10 Big Pieces: Bogost, Persuasive Games

Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
Ian Bogost
The MIT Press, Cambridge MA 2009

Summary

Bogost takes as his subject matter “procedural rhetorics,” “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, imagies or moving pictures” Videogames thus have a “unique persuasive power,” not, as the Serious Games movement would have it, “equivalent to the content of video games,” but rather “this power lies in the very way videogames mount claims through procedural rhetoric.” Also contrary to the Serious Games movement, which he says “sought to create videogames to support existing social and cultural positions,” videogames “can disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world, leading to potentially significant long-term social change.” (ix)

Bogost claims that because “computers function procedurally, they are particularly adept at representing real or imagined systems that themselves function in some particular way – thiat is, operate according to a set of processes. The computer magnifies the ability to create representations of processes.” (5) Procedural representation, then “explains processes with other processes… rather than language.” (9)

Citing Sid Meier’s definition of gameplay as “a series of interesting choices,” Bogost observes that “[i]nteresting choices do not necessarily entail all possible choices in a given situation; rather, choices are selectively included and excluded in a procedural representation to produce a desired expressive end.” (45) Thus, “meaning in videogames is constructed not through a re-creation of the world, but through selectively modeling appropriate elements of that world…. some subset of a source system, in order to draw attention to that portion as the subset of the representation. Interactivity follows suit: the total number and credibility of user actions is not necessarily important; rather, the relevance of the interaction in the context of the representational goals of the system is paramount.” (45-6)

Bogost, in discussing a game called Antiwargame, observes that “[i]f procedural rhetorics function by operationalizing claims about how things work, then videogames can also make claims about how things don’t work.” (85) By exposing the procedural logic of political systems, procedural rhetorics “articulate the way political structures organize their daily practice; they describe the way a system ‘thinks’ before it thinks about anything in particular.” (90)

“Procedural rhetoric,” Bogost states, “is precisely what is missing from current uses of technology for political and civic engagement.” Games embodying such rhetoric “can have a political impact because they allow players to embody political positions and engage in political actions that many will never have previously experienced, and because they make it possible for players to deepen their understanding of the multiple causal forces that affect any given, always unique, set of historical circumstances.” (135)

Bogost criticizes Gee’s concept of “situated” or “embodied” learning from What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. He claims “it is not strong enough,” that videogames offer not just meaning and experiences of real and imagined worlds and relationships, “they offer meaning and experiences of particular worlds and particular relationships. The abstract processes that underlie a game may confer general lessons about strategy, mastery and interconnectedness, but they also remain coupled to a specific topic,” taxation in Sim City, or criminality in Grand Theft Auto. (241)

He concludes, “As creators and players of videogames, we must be conscious of the procedural claims we make, why we make them, and what kind of social fabric we hope to cultivate through the processes we unleash on the world.” (340)

Critique and Analysis

Bogost spends much of the book critiquing the Serious Games movement for being a handmaiden to the existing sociopolitical elite, but clearly falls into the same trap, reminiscent of the modernist criticisms of modernism described in Does Technology Drive History. There is seemingly no room for player agency in Bogost’s games – they merely are led through a series of constrained choices to accept a biased rhetorical conclusion. Serious Games would reinforce hegemony, Bogost claims to challenge it, but both using tools of disempowerment and hegemonic discourse.

Bogost’s criticism of Gee comes close to the mark, however, and one of the strengths of the book is that it is grounded in specific rhetorical procedures, in specific games, with specific real-world consequences, not creating abstracted player communities or learning outcomes, as both Gee and Sicart tend towards.

Bogost’s book is a good companion piece to Castornova’s: it is the reality of manipulative power in service to the existing order (whether as proponent or opponent, both buy into and limit their discourse to the status quo) that Castronova is blind to. Couple Bogost’s persuasive tools to Castronova’s real world as game world, and you get a nightmare of the denial of agency and freedom of thought much worse than that of the 20th Century dystopians.

Utility

Any “educational game” needs to address the assumptions of the Serious and Persuasive games movements. There is a narrow channel between their embrace of the light-democracy power structure on the one hand and deracinated utopianism on the other. This is where Post is of particular value, with his focus on gamelike governance structures, with strong player agency (contra Bogost) that manage immense power in the real world.