Video games as an Expressive Medium, Industry Surge, and Cultural Struggles

Video games are an expressive medium, meaning that they represent real-world situations and systems. Players are conditioned to interact with those systems and are thereby invited to form an opinion and cast judgments about them. The growth of video games as an expressive medium demands creative progress from the games industry and critical progress on the part of the academic community, so that deeper knowledge may be acquired of the way video games work—and precisely how players are influenced to take action within a game. Video games are certainly a legitimate medium to compare, even to the high-arts. While video games struggle for legitimacy, millions of players worldwide are opting out of reality for hours each week to play video games. The gaming industry has now surged over 100 billion dollars in revenue annually. Despite games' worldwide commercial success, games still remain to be accepted as a cultural form. Educators are particularly amenable to equating time spent on games to idle, or wasted time. However, games are more than “empty entertainment”, they provide valuable insight into how the world works in a rather unique way.

Video Games and Oratory vs. Visual rhetoric

There exists rhetoric beyond its traditional, controversial form. At a fundamental level, rhetoric is all about effective persuasion or the effective expression of an idea, which includes the nonverbal domain of expression, visual. Video games often employ verbal and visual rhetoric, but both fall short in addressing the rhetorical function of procedural representation, procedural rhetoric. When you play a video game, you probably aren't focused on the composition of the gameplay -- that is, how the game was deliberately constructed to elicit a certain response or experience for the player. When games want to make a player behave in a certain way, they do so through rhetorical strategies underpinning how a game is programmed. This rhetorical strategy is called procedural rhetoric, which is “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures.” (Bogost, 2008).

Procedural Rhetoric and Ian Bogost

Procedural rhetoric is a term and concept coined by academic and video game designer Ian Bogost. Procedural, in procedural rhetoric, does not refer to the procedural programming paradigm in computer coding, nor does it refer to bureaucratic procedures. Instead, a procedure can be thought of as something that simply defines certain rules and constraints to allow and deny specific play experiences. Bogost coined the term from Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, in which she referred to procedurality as a computer’s “defining ability to execute a series of rules.” (Murray, p.72) Bogost suggests that, “This ability to execute a series of rules fundamentally separates computers from other media.” Game developers’ ability to use code to define the rules and constraints of the game gives them the ability to persuade players to view the world according to the procedures of a particular game. Contemporary rhetoric focuses on the oratory art of persuasion while procedural rhetoric focuses on the gaming system, processes, rules, and procedures as a means to persuade the audience, that being players.

Procedural Rhetoric in Action

I will use the video game This War of Mine, a war survival computer game, as an example of procedural rhetoric. This War of Mine is unique in that it depicts a war experience from a civilian's perspective, all while the game forces the player to consider the consequences of one’s actions by embedding its political and ethical messages almost entirely in its rules and mechanics. Bogost argues that “we can learn to read games as deliberate expressions of particular perspectives. In other words, video games make claims about the world, whichplayers can understand, evaluate, and deliberate.” (Bogost, 2008, p.119). Following the affordances of the game, we must make decisions on the basis of selective characters' personalities. Each character has their reactions to moral and interpersonal behaviors such as committing crimes, aiding people, or consoling others. By judging the result of our actions, the game may allocate success or failure, implicitly encouraging certain courses of action through rhetorical procedures. How do games like This War of Mine encourage moral reflection, and what aspects of its rhetorical narrative require ethical choices? From a player's perspective, one might make moral decisions based on what would expect to be the correct winning strategy after being instructed by the procedures of the game. This War of Mine follows suit to the rules of the real world; poor decisions may result in the character feeling emotional turmoil, while actions that can be considered “good” may never be rewarded. There are a plethora of rules governing time, physiological and psychological needs, character interaction, and ethical choice, but there is no clear effective “winning strategy”. The rules and procedures are structured so that the player feels the anxieties and sadness of being a civilian caught in warfare. This War of Mine makes players consider the real-world consequences of social, political, and cultural behavior that could eventually lead to a war-torn landscape. Effectively, This War of Mine has strong procedural rhetoric because it makes players consider the effects of their actions in a social complexity while also making a statement on the consequences of war.

Programming and Developing, Game Procedures, Possibility Spaces

When programming a game, developers must actively be aware of their audience. Game developers must know how to inspire extreme effort and facilitate cooperation and collaboration. “Procedures (or processes) are sets of constraints that create possibility spaces, which can be explored through play.” (Bogost, 2008) “Software is composed of algorithms that model the way things behave. To write procedurally, one author's code that enforces rules to generate some kind of representation, rather than authoring the representation itself.” “video games more frequently and more deeply exploit the property of the computer that creates the kind of possibility spaces that we can explore through play. Furthermore, unlike productivity software such as word processors and spreadsheets, video games are usually created with some expressive purpose in mind; they represent models of systems or spaces that players can inhabit, rather then serving as mere tools.” “Video games depict real and imagined systems by creating procedural models of those systems, that is, by imposing sets of rules that create particular possibility spaces for play.” **A well-crafted possibility space, therefore, constrains a player’s actions, and is within a range that they understand clearly. This may be through physical exploration of the boundaries of the space, or through gaining an understanding of the mechanics by exhausting all possible actions available.

Game Mechanics

Procedural rhetoric is specifically concerned with how games make claims about the real world through processes; a claim may address material aspects of our world like war or conceptual ones, like teamwork. Additionally, certain games may have procedural elements that are not persuasive and are simply game mechanics that are necessary to the game but make no coherent claims about the real world. For example, consider the video game Mario Kart. Players may collect boosts and shoot red and green shells, but these game mechanics reference the logic of the game world, are entirely self-referential, and therefore are not part of the procedural rhetoric. The visual aspects that govern games often mimic aspects of the real world, such as a day and night cycle. These may be a procedural representation of the material world but make no decisive claim. Nevertheless, aspects of a game may have the unintended consequence of having procedural rhetoric even if it wasn’t intended by game developers. Cultural, social, or political values may have influenced the development of the game in that it unintentionally makes a claim about the real world.

Conditioning and Compelling Nature of Video Games, Reality Abandonment, Time Investment

Gamers work hard at games: they invest time and effort, they overcome challenges and respond to failure by trying harder. They enthusiastically invest their best efforts in the game with no thought of extrinsic reward. They are compelled to achieve the goal of the game, despite its rules and constraints. Instead of providing players with more immersive alternatives to reality, game developers should be responsible for providing the world at large with a better and more immersive reality through procedural rhetoric. Developers should continually challenge players with voluntary rules and constraints to put our personal moral and ethical strengths to better use. A game that continually uses procedural rhetoric to challenge players to consider their full range of interactions and motives is a successful game.

Video Game Pedagogy and Real-World Applications

In the past decade, game studies have emerged as a burgeoning branch of pedagogy. Consequently, a great variety of forms of games have been programmed to complement learning practices. “In the context of digital media and learning, video games offer two overlapping opportunities. In one, players can learn about aspects of the world that particular games models, such as consumption in Animal Crossing or urban planning in SimCity. This is a kind of subject-centered literacy focused on examples of human practice.” In a game like Animal Crossing, the game mechanics are centered around monotonous busywork, but players willingly choose to perform these tasks because it helps them feel content and productive in their residence. Video games also offer the possibility of teamwork across large groups of people, emphasizing collaboration, cooperation, and contribution. What would happen in a workplace if the insights from gaming are considered? In a game focused on examples of human practice that also uses procedural rhetoric, players work hard and love even the most mundane tasks while conceptual aspects of our work, like teamwork and collaboration, are rewarded.

Citations

Bogost, I. (2008). Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT Press.