Procedural Rhetoric in Videogames

Unpacking Procedural Rhetoric in Videogames: A Student's Guide to Persuasion in Play

Videogames are more than just entertainment; they are a powerful expressive medium that can persuade and influence players. This concept is central to procedural rhetoric, the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions. Unlike traditional forms of rhetoric that rely on spoken words or images, procedural rhetoric leverages the unique capabilities of computational systems to make arguments and shape perspectives. This article will explore what procedural rhetoric is, how it functions in videogames, and its implications for understanding the persuasive power of play.

What is Procedural Rhetoric? Definition and Core Concepts

Procedural rhetoric refers to the practice of persuading through processes, especially computational ones. It's about using systems of rules to generate behaviors and outcomes that convey meaning or an argument. This differs fundamentally from persuasion through static text or images because it relies on the player's interaction with the system itself to build understanding.

• Processes and Persuasion: Procedures define how things work—the methods, techniques, and logics that drive systems. Procedural rhetoric uses these processes persuasively, much like an orator uses words or a filmmaker uses visuals.
• Computational Foundation: The computer's defining ability is to execute a series of rules. This procedurality is the core practice of software authorship; rather than authoring a representation directly, one authors code that enforces rules to generate representations.
• Meaning Through Interaction: Procedural systems generate behaviors based on rule-based models, producing many outcomes that conform to the same guidelines. This interaction of algorithms creates meaning.

Procedurality: The Engine of Digital Persuasion

Janet Murray, in her influential book Hamlet on the Holodeck, defines four essential properties of digital artifacts: procedurality, participation, spatiality, and encyclopedic scope. For Murray, "procedural" refers to the computer's ability to execute a series of rules. This capability distinguishes computers from other media.

• Software as Rules: Software is composed of algorithms that model how things behave. To write procedurally means to author code that enforces rules to generate a representation, not just the representation itself.
• Beyond Bureaucracy: While "procedure" often invokes notions of bureaucracy or fixed, unquestionable rules, procedurality in this context refers to the fundamental concept of authoring processes. These processes can be explicit, like court rules, or implicit, structuring behavior in subtle ways.
• Cultural Processes: Even seemingly simple actions, like customer service policies or military interrogation methods, are built from numerous interacting cultural processes. These procedures, whether rigid or flexible, structure human behavior and invoke underlying values.

For example, Owen Gaede's 1975 simulation game Tenure illustrated how a teacher's seemingly minor decisions regarding grading, classroom rules, or student issues intertwine with personal and professional politics. The game argued that educational practice is deeply affected by school politics, not just pedagogical goals, by having players interact with a system of rules that reflected these complexities.

Rhetoric Reimagined: From Oratory to Code

Rhetoric, traditionally defined as the art of persuasive expression, has evolved significantly. From classical oratory to modern media, the concept of persuasion has adapted to new forms of communication.

• Classical Rhetoric: In ancient Greece, rhetoric (Greek: rhētorikē) was primarily public speaking for civic purposes, aiming to persuade listeners to a particular opinion or action, such as in law courts or assemblies.
• Beyond Oratory: Over time, rhetoric expanded to include written and artistic modes. Kenneth Burke broadened the concept, suggesting rhetoric is about "identification"—the use of symbolic systems to join interests and facilitate human action in general.
• Visual Rhetoric: The rise of photography and cinema led to the study of visual rhetoric, exploring how images persuade by influencing attitudes, opinions, and beliefs. However, visual rhetoric alone is insufficient for understanding digital media, as images in games are often constructed and sequenced by code.
• Digital Rhetoric's Shortcomings: Traditional digital rhetoric often focuses on text and image content in digital spaces (emails, websites) without adequately accounting for the computational underpinnings of that presentation. It tends to treat the computer as a black-box network appliance rather than an executor of processes.

Procedural rhetoric fills this gap by focusing on how computers, through their inherent procedurality, construct arguments. It acknowledges that videogames are not just displaying information but actively modeling systems and inviting players to experience and understand those models.

Videogames as Persuasive Systems: Real-World Examples

Videogames, from mass-market commercial products to obscure art objects, possess the power to disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs. This power lies in their procedural rhetorics, not just their content.

• Tenure (1975): This early simulation game demonstrated how educational practice is intertwined with personal and professional politics. Players navigated complex decisions, revealing the underlying processes of high school administration. It made a convincing argument about the indelible mark of politics on learning.
• Military Procedures (Abu Ghraib): The questions raised about military interrogation procedures during incidents like Abu Ghraib highlight how procedures dictate actions and can imply underlying ideologies. In games, these procedures can be modeled and interrogated.
• Retail Policies: Consider the different experiences of returning a defective DVD player to a human clerk versus an online system. The computer's inflexibility exposes the explicit procedures, while a human might "bend the rules" by enacting new processes (e.g., promoting repeat business), demonstrating how procedures can be layered and context-dependent.
• Persuasive Games Studio: Ian Bogost's own studio, Persuasive Games, explicitly creates videogames designed to have an impact in domains like politics, advertising, and learning. Examples discussed in the book stem from this attempt to theorize and practice procedural rhetoric.

