Bogost, and Narrative Redemption in the Digital Moment

The Rhetoric of Video Games

 A key term in Ian Bogost’s essay “The Rhetoric of Video Games” is the term  Procedurality.

Procedurality gets its name from the function of the processor— Procedurality is the principal value of the computer, which creates meaning through the interaction of algorithms.  This ability to execute computationally a series of rules fundamentally separates computers from other media.

It gets interesting when Bogost dives into a definition of classical rhetoric. What I consider the heart of Classical Rhetorical Procedurality to borrow Janet Murray’s term, is nicely summed up by Bogost:

“The adept rhetorician does not merely follow a list of instructions for composing an oratory…he musters reason to discover the available means of persuasion in any particular case.”

But that’s really Aristotle. It’s gets better when he brings in Kenneth Burke, which leads us to a Visual rhetoric  “Visual communication cannot simply adopt the figures and forms of oral and written expression, so a new form of rhetoric must be created to accommodate these media forms.”

Digital Rhetorical artifacts seek to persuade, both by the computer’s seemingly omnipotent distributive properties. The first is wider distribution of traditional argument couched in visual and written persuasion of author-generated argument, speech acts deployed in a unilateral fashion, for instance, something like “Global warming is bad” http://news.discovery.com/earth/videos/dnews-earth-videos.htm

It’s in the second category where Digit Rhetoric gets interesting, by offering a new means of enforcing Procedurality, especially in gaming.  “The McDonald’s game seeks to challenge notions of capitalist excess, challenging the general public’s indifference to the material, or real-world impact of shoving cheap hamburgers in your face.  “They aren’t aware of it, but they do it” (Marx).  Indeed: if Herr Marx were around today, he would love this game, and likely get a repetitive-stress injury from overplay. 

 Bogost uses it to highlight a sort of redundant point that the computer can be used to “to sketch a few different ways video games can be used rhetorically, whether for design, critique, or learning.”  America’s Army is another stretch.  Bogost quotes the designer of the game as saying “All players abide by rules of warfare. If a player violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice, rules of engagement, or laws of land warfare, reprisal is instant. He will find himself in a cell at Fort Leavenworth, accompanied by a mournful harmonica playing the blues. “   There’s nothing really novel in that; all of these codes, values and rules- The Procedurality of War, if you like, are instilled in soldiers during indoctrination and subsequent training.  The face that the military sees shooter games as a way to reach the more-uh, post-modern soldier- via video games is a sobering thought.  It’s a turgid, eats-your-veggies claim but the reality of cause and effect of shooting people while in uniform may be dampened by repeated exposure to FPS games. “ Continued violation of the rules may cause a player to be eliminated from the game. To rejoin, he must create a new ID and restart.”

 I resent this oversimplification that surrounds FPS. Personally, I thing FPS has a desensitizing factor in many cases. I realize it’s a turgid, eat-your-veggies kind of argument, and while drone pilots at Fort Carson don’t get blood on their uniform while spoiling Afghan wedding parties, just as academic and programmers can defend the instructional value of shooting virtual people, but ask the marine who was at Fallujah; he’ll have a grasp what cause- and effect is like, Both viscerally and physiologically, in analog warfare.  In other words, there’s no rest for PTSD.

But Gaming to me isn’t all bad: it has an immediate appeal, in that the user is no longer a Spectator, but an Protagonist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdNplzdx5OM

The one aspect of gaming- or Digital Rhetoric- that is the Affordance offered by the computer to extract a  story from the Narrative Space, reconfigure it, and re-distribute it in the Digital Sphere.  Form the console to the laptop the Internet, it's an empowerment of the viewer unimagined before the Rise of the Digital.  And while it has long been argued that the Gamer enters the FPS Narrative Space, rather than merely watching it. (E.g. Grand Theft Auto) it’s really limited by the Procedurality encoded by the game’s designer.  Then again, entering the Narrative is hardly a fresh idea:

 But another, affordance is upon us: the ability to harness the game’s engine to the Users will. This a radical departure that Digital Media allows; the pre-eminent example are short Machinima films, where pieces of Narrative FPS games are grafted together in a sequence determined by the User/ Author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima

This short, by the director of “ The Road”, and the awesome must-see Australian western, “The Proposition”, exemplifies the power of this new digital narrative medium.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZUUVV2rjoc

But then again, sometimes the power to shape narrative doesn’t always inspire a leap forward, and the user echoes the values of the original text (in this case the FPS game Red Dead Redemption).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptzhsa1y_NM

Although perhaps this parody of an infomercial  echoes the McDonald’s game in pointing to a darker truth about American  culture, by offering an indictment of America’s economy of violence in the widespread distribution and marketing of firearms?

Either way, like Hilgard's Machinima piece, it's a remediation of culturally vacuous FPS game material, shaped into something  of value, an artifact grounded in Aristotelian structure: a story, and perhaps an offering of Narrative Redemption at the Digital Altar. 

The Value of Mimicry and Playing

Roger Caillois defines what it means to “play” in comparison to “work” within adult world in his book, Man, Play and Games. The distinction between the real world and the world of the game is separated by the rules that can define a game however are often not always respected in the real world. The freedom that also exists to play a game that does not entail any form of salary or monetary exchange related to the real world makes the outcome of the game arbitrary except for terms of entertainment or amusement. While these rules and restrictions on what actually constitutes “playing”, the relationship between games and the impact on the players of the game may affect the behavior of players when they are not longer playing. Callois points out how this form of crossover related to “mimicry” will often “cross the border between childhood and adulthood”. The importance of this time of “play” is so crucial that one would have difficulty discovering passion if they are not able to actually have time in structured work or education where the goal is not entertainment.

Mimicry will often consist of scenarios where the individual must make decisions where the consequences can be understood in another form of context. The child is “thus confronted with a diverse series of manifestations, the common element of which is that the subject makes believe or makes others believe that he is someone other than himself” (10). While the individual is often faced with obstacles in their own world of imagination, creativity to advance the game and alter the rules will lead to scenarios where one can be the happiest. When compared with our own education system, I am actually surprised that student is not presented with more opportunities to engage in mimicry prescribed by instruction of the teacher. The value of playing a game that is not make of strictly one’s own imagination is that new possibilities become available similar to the parameters of more modern games. This form of copying helps to reflect where a child might feel a particular passion for what they enjoy as entertainment or even their favorite kind of game.

The Game of Life

Taking a procedurally demarcated perspective on video games is an interesting way of opening up the idea of games, turning it into a more abstract concept. Even the word itself, games, invokes images of non-productivity and wasted time. Instead, shifting the definition into an open, rhetorically defined conceptual framework, allows for the understanding of games to take in a wider dimension of meaning. Games such as SimCity are in some ways certainly videogames, but in other ways can be seen as instructive templates for an understanding of our world. Growing up, I would lose dozens of hours designing my metropolis. As soon as my expansion seemed to be nearing completion, I found myself grappling with old power plants, griping overtaxed citizens and special interest groups all with an ax to grind. Although in many ways the financial advisor in the game such as SimCity does not model reality, in some very important ways it does. Creating a balanced budget is an important concept to grasp.

The potential of video games to be used as a learning tool is often overlooked. The association with gaming is one of children with nothing better to do and antisocial computer programmers. Perhaps these generalizations are representative of the gaming population to a large degree, but that does not necessarily have to be so. Remodeling a game such as SimCity, Animal Crossing or even World of Warcraft to incorporate more realistic lessons can potentially prove useful to society in general. There isn’t a reason in the world that in a developed country where everyone has a computer we can’t have basic mathematical concepts, economic drives and constraints, and the basics of barter and trade taught through an interactive game. The market trading system and World of Warcraft is an example of something approaching a decent analogy to the stock market. Putting aside for the moment whether or not one believes in the validity of the trading of stocks or the companies behind them, the idea of a free market of the items traded between individuals and controlled by supply and demand, is an interesting one to study.

The procedural rhetoric of video games can be defined in any way suitable to the purpose of the game designer. This creates an open field for exploration and new media. From games detailing political policy such as Take Back Illinois, to detailed trainings of military ethics in combat, the groundwork is already being laid for increasingly revolutionary hybridization between learning and gaming. Breaking games out of the confines of the stigmas associated with them is a necessary step in redefining the relationship between the idea of games and the education of society.

Free and under control?

There was a moment while I was reading Galloway when I thought to myself- just how much control do we have over technology? I'm not talking about the kind of doomsday out of control scenario that happens in the movies; a computer that takes over the world and becomes more powerful than the average human. I'm thinking more along the lines of the amount of agency that we are able to exhibit when playing a video game ore simply surfing the web. Galloway discusses the notion of control and by making reference to Deleuse who defines control not in terms of being restricted or necessarily bound by something, but having the ability to act freely in an inherently constrained environment. The freeway for example, gives drivers the freedom to go wherever they want under the framework provided by the freeway. In other words, they are bound by the roads of the freeway itself. Moreover, while they are free to drive to a myriad of places, they must follow the roads that have been predetermined by civil engineers. Galloway suggests that this particular understanding of control is "key to understanding how computerized information societies function. It is part of a larger shift in social life, characterized by a movement away from central bureaucracies..toward a broad network of autonomous social actors." This shift, put forward to Galloway, characterizes much of what we take for granted when operating a computer. Take Facebook, for instance. When wasting time on Facebook, I have always felt as if I were in full control of what I was doing- I can post pictures when I see fit, comment on other people's post when I feel like I have something to say, or just idly scrolling down my newsfeed. Like the realm of video games, Facebook is constructed in a way that gives the user freedom but also constrains users to only being able to act in a certain way. The obvious example would be posting inappropriate messages or pictures. Inappropriate posts will be reported and deleted by the system; reminding you that you aren't in full control of your profile. Further, Facebook is set up in a certain way to make us feel that we have all the agency in the world, while restricting our freedom when it sees fit. 

What does Galloway and Deluse's definition of control mean for the relationship between computers and users at large? I find the whole notion of being "free" but in a controlled environment a little problematic. It undermines the freedom we want to believe in and hold so dear to our uniqueness as a society. On the flip side however, I think Deluse's interpretation of control and freedom is much more nuanced than a blind understanding of freedom as being limitless. Computers have their limits. They are not omnipotent machines and they really never will be because they are a product of human intelligence and creativity. The "computers taking over the world scenario" seems unlikely to me in a world where Deluse and Galloway are right because computers will always have a limit and we as individuals will always be bound by our own conventions and conformities. 

Video Games

While I don't consider my self a "gamer," I do enjoy playing videogames. I remember my first encounter with console play, when I was 4 years old playing "Super Mario World." Of course since then, each time of play was limited because my parents felt that too much playing wouldn't be beneficial. If only they knew it would eventually be a suitable career. Even today after there are so many professional gammers and Youtube personalties that have taken gaming as part of there career, the way Ian Bogost discussed the view of "play" as a trifle and a distraction, something childish, still holds true today. This career choice or even lifestyle, to me is still looked down upon, especially by the older generations. I feel sentiments as, "get a real job," are still thrown around because of the views of play. This is going to change as the "gamers" of today become the parents of tomorrow, understanding the concept of play.

One of the interesting parts of Bogosts is that playing is exploring the possibility space with in the procedure. All which is centered around human practice. Looking at the games released throughout the years, I understand that there are ideologies being perpetuated. Such as the damsal in distress ideology, that is the driving force to the plot for many games. It's hard to imagine that games I play are rhetorical. I understand when discussing games like Animal Crossing, Bully, Sim City, etc. how each reflect some human practice and that allows for critique or exposing ideologies. Are all game arguing something? Are there any games that don't have arguments? Even if games do or do not argue, they all have procedures that allow the player to explore a possibility space. I don't think early game developers would ever imagine that  video games would be used to argue or critique or even be rhetorical.

