Mini-Essay Five: Excuse the Rant

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The first striking difference between Gee’s “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy” and Ian Bogost’s “Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames” is the readability, but there is also a difference between the topics of each book. While Gee was interested in the pedagogical aspects of video games, Bogost’s book focuses on the rhetoric of videogames—how videogames make arguments.

Bogost’s preface discusses the fact that videogames still struggle to be taken seriously in almost all realms—not just as persuasive tools. He then moves on to explain the topic of his first chapter, procedural rhetoric, which he defines as “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures” (ix). Similarly to Gee, Bogost writes that “videogames can also disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world” (xi), which Gee discussed in the context of the cultural model. I imagine that this sentence is particularly important to Bogost’s argument for videogames as rhetorical, especially since he spends a large portion of the first chapter giving a brief history of rhetoric.

Bogost begins by admitting that rhetoric often invokes negative connotations—especially since our definition comes from the definition used to describe the Sophists’ ability to “make the worst argument the better.” This, however, is only one aspect of rhetoric. Bogost informs readers that “[r]hetoric in ancient Greece—and by extension classical rhetoric in general—meant public speaking for civic purposes” (15), and gives the example of Plato’s Apology. (I find this to be an interesting example because Plato explicitly argues that he should not be put to death because he is not a Sophist—he doesn’t attempt to make the worst argument the better, but rather engages in the Elenctic method, thus leading to aporia on the part of the other interlocutor.) In the next section, “Rhetoric Beyond Oratory,” Bogost explains that “[i]n discursive rhetoric, persuasion is not necessarily so teleological” (19), which is a point Gee tried to make throughout his text—videogames don’t necessarily have to have an end result, or at least not an end result that involves “winning” the game.

In his discussion of visual rhetoric, Bogost writes that “[t]he preferential treatment afforded to verbal rhetoric underscores the continued privilege of speech over writing, and writing over images. Philosopher Jacques Derrida argued against the hierarchy of forms of language, giving the name logocentrism to the view that speech is central to language because it is closer to thought” (23). Interestingly, this is a topic I discussed in one of my first blogs. Though this idea is discussed briefly in “Visual Rhetoric,” I believe that it is central to the arguments that videogames can make because they don’t often rely primarily on language, though videogames today do seem to include language as an important part of playing.

After what I consider to be a number of (helpful) tangents, Bogost returns to the idea of procedural rhetoric, which he defines anew as “the practice of using processes persuasively, just as verbal rhetoric is the practice of using oratory persuasively and visual rhetoric is the practice of using images persuasively” (28). His choices of games to use as examples are interesting, especially in light of Gee’s book and our discussion in class of “bad games”. Bogost finds that the games he mentions are bad because of their lack of procedurality, but I find that they are bad in so many other ways. I find his example of Freaky Flakes to be an especially bad one, considering that both he and Gee think that videogames can “disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world” (ix). Freaky Flakes, Bogost notes, is incrementally more procedural than such games as Retouch—despite this fact, I still think that it’s a bad game and that Bogost actually seems to buy into the thing that makes it a bad game in the first place. Though this is certainly a tangent, I think that it’s very important to make note of the fact that Bogost criticizes Freaky Flakes for being less procedural by saying that “[t]he user creates a cereal box, but every box yields the same result (even combining the superhero and the princess ring yields the congratulatory message, ‘Your box looks great!)” (34). I think that Bogost would benefit from reading Gee’s chapter on cultural models and taking into consideration his idea that superheroes and princess rings can’t be enjoyed by the same (male or female) child.

This, of course, is not the point of the first chapter of Bogost’s book (it’s merely a point that I couldn’t ignore). Rather, Bogost’s first chapter discusses the ways in which videogames can be used as rhetorical models and continue to be both serious and playful (which we have learned are not mutually exclusive) and finally, persuasive.

Questions:

1. Bogost writes that “educational games translate existing pedagogical goals into videogame form” (57). Having read Gee, do you believe this is true? If it’s true, are video games being used to their greatest potential?

2. Taking into consideration Gee and Bogost, what do you think is wrong with Fogg’s list of persuasive technology tools (on page 60)?

3. Which examples from this book are good examples of what we should include in our Second Life game? Which are bad?