#procedurality

[thatcarlygirl]

Bogost (2010): Games know how to win friends and influence people. As do I.

Processes influence us. They seed changes in our attitudes, which in turn, and over time, change our culture. As players of videogames and other computational artifacts, we should recognize procedural rhetoric as a new way to interrogate our world, to comment on it, to disrupt and challenge it.

Bogost, I. (2007).  Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

[koopmode]

[overthinkingvideogames]

On procedurality and "procedural rhetoric"

The ever-productive Ian Bogost spent much of his 2007 book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames attempting to define how videogames influence players (such as by imparting political messages). He defined this ability of videogames as an entirely new form of rhetoric, "procedural rhetoric," "a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation."

To quote Sicart's response to the proceduralist movement,

What proceduralism (and ludology) argued was that computer games present a technological and cultural exception that deserves to be analyzed through the ontological particularities that make computer games unique, in this case, the fact that they have a “procedural nature”.

[...]

Proceduralism is interested in the ways arguments are embedded in the rules of a game, and how the rules are expressed, communicated to, and understood by a player. Via their simulation rules, games present embedded values, and it is the players’ appropriation and understanding of that model that make a game have meaning

[...]

But what is the message that proceduralism communicates? Why is procedural rhetoric a better way of understanding the seriousness of games? In essence, procedural rhetoric argues that it is in the formal properties of the rules where the meaning of a game can be found. And what players do is actively complete the meaning suggested and guided by the rules. For proceduralists, which are after all a class of formalists,4 the game is the rules, both in terms of its ontological definition (the what in what is a game), and in its function as an object that creates meaning in the contexts in which specific usersuse it.

Sicart's article is a wonderful overview of the field, as well as what he views as the field's weakness: an over-empehasis on procedure and rules that makes the player less than what he or she is--less than a

living, breathing, culturally embodied, ethically and politically engaged being that plays not only for an ulterior purpose, but forplay’s sake. The missing part in proceduralism is that player who plays for the myth, and not for reason; for the other players, and not for the game; for the game, but not for the message.

In Procedural Rhetoric, Civilization, and "You Didn't Build That!", Jason Hawreliak responds to Sicart and uses Civilization III as a key example of procedural rhetoric: 

What Civilization also shows, however, is that government spending is not often immediately recognizable. People generally think, “What have you done for me lately?” and government projects are often terribly long term. They fade from memory, and people rarely thank the government when driving on a highway, for instance. Although the “real time” of a game ofCivilization is not long by today’s standards (though length can vary tremendously), the game time or time span of Civilization is incredibly long. A decision to build a great wonder like the Pyramids, for example, may take the player 50 turns and several hundred years. In this way, Civilization accurately represents the long, often invisible hand of government, necessary but unspectacular.

So all in all, I think procedurality remains a useful and dynamic approach for analysing videogames, and I think we can recognize procedural rhetoric in “real life” issues as well. But this doesn’t mean that we should exclude other components when looking for meaning in a game, and I don’t think Bogost ever suggests that.

Hawreliak also draws one's attention to three other works that use the Civilization series to make a point about procedural rhetoric.

For Casey Wilson, Civ 4 "is an excellent example of one in which the nuances it ignores are as integral to its argument as those it foregrounds."

Jorge Albor notes that Civ V "alone may not be all that persuasive, particularly for gamers who seem so damn good at ignoring a game’s fictions, it functions within a greater discourse about civilization and progress that does, in fact, sway popular perceptions and global policies. Designers and players should first and foremost navigate the intersection of digital systems and global systems critically, before we become enraptured by fun alone."

Kurt Squire also addresses the hidden lessons of Civ and how "Civilization III enlisted students’ identities as gamers and created a space where they could bring their own experiences to the study of world history"

For more on procedural rhetoric, I recommend:

Bogost's Gamasutra article on "the proceduralist style"

This entry in VersusCluCluLand's "Essential Jargon" series

Bogost's response to this debate/dialogue in Culture Digitally

Voorhes' attempt to integrate procedural and rhetoric criticism in his discussion of Final Fantasy

Tanner Higgin's discussion of the concept of "race" (and critical race theory) in videogames from a procedural rhetoric standpoint

J. Nicholas Geist's interactive review of Infinity Blade