1.0 Reading Notes – The Rhetoric of Video Games (Ian Bogost)
My biggest takeaway from Bogost is that a game’s rules are not simply there to make it playable. They can communicate an argument about how the world works, whether the designer intends this or not.
A few ideas stood out to me:
Play and possibility spaces: Rules define what players can and cannot do. Meaning emerges from exploring those possibilities, including discovering their limitations.
Procedurality: Unlike books or films, games can model how systems behave. Players interact with processes rather than simply reading or watching representations of them.
Procedural rhetoric: Games make arguments through rules, actions, and consequences. Bogost’s example of Animal Crossing illustrates how debt and consumerism can be experienced through gameplay without an explicit lecture about either.
Ideology: A simulation inevitably includes assumptions about the world. The designer determines which relationships exist, which behaviours are rewarded, and what success looks like.
Critical play: Players should question the systems presented to them rather than assume they accurately represent reality.
I found Take Back Illinois particularly interesting. Bogost describes a political game where winning requires adopting particular policy choices. Players experience an argument, but the simulation doesn’t establish whether that argument is correct. The designers have already decided how those policy choices affect the world.
This raises a question for me as someone who builds educational software: How often do we mistake what our systems can measure for what we actually want learners to achieve?
A system might reward speed, correct answers, or completed activities. Those are measurable, but they are not necessarily equivalent to understanding. Bogost’s reading made me think about how easily we can encode a particular definition of success into software, then forget that we were the ones who defined it.
2.0 Playing Adventures With Anxiety
- Game: Adventures With Anxiety
- Creator: Nicky Case (2019)
- Platform: Web browser (HTML5)
- Genre: Interactive visual novel / psychological comedy with turn-based battle elements
- Audience: Likely teenagers and adults interested in understanding anxiety, emotional wellbeing, and the relationship between thoughts and behaviour
- Playtime: Up to 1 hour. Multiple rounds
One of the most interesting moments in Adventures With Anxiety was when the game congratulated me after the human character’s energy had been completely depleted. I had supposedly succeeded. But what exactly had I achieved?
A game that congratulates you for making someone miserable
In this game, I play as anxiety itself, represented by an animated red wolf. My responsibility is to protect a human from potential danger. The problem is that almost anything can become dangerous: eating a sandwich, attending a party, or seeing other people looking happy on social media.
The game’s genre makes this possible. Most of the interaction happens through dialogue choices, but the game borrows the visual language of combat games, complete with opposing characters, energy bars, and victory screens. Instead of attacking someone with weapons, I attack them with worries.
The mechanics are simple. Their implications are less so.
2.1 When protection becomes the problem
The first screenshot I captured shows the wolf treating an ordinary sandwich as an immediate threat.
Figure 1: The wolf warns that the sandwich is putting the human in danger.
There is something funny about the absurdity of the warning, but the humour also reveals how the system works. Anxiety interprets ordinary experiences through the possibility of something going wrong.
The social-media sequence made this even clearer. The human looks at photographs of people enjoying themselves and begins wondering why they cannot be like everyone else.
Figure 2: The human compares their life with pictures of apparently happy people.
What interested me was the limited range of responses available to the player. In one scene, the choices include encouraging the human to attend a party or worrying about the white bread that might be served there.
Figure 3: Even the apparently positive dialogue option comes with another potential threat.
The player appears to have agency, but the choices remain within the wolf’s anxious way of interpreting the world. I could choose what to worry about, but I couldn’t simply decide that everything was fine. This connects to Bogost’s concept of the possibility space. The game’s constraints are not just limitations on interaction. They express something about the experience being represented.
2.2 The problem with measuring success
The game’s most interesting design decision, to me, is how it defines winning.
As the wolf, I am meant to protect the human. Yet the battle system rewards me for exhausting them. When the human’s energy reaches zero, I receive a congratulatory message.
Figure 4: The game congratulates the player after the human’s energy has been depleted.
The end-of-round summary then reports my activity across three categories:
– Being harmed: 3
– Being unloved: 2
– Being a bad person: 1
Figure 5: The game summarises the fears generated during the round.
I found this particularly interesting from a software engineering perspective. We often design systems around measurable objectives. Once an objective is defined, the system can track progress, provide feedback, and reward success. But what happens when the objective is a poor representation of what we actually care about?
Here, the wolf is trying to protect the human, but its measurable achievement is the amount of distress it produces. The game intentionally exposes this contradiction.
This also reminded me of a challenge I have encountered when designing educational technology. We can measure correct answers, time spent learning, and completed activities. But those indicators do not automatically tell us whether a learner has developed understanding or independent judgment. This game turns a similar problem into a game mechanic: the player can become extremely successful at doing something fundamentally unhelpful.
2.3 Connections to other course concepts
The game also connects to Jenkins’s discussion of narrative architecture. It is primarily an enacted narrative: players participate by selecting what the wolf says, but within a largely authored story. The environment and interactions evoke familiar experiences such as social comparison, fear of rejection, and second-guessing everyday decisions.
Through the MDAO framework, the mechanics are relatively small dialogue choices and energy bars. The resulting dynamics involve repeatedly generating threats and watching the human’s ability to respond diminish. The emotional effect shifts from amusement at the ridiculous wolf to discomfort about the consequences of its behaviour.
That transition is where I think the game becomes rhetorically effective.
If I were to talk about how the game made me feel, I would say it made me feel uncomfortable towards the end of the first round when it became certain that the game rewards sewing distress, discomfort and draining the energy of the human character in the game.
2.4 Possible ludonarrative dissonance effect
There appears to be a contradiction between the wolf’s stated purpose of protection and the gameplay reward for causing distress. However, I don’t think this is unsuccessful ludonarrative dissonance. I think the contradiction is the argument.
Bogost discusses The McDonald’s Videogame, where the player’s pursuit of business success encourages ethically questionable decisions. Similarly, Adventures With Anxiety uses a misleading definition of success to expose the problems with the system’s underlying logic.
My criticism is slightly different. Because the choices are heavily scripted, I sometimes wonder how much of the conclusion I am discovering independently and how much the designer is steering me toward it.
2.5 What I would take into my own game design
Playing Adventures With Anxiety made me reflect on my current P2 game, Silicon Crossroad which is designed around everyday student decisions and their longer-term consequences.
In Silicon Crossroads, players make choices that affect their Knowledge, Wellbeing, and Network scores, eventually leading to different outcomes. But Adventures With Anxiety made me question whether players might simply try to maximise these scores rather than reflect on the trade-offs behind their decisions.
What I particularly appreciate about Adventures With Anxiety is how it uses a simple mechanic to expose a contradiction: the player is rewarded for protecting someone in ways that actually harm them. It’s a reminder I want to carry into my own design: the outcomes a game rewards can communicate a stronger message than the one its designer intended.