Building Blocks: Procedural Figures, Forms, and Genres

Just as literary works have figures, forms, and genres, so do procedural representations:

• Procedural Figures: These are standardized or formalized "unit operations" that take on common roles in multiple procedural systems. Examples include:
• Graphical Logics: Movement, gravity, collision detection (common in game engines).
• Textual Logics: Natural Language Processing (NLP), text parsers (like in Z-machine text adventure games), or n-grams for text generation.
• Interface Logics: Scrollbars, push-buttons, operational logics for opening/saving files (common in software frameworks).
• Procedural Forms: Collections of procedural tropes, analogous to a sonnet or a short story. A physics engine, for instance, can facilitate diverse expressive practices.
• Procedural Genres: Emerge from assemblages of procedural forms, akin to film noir or science fiction novels. In videogames, these include platformers, first-person shooters, or turn-based strategy games. Recognizing gameplay often means recognizing similarities in constitutive procedural representations.

The Power of Interaction: Interactivity, Play, and the Enthymeme

Interactivity is a crucial, though often vague, concept in digital media. For procedural rhetoric, it means meaningful responsiveness to user input, creating an environment that is both procedural and participatory.

• Sophisticated Interactivity: Not just more buttons or faster reactions, but tighter symbolic coupling between user actions and procedural representations. This allows for greater empathetic and dialectical engagement with the system's arguments.
• Play as Possibility Space: Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman define play as "the free space of movement within a more rigid structure." In videogames, this refers to the myriad configurations a player might construct to understand how the inscribed processes work.
• Procedural Enthymeme: Interactivity can produce an effective procedural enthymeme, where a proposition in a syllogism is omitted, and the player (or listener) is expected to fill in the missing proposition through their interaction. For example, in Chris Crawford's Balance of the Planet, players set environmental policies, and the game's complex interrelationships implicitly argue about ecological and economic causality. The player completes the argument by observing the outcomes of their decisions.
• The Simulation Gap: The ontological position of a videogame resides in the "simulation gap" – the space between rule-based representation and player subjectivity. Players perform significant mental synthesis, filling this gap to complete the game's procedural arguments.

Games like Grand Theft Auto III offer a broad expressive space not just because of the player's ability to "do anything" (which is constrained by game parameters), but because the player's manipulations and gameplay effects create a powerful interplay. The game's procedural rhetorics are completed by player interaction, even if the computational "listening and thinking" are limited.

Why Videogames?

Videogames are a particularly relevant medium for computational persuasion and expression for several reasons:

1. High Process Intensity: Videogames tend to run more code and do more with code than other computational artifacts, demanding significant CPU resources. This high "crunch per bit ratio" suggests greater potential for meaningful expression.
2. Popular Form: They are perhaps the most prevalent form of expressive computation, making them a powerful vehicle for widespread cultural influence.
3. Cultural Meaning: Videogames hold cultural meaning as computational artifacts, relying on the computer to bear their meaning, unlike, for example, a word processor used to create an expressive text.

Domains of Persuasion in Videogames

Procedural rhetoric in videogames manifests in several key domains:

• Politics: Games can expose how ideology functions and how political processes unfold. They can explore public policy and political campaign discourse by modeling systems and allowing players to interact with the consequences of political decisions.
• Advertising: Games offer a new era of advertising beyond mere product placement. They can deploy "demonstrative" advertising by articulating the function of a product or service through procedural rhetorics, allowing players to experience its utility.
• Learning: Videogames offer new ways to teach procedural literacy, not just specific knowledge or abstract principles. They can address values and aspirations, allowing players to critique business, social, and moral principles by experiencing them through simulation, as seen in "exergames" that translate personal training rhetorics into active play.

FAQ: Common Questions About Procedural Rhetoric in Videogames

What is procedural rhetoric in videogames?

Procedural rhetoric in videogames is the art of using the game's underlying rules and systems to persuade players. Instead of explicitly stating an argument, the game's mechanics, interactions, and simulated processes convey a viewpoint or prompt players to draw conclusions through their actions and observed outcomes.

How is procedural rhetoric different from visual rhetoric?

While visual rhetoric uses images and visual representations persuasively, procedural rhetoric focuses on the persuasive power of processes and rules. In videogames, images are often constructed or sequenced by code, making the underlying procedures the primary mode of persuasion, not just the visual presentation itself. It's about how the system works to make an argument, not just how it looks.

Can videogames really change people's beliefs through procedural rhetoric?

Yes, procedural rhetoric can influence players' fundamental attitudes and beliefs. By creating models of real or imagined systems and allowing players to interact with them, games provide experiential learning that can be deeply impactful. When players experience the consequences of different actions or policies within a game's rule set, it can challenge or reinforce their understanding of how those systems operate in the real world.

What are some examples of procedural rhetoric in educational games?

Educational games that use procedural rhetoric often model complex systems. For instance, a game might simulate historical events to show the interplay of social, economic, and political factors, rather than just narrating them. Tenure, for example, taught new teachers about the intricate politics of a school environment by having them make decisions and face the consequences within a rule-based simulation. Other games might simulate ecological systems to teach about environmental impact or economic models to explain market forces. For more context, you might explore the concept of Serious game.