Monday, April 18th

Bret Keough, Anna Romano, Cade Taylor: Pages 28-64 in Persuasive Games

Procedural rhetoric, according to Bogost, is the processes used to persuade someone of something. Then, on page 46, Bogost begins talking about persuasive games. The goal of persuasive games is to make the player keep on playing; to give the game an addictive quality. However, Bogost is interested in videogames that make arguments about the way systems work in the material world. The examples he discusses strive to move the player from the game world into the material world. They're not really intended to be played for amusement. Examples include Tactical Iraqi, Crazy World, and Tax Avoiders. They make arguments about the way systems work in the material world by using visual rhetoric to hypnotize the consumer into continually accessing the media text. That's why it's so important to keep the visuals up to date, because that's what draws in the game's clientele. A downfall for a game would be taking the procedural rhetoric from another game, adding its own visuals, instead of having its own representation; this in turn leads to ineffectiveness. More successful procedural rhetorics have unique ideas behind them in order to avoid audits, income taxes, or CPA charges (according to Bogost). Finally, there is a very distinct difference between Sutton-Smith's rhetorics of play and Bogost's procedural rhetoric: the former characterize broad cultural contexts, while the latter express specific patterns of cultural value. "If persuasive games are videogames that mount meaningful procedural rhetorics, and if procedural rhetorics facilitate dialectical interrogation of process-based claims about how real-world processes do, could, or should work, then persuasive games can also make claims that speak past or against the fixed worldviews of institutions like governments or corporations" (p. 57).