Rhetoric of Video Games
– Games use rhetoric differently than books
– Using procedures (like rules and systems) instead of words
– “procedural rhetoric”
– Words can’t do procedural expression like video games can
– Games as models
– Games persuade through system and persuading users that systems work (like a flight simulator)
– Games can make claims about the world
– Play/possibility space
– “Free space of movement within a rigid structure
– Meaning comes from what rules allow and forbid
– Procedurality is why computers matter
– They can exercise rules
– Games as high-process-intensity media
– McDonald’s video game
– Business ethics via mechanics
– You manage in order to stay profitable
– Didactic
– Bully
– High school politics
– Rules are subtly expressive, privileging underdogs
– Satire/entertainment
– Spore
– Astrobiology
– “Seeded-life view”
– Using this to think about how the world might work
– What to look for in any game
– Goals
– Win states
– Verbs
– Economies
– Friction
– Reward/feedback
– Failure states
– Games are process media, the meaning is extant within the rules, not just in what you’re looking at
– Can be used for media literacy
– Education
– Design ethics
Game: Papers, Please
Creator: Lucas Pope (3909 LLC)
Platform: Mac/PC (Crossover) via Steam
Target Audience: Players interested in puzzle games with moral complexity; teens and adults who can handle themes of authoritarianism, immigration control, and political violence
Time Played: 2hrs
Link: https://papersplea.se
Papers, Please is a game that’s set in a fictional communist country/state called Arstotzka. You’re a border control officer just trying to make ends meet, and make sure your family is safe, and hopefully one day able to get out of the country. It’s a simple set of rules, you have to check peoples’ documents, stamp passports, and decide whether the people make it through or not. When you make mistakes, you get citations that make you lose money, meaning you provide for your family less, etc. However some of the decisions you make are essential to making sure they live—maybe letting someone illegal into the country so that they can bring something back to you as a gift.
This dystopian bureaucracy simulator sounds boring, but it’s filled with political commentary that’s just as important if not more than its mechanics. The “puzzles,” (which mostly consist of checking the passports and documents of visitors, checking them against your rulebook and making sure that any daily amendments are made) force you to focus intensely on the rules of the game. You soon see the people as not that—but potential errors. The simulation elements (time limits, family expenses, etc) add urgency that brings you to make moral compromises as a player. Yeah, you can’t let that refugee through because you really need to buy medicine that day.
It’s very clearly in line with Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric,” being that the rules make the arguments.
In order to succeed, you must process people quickly, and get through as many as possible. One of the most physiologically visceral memories of playing was the sensation I got when I looked at the timer and thought, “oh I could get 5 more people in today if I go quick enough,” often leading to people slipping through the cracks, and redefining doing a “good job” as “being good at complying,” something that’s impossible to beat the game without doing at least a little of.
The verbs in the game are pretty rigid too. Inspect, compare, interrogate, approve, deny, detain—no “comfort, advocate, appeal” options at all. The mechanics simply lead to the player needing to make bureaucratic decisions. Economically: Time and money are scarce currencies, and you have no time for compassion!
Friction comes in the form of the new rules every day. One day there are special entry permits, another, you need to make sure the entrants are vaccinated, some days certain districts aren’t allowed in. You must be thorough, and that causes callousness to emerge.
The game argues that authoritarian systems make normal people into “instruments of oppression” through a system built on carefully designed incentives. It’s an allegory for lots of things, but the “just following orders” of it all certainly brings up many mid-century memories. It’s the subtlety that makes it work. Of course, there are sprawling Cold War and WWII games that put you in the lap of the Nazis, battling Stalin or Hitler or fighting The Man, even games (or other media, like Star Wars) putting this into a fictional perspective are still more blunt than something like this. It puts you into the machine as barely even a cog—if you were gone, nobody would notice, and that’s what’s powerful about it.
It brings you to your worst, thinking “I can’t afford a citation right now so I can’t let this mother into the country to see her child.” It is anxiety-generating, for sure. You dread the next day instead of being excited for it—but that challenge is what brings you back again and again.
There’s not a lot of ludonarrative dissonance at all, the mechanics all go into what you’re meant to think and feel pretty clearly and objectively.
In terms of my own game, what I’ll take from Papers, Please is minimal, but I think that the artstyle is definitely a big inspiration for me and my co-artist, the drab, dim colors, and the pixel art for obfuscation of reality, rendering the player’s anxiety levels to go up, simply because they have to fill in the spaces with their imagination more and more.
The game’s argument lives entirely in its rules. Nobody needs to explain that the system is oppressive, you feel it in the regulations, the timer, the citations adding up. It’s a game about how incentive structures shape behavior, how good people do terrible things when terrible things are proceduralized and rewarded.
