dynamics
- Animal Crossing, America’s Army, The McDonald’s Videogame etc. are also tools for critical thinking
Designing Intentionally:
- Intentionality -> avoid embedding cultural biases
- McDonald’s Videogame -> players to make morally questionable choices for profit
- In Animal Crossing -> NPCs prioritize simple living over consumerism, creating a contrast with the player’s consumerist drive
- Play is literacy. Games teach players to understand and critique real-world systems.
- Procedural rhetoric is abstraction, simplifying systems
- I want to be aligning mechanics with the intended message, treating my game as a system of arguments.
My game centers around reflection of AI input on human thinking and the impact of fully integrating that into our thinking process. I plan to use Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric to create mechanics that emphasize the outcomes of AI vs. human thought, by presenting choices that are either driven by an AI or human tendency. I also want to expose ethical dilemmas if they exist in order to “design intentionally”, such as a concept of human memory loss which I correlated with computer memory loss in my game.
