Read&Play: The Rhetoric of Video Games – Judy He

1. Notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ws0Kt9_NJY4uXVTp681TmokBkKK9RB8HFwTQ3Kc8UVM/edit?usp=sharing

2. I played We Become What We Behold and Adventures with Anxiety.

We Become What We Behold

• The game’s target audience could be the general public, media professionals, or anyone who needs media literacy.
  • Platform: HTML 5, itch.io; creator: Nicky Case! I spent about 10 minutes for the playthrough. https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
  • It is a game about news cycles, vicious cycles, infinite cycles. 
  • I think it’s a very interesting short game. At first I thought I was just taking photos of the crowd but soon I realized from the instructions that the audience has a clear preference from malicious events with conflicts and intense emotions, peaceful, normal and loving captures will not have an effect at all. The only way to continue the game is to capture more provocative moments and eventually the mess becomes more chaotic until everybody gets angry and starts shooting everyone.
  • It is hard to put this game into one genre. On the surface it is a casual point-and-click game with only taking photos being the only action. But I think it is really a persuasive game and a dark satire, a bit like an explorable explanation.
  • Using Bogost’s distinction between more didactic games like The McDonald’s Videogame and more subtly expressive ones like Bully, I would put WBWWB closer to the didactic side. Especially when the TV talks directly to the player – even though most of the game still lets you discover the point on your own.
  • I’d appreciate if the game gives any kind of warning beforehand on shooting and violence scenes, it was pretty triggering when I saw it. I will keep this in mind when I’m designing my own games in the future.
  • What I like about the game is that it got the idea through giving the player very limited choice and therefore agency – it became clear to me that there will only be one outcome despite how I want the opposite to happen. The titles on the TV programs also did a good job getting the main ideas across for the audience in just a few words every time
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  • But this also creates a problem in the game: it blames you for something it forces you to do. This is where the only bit of ludonarrative dissonance occurs: The story only moves forward when you take the inflammatory photo, and then the ending implicates you, even though there was never a peaceful path. Still, I think the rhetorical outcome is effective despite this, maybe even because of it. The only way to “resist” is to stop taking photos, which just freezes the game – similar to how, in real life, the main thing one person can do is stop feeding the cycle. It made me feel a little tricked at first, but then it made me reflect more.

  • Feelings it evoked – amusement at the beginning, then discomfort, then guilt, and a quiet sadness at the end. I knew the photo of the angry square was the “interesting” shot and I took it anyway, because the game rewarded it. The moment that stuck with me most was the zoom-out to the laptop, because it felt like the game was turning around and looking back at me.

  • For my own game, the biggest takeaway is how much one well-chosen action can carry. The camera isn’t just a mechanic here – it is the theme. I want to do something similar in What I Meant to Say, where the act of choosing words, and what gets lost between what you mean and what you can actually say, is the main mechanic instead of decoration. I also like how the TV captions give feedback in the world’s own voice instead of a score, which could be a nice way to show how other characters hear an international student’s words. The tonal bait-and-switch is something I want to keep in mind too – starting light and cute earns the player’s trust before the heavier moments.

    Bogost’s point that making games can be a way of writing arguments, not just a craft or technical practice, also made me think about my own game more intentionally. Take Back Illinois tried to compress each policy position into the smallest possible rule set, and I want to ask the same question for What I Meant to Say: what is the smallest set of rules that makes the player feel the gap between what they mean and what they can say?

    On the other hand, I want to be careful not to blame the player for choices they never really had – or, if there is no real choice, make that clearly part of the point. I also hope my game leaves players with at least a little hope, or an idea of what could go differently, instead of only showing the problem. And I want the big story moments to come out of the mechanics, not be scripted on top of them like the gunman.

Adventures with Anxiety

• target audience: older teenagers and adults, especially people who deal with anxiety themselves or want to understand someone who does. There is alcohol, swearing and sexuality elements mentioned in the game, so it is not really for kids.
• creator: Nicky Case
• platform: HTML5, itch.io
• https://ncase.itch.io/anxiety
• The whole playthrough took me around 20 minutes.
• The game has players play as the anxiety, and you are told your goal is to “protect” the human. The game interface is presented like chat messages screen. The player could “attack” the human with one of three fears: being harmed, being unloved, or being a bad person.
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• This is mainly a choice-based interactive fiction, kind of like a visual novel, but it mixes in a parody of turn-based RPG battles.

• The chat-message format and phone-shaped screen make it feel like you are texting with the voice inside your own head, which is really intimate and also very relatable – a lot of anxious thoughts do happen while staring at a phone. The RPG battle parody makes anxiety’s “attacks” literal and kind of funny, and the human’s energy bar shows how exhausting it is to be constantly hit with fears. The humor matters a lot too, because it keeps the game from feeling like a lecture about mental health.

• Thinking with Bogost’s procedural rhetoric, the battle system makes an argument on its own: every time the wolf “protects” the human, the human’s energy goes down. So the rules say that anxiety’s protection is actually draining you, even when it means well. There is another procedural claim in how the story unfolds – because the wolf overreacts to sandwiches and party invites, the human learns to tune it out, so when a real danger shows up on the rooftop, the human doesn’t listen. It works a lot like a car alarm that goes off so often nobody pays attention to it anymore.

• The possibility space is also very small — mostly choosing which of the three fears to use. But this is where Kenneth Burke’s idea of “identification,” which Bogost talks about, helps me. Because you are asked to pick the fear that feels most personal to you, you start to identify with both the wolf and the human, and I think that is where the persuasion really happens.

• In terms of Jenkins’ narrative architecture, the game relies a lot on evocative spaces – eating alone on campus, a party where you don’t know anyone, a rooftop with a drunk friend – places a lot of players already have feelings about. The art is mostly grayscale with a coral red for the wolf and a few objects, which pulls your attention to what matters. Thinking through MDA, the mechanic is choosing a fear to attack with, the dynamic is the human’s energy draining and the human pushing back, and the aesthetics move from humor to recognition, discomfort and finally relief.

• I also liked the idea how the game externalizes anxiety as something external to the human, which probably is borrowed from CBT ideas in psychotherapy.

• I think the message is that anxiety isn’t an enemy – it is a part of you that is trying, very clumsily, to protect you, and it has its own fears too. A healthier relationship with it means neither obeying it nor shutting it up, but listening to it and working together. And I think it was successful to get the message across overall. It made something as vague as anxiety feel concrete and gave me a language for talking about it – the three fears are a really simple way to name what is going on.

• For the most part I don’t think the game suffers from ludonarrative dissonance. The two small things felt similar to We Become What We Behold is – in the early chapters the game rewards you for being as anxious as possible, since the scene only moves forward when you drain the human’s energy; and while the game looks like a choose-your-own-adventure but most choices don’t change the story.

• The thing I most want to borrow is Case’s trick for branching stories: make the choices matter to the player, even when they don’t matter to the story. Asking players to pick the option that feels most personal turns a choice into a moment of self-reflection – Case calls the game an “augmented self-reflection” tool. I also love the idea of turning an inner state into a character. For my game, I could imagine personifying the words an international student wants to say but can’t find, or the thought behind them. The chat-message interface is another thing I want to remember, because it makes text-heavy games feel intimate instead of like reading a book. And breaking the UI to show that the relationship has changed is a gimmick I would love to try in some form.