Ian starts with an example of the game Animal crossing. This game is a life simulator where the player performs mundane labor, like collecting goods, buying furniture, and paying off debt. It shows consumer capitalism through the mechanics. For example, mortgage → upgrade house → you want more stuff → more work → more debt. All the debt enriches Tom Nook, who upgrades his store as the players pay their loans. The NPCs in the game represent anti-consumerist values, like simple living. Ultimately, the games is a model of capitalist ideologies, as players actually feel the effects of this capitalism loop. I think the main thing that stood out was learning through experience versus traditional lecture-style instruction. His main point was that video games can represent and critique real-world systems through rules and processes rather than just moral lectures.
The next topic is play, can be defined as the free space of movement within a more rigid structure. This means that meaning emerges from rules creating a possibility space, rather than rules being a distraction or just an engagement mechanist. For example, kids invent playground rules, poetic forms like haiku enable creativity through constraints, or even oulipo constraints (like palindromes or lipograms). Play is how players explore the system and derive meaning.
Procedurality us the core affordance of computers: executing rules and processes. Video games highly emphasize this intensity, since games represent systems not through images but rather behaviors modeled in code. There’s two types of procedural learning in game. The first type is subject specific (like economics, warfare, etc) and the second is procedural literacy (how the systems function through rules). To understand a game is to understand the world that it models.
Classical rhetoric is persuasion through speech, and modern rhetoric is persuasion and expression in many medias. Rhetoric creates identification between communicator and audience. Existing digital rhetoric focuses too much on text and visuals only.
There’s a few examples of procedural rhetoric. In the McDonalds video game, there’s a critique of corporate exploitation. The player must engage in deforestation, bribery, growth hormones, and PR manipulation. It’s interesting because winning requires moral compromise, which exposes the necessary evils that are within business logic. In America’s Army, the mechanics reinforce the rules of engagement, military discipline, and honor systems. Players learn values through compliance with the mechanics, which shows the ideological stakes of these procedural systems. In Take Back Illinois, which is a persuasion game, it models public policy on tort reform, education standards, and economic development. Interacting systems reinforces the political positions. However the game is not propagandistic—the player is invited to assess positions through real play. In Bully, there’s the high school politics system (power hierarchies, social justice, and confrontation as necessary). this models how cultures enforce their own internal values.
So why does all this matter? Playing games is a form of systems literacy, which teaches us how economic, political, and social systems operate and influence us. Parents and educations should teach critical play and treat games like books/films in the curriculum. Additionally, game development should teach not just coding but procedural augmentation. Ultimately, games are models for interpreting, and sometimes challenging, the rules and systems of real life.
Game Analysis: Depression Quest
Game overview, audience, and play experience:
Depression Quest is an IF game designed by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Shankler. It’s available for free online and on Steam. Its target audience includes young adults, players who want to learn about mental health, and anyone looking for empathy-building experiences rather than just pure entertainment. I played the browser version for around 1.5 hours, progressing through many branching pathways and reaching one of the narrative endings involving ongoing treatment and unfortunately continued struggle. You can access the gave using the following link: https://www.depressionquest.com.
As I played the game and got deeper into it, I encountered workplace stress, relationship interactions with my girlfriend, attempts to socialize, and decisions regarding my own therapy and medication. My depression level drastically varied depending on how overwhelmed or withdrawn I acted. The story felt incredibly cyclical, like a direct mirror of depression itself.
Genre and it’s impact on the game’s message:
Depression Quest can mainly be categorized as interactive fiction, narrative simulation, and serious/empathy gameplay. There we no avatars, movement mechanics or victory situations. Instead, the user interface uses clickable narrative choices with constant grayed-out options, which I feel like is the strongest and most important mechanic. I felt like the absence of traditional fun elements really reinforces the message of depression by removing momentum, motivation, and reward-seeking behavior. This genre also makes the user focus on emotional reality, rather than spectacle and fantasy. This helps reinforce the message that players must sit with their own vulnerabilities instead of escaping it with power fantasies. The game evolves into more than just a story about depression; it’s a whole system that really makes users feel depressed. I felt this was very strong.
Connection to course concepts:
First, this relates to the procedural rhetoric that we learned from Ian Bogost. Bogost describes procedural rhetoric as persuasion through systems and rules rather than just narrative. In Depression Quest, we see that the game doesn’t just “lecture” players about mental illness. Instead it procedurally enforces the diminished power and agency of a player. Seeing the good option and being unable to choose it is an extremely powerful rhetoric act.
There’s also the concept of play as a possibility space, by Salen and Zimmerman. Play is the exploration of a constrained rule-base environment, and in this game, that possibility space gets smaller as depression gets worse (almost an inverse of traditional design norms). This really hones in on the fact that depression isn’t just a feeling but rather a constraining structure. Going back to Bogust, we see that games can also express/reflect on societal systems. Depression Quest very closely models a psychological reality, where players interrogate their own assumptions (which is a form of critical play).
When we combine these concepts, we can see that games can be deeply persuasive cultural media, not just leisure objects.
What I’d take and constructive critique:
Here’s what I’d add into my own design:
- Using a metaphor as one of the most powerful mechanics. I LOVED how the grayed-out options instantly conveyed a struggle theme to me. I want to explore metaphors where game mechanics embody emotional truths.
- Narrative structure with systemic feedback. I liked how the depression meter and treatment status modify the available decision options, showing how small changes can create really big narrative elements. I had previously incorporated something like this into my p2 game, but after seeing this design decision I have a few more ideas I’d like to implement.
- Removing traditional win states. I like that the game resists cue narratives, which adds to it’s authentic feeling. I would like to explore more ambiguous outcomes in my p2 project as well.
Here’s what I’d improve:
- Some of the paths felt too similar, which reduced the perceived agency a bit too sharply
- I would like to have seen more variety in audio/visual, which would have sucked me into the game even more
- One thing to note is that those critiques just propose a slightly different shift in the balance between realism and interactivity.
Message, success, impact, and dissonance:
I think the game gets across it’s intended message that depression us the systemic loss of control and agency, not just perpetual sadness. The game alters daily life, really exhausts resilience, and blocks access to the obvious healthy choices, which makes the players feel truly helpless. The game communicates this message in a few ways. The locked options act as a metaphor for the inability to choose the best action. I love this because a lot of people think depression isn’t real and that the depressed person can just take simple actions to make them happier, which is not true. I like the negative feedback loops (withdrawal → worse symptoms → fewer choices), and I enjoued the realistic storylines without a magical fix. I obviously wanted a fix but that concept really drew me into the game. The game really is successful in making you feel helpless and frustrated on purpose. As such, I think the game was successful; the discomfort that I felt was the measure of the game’s success. I left with a heavier heart and deeper compassion. Regarding the emotional response, I felt anxious at times but also very empathetic. I wanted to help the character, but the inability to always do so made me reflect on real people I know who’ve struggled. Regarding ludonarrative dissonance, I didn’t feel much. The narrative says that you are stuck, and the mechanics made me feel actually stuck. If anything, the repetition of this “stuckness” reinforced the point that depression is cyclical and repetitive.