Why We Play

Why do we play games? The obvious answer is entertainment, but it goes deeper than that. From a young age, we are taught how to play, by ourselves and with others. We are rewarded for winning or exhibiting good behavior, and we are reprimanded for cheating and rule breaking. Playing, Caillois says, is an activity located entirely outside serious, ordinary life. I’m not so sure that I agree.

Sure, games can be sorted into the “escapist” category alongside movies and television. We can delve into the controlled arena of game play to escape from the harsh realities of our world. But the two dimensions are not totally disconnected, and even though rules and outcomes may remain in one realm or the other, attitudes, behaviors, and feelings easily flow between.

As I mentioned, playing games is a learned skill. Children are expected to gain certain traits through game play, like honesty, teamwork, and determination. We don’t do this for nothing. We frame these important life lessons as games so the kids have an easily discernible reason for participating. But, we don’t really care which kid wins Simon Says. We just want them to listen to us.

I don’t mean to say that games are all just a sham meant to control people. I’m just noting that the worlds may not be so separate. Look at professional athletes in our country, who are held up as idols for playing games for a living. Their behaviors on the field, court, or rink don’t end when the buzzer sounds. Many athletes have off the field issues related to aggression. Many pursue a lavish lifestyle, spurred on by their heightened status. In a way, their entire life is a game. It is impossible to separate the game from the player.

The Scope of Procedural Rhetoric

Bogost's inception of Procedural Rhetoric opens a whole new view of videogames, and what's going on beneath the surface. I've actually played Animal Crossing (his prime example) in a situation where two housemates were also playing it, and the consumerism at the core of the game became a competitive focus for us - and when one got tired of the consumerism, there was very little to motivate one to play the game. There is a question, though, of why some game developer wants to promote rampant consumerism.

Procedural Rhetoric, though, doesn't seem to me like something that's really limited to the video game. The concept seems almost Foucaldian, creating indoctrination through repetitive reenactment. Furthermore, there are real situations that seem to fit perfectly as examples of Procedural Rhetoric. Primary education springs to mind - while there is certainly plenty of knowledge taught, all the basic procedures that make a person into a normal, productive member of society are also taught there. It also could be applied to the Stanford Prison Experiment, and a number of similar studies that reveal that humans can be easily trained to act in certain ways, just by being in certain situations.

The video game is probably the *easiest* way to enact Procedural Rhetoric, but certainly not the only one. It does, perhaps, reveal it in a much clearer way than looking at other practices.

Procedural Rhetoric

I was very interested by Bogost's term procedural rhetoric in regards to gaming. Games represent how real and imagined systems work, and make it so players can interact with those systems and form judgments about them. Bogost draws on the history of rhetoric and analyzes rhetoric's function in videogames. Though it might seem like it at first, videogames aren't classified under visual rhetoric (using imagery and visual representation persuasively.) Videogames seem to open a new door for persuasion and create an entirely new rhetoric.

Bogost's "procedural rhetoric" is a type of rhetoric tied strongly to technology and computers. It is based on running processes and following rules. The example of The McDonalds Game is given to illustrate procedural rhetoric at work.The game is an obvious critique of McDonald's business practices where the player has to manage a third-world cattle pasture and raise them as cheaply as possible. It even goes as far as having the player negotiate with and bribe lobbyists to reduce complaints against the company. This example is quite overt, but being aware of procedural rhetoric is very important. Just like all rhetoric students learn, it is our job to be cautious and highly attuned to the types of rhetoric that exist everywhere in our lives. Bogost's argument was very intriguing because it explains a rhetoric that was born with the digital age that will only progress. We need to take these videogames seriously and get to know them well in order to learn the complexities and possibilities of rhetoric within them.

Play

    To engage in the practice of playing is to relieve stress and have fun, enjoy ourselves, as the premise goes, the opposite of work and school.  I would go further and say that this is a time and space in which a lot of learning takes place because, within parameters or rules, we exercise other things and, we do sort of "work and produce".  We exercise our imagination, our ability to negotiate skills, mental or physical.  This is a platform where we can develop relationships with others and ourselves; it renders productivity of another kind, development of self and community as we learn to depend on others reciprocally.

    If we look at what Bogost says, adopting a definition of play from Salen and Zimmerman, "play is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure." to which, Bogost goes on to say: "Understood in this sense, play refers to the "possibility space" created by constraints of all kinds." (page 120).  This is critical because it brings to mind an openness and, a kind of permission to discover yourself and, give yourself the permission to be the newly discovered self, after all, it is play. The "sky is the limit" with this "possibility space".

    Transforming this energy into the digital sense, we see there is no limit to what the imagination can do to produce video game after video game, producing its own culture along the way. The video culture is the playground platform, or "possibility space" for taking the practice of play to another dimension, for people of all ages, check out Bogost's website: www.bogost.com.

Human and Reality

A Human life can be seen like a role-playing game, as the character gains more experience and levels higher in rank usually indicating by numbers, and this can create two very separate realities for one individual. The way I would define reality is what the brain constructs the environment in which we perceive as the laws of the universe. Virtual reality is a man made reality in which laws and physics are constructed to fit its own universe. Reality is what shapes us of who we are because we are confined within in its limits of the perceivable world. But as much as the physical reality shapes us, so too does the gaming world with its own language and physics because it influences us to think in that universe’s manner. A role-playing game can form communities and shooting games can create aggression. These characteristics have as much influences on us as physical reality can construct social groups, friends, and social norms. For many people, games aren’t “games”, instead, they are their own reality where their in some sense free on the physical world.  

Why wouldn’t anyone want to live in a game where you, the player, control the surroundings? We can’t automatically fly with a thought, but with a game we probably can. This reminds me of the movie “Inception” where Cobb can create his own world, but later realizes he missed the physical world. Games or virtual reality can’t offer us the same sensations as we feel in physical reality, however it can come close. We use all these different cues (stimuli that gives us an idea of the world) to help guide our mind and these offer us bodily sensation to which we can feel (anxiety, relaxation, fear, happiness) to a level that can’t be perceived in virtual reality. We want to control, but the cost of that would let us loose a lot of our sensations, in which many ways rewards us of the feeling of being alive.

Re-conceptualizing film

Despite the density of the Kittler reading, I came to view the history of film, especially in the context of its technological evolution, in an entirely different light. I wanted to share my thoughts on a particular quote the struck me instantly as relevant and blog worthy- "Since it's inception, cinema has been the manipulation of optic nerves and their time." When sitting and enjoying a movie on the big screen, it is only natural to get lost in the fiction of it all: overwhelmed with special effects music, action scenes and if you're lucky, even some well-written dialogue. Everything can seem so complicated, that it's difficult to establish a starting point for how the film came about and how it pulled itself together. Films today, are filled with complexities and while they are complex, I think Kittler makes a very powerful point about their humble beginnings. Film is a manipulation of the same optic nerves as photographs and their entire existence depends on the nature of photography.
Since, the science of photography is a prequisite to filmmaking, Kittler challenges the reader to try to make a distinction between where photography ends and film begins. Moreover, "it is arbitrary to say where the development of the moving pictures began and it is impossible to see where it will lead" (117). Did the art and science of film begin when movement was formerly introduced to the cinema? Or "did it start when the first presentation of successive pictures at such a speed that the impression of movement resulted?" (117) These questions are posed to the reader at the beginning of the article, when the reader has a rather simplistic view of film. However, as I continued on reading about the various instances in which historical figures such as Edison and Chamberlin interacted with film and photography, answers to the above questions became much more blurred and less one-dimensional. Admittedly, before reading Kittler, I held a much more simplistic understanding towards film; I saw film as a process that involved great collaborