Post # 5, Bogost Chapter 1

The first chapter of Ian Bogost's book, Persuasive Games: the Expressive Power of Videogames, is launched by Bogost's extensive explication of the terms procedure and rhetoric, in order to familiarize the reader with his term procedural rhetoric. Procedure, he says, has a negative connotation in our society. It is often equated with bureaucracy, stifling laws, and bending to someone else's authority.  In other words, procedures are understood to structure our behaviors and actions, often seeming obsolete. In actuality, a procedure is really much more benign; it is merely a means of executing processes, and those processes are what define the way things work. Procedures, then, are much more helpful than we are wont to give them credit for. To illustrate this point, Bogost offers a scenario of a consumer who buys a DVD player that turns out to be defective. The consumer only discovers the DVD player is defective after the two week maximum on returns to the retailer has passed. In one part of this scenario, the consumer takes the defective DVD player back to the retailer and is engaged by a human customer service representative who--swayed by empathy, logic, or expediency--alters the procedure and allows the return. In the alternate scenario, the defective DVD player is purchased from an online retailer and the return process is handled by a computational program. The return is denied because it is handled by a computer, which is inflexible and incapable of empathy. The more important point that Bogost is trying to make with these two variations on the same scenario is not that you will get a different result for the same procedure depending upon whether you engage a person or a computer; instead, the more important point being made is that if it weren't for a (return) procedure, it might never even occur to the consumer that an unwanted or defective product could be returned to a retailer. Thus, procedures don't just limit behavior, they can also encourage it.

The term rhetoric, also carries negative connotations in our society. When people think of rhetoric, they may be inclined to think of corrupt businesses with spin-doctors who try to limn shady practices positively, or academics who use esoteric language to obfuscate what they're saying. Probably the most relevant example of negative rhetoric comes courtesy of American politicians who toss the word around as a way of denigrating their political rivals. But rhetoric has a very long history and was not originally seen the way that it tends to be today. Bogost states that, "Rhetoric in ancient Greece--and by extension classical rhetoric in general--meant public speaking for civic purposes." (15). Rhetoric was a very necessary skill for the ancient Greeks, particularly because they had to defend themselves in public courts; in this respect, I liken rhetoric to eloquence. But in the grander sense of the word, rhetoric is the skillful and effective use of communication. This communication can be oral, written, visual, and multimodal. As an undergrad, I double majored in English and Visual Arts. My art focus was graphic design. By the time I graduated in 2007, the art department changed the name of the focus from graphic design to visual communication. My coursework included learning typography, design principles, page layout programs, web design, and a number of other programs all for the purpose of creating effective and compelling communication: rhetoric.

Bogost uses the combined term procedural rhetoric to describe the practice of using processes persuasively. Persuasive games, he reasons, are "videogames that mount procedural rhetorics effectively." (46). It is not enough for a game to have compelling visual rhetoric, which is what most current-generation games focus. A truly persuasive game must have strong procedural rhetoric. In fact, it seems to me that Bogost believes that a game can be persuasive at the expense of being visually appealing, but that the converse may not also hold true. Bogost gives the game Tax Avoiders as an example of a game with unimpressive visual rhetoric but very strong procedural rhetoric. The game effectively employs process, in that it conveys at the very least a basic understanding of tax procedures.

Questions:

1) Do you agree with Bogost about the negative connotations behind the word procedure?

2) How can video games help remove the stigma associated with the word rhetoric?

3) If a game employs outstanding procedural rhetoric but lacks impressive visual graphics, how likely would you be to play it?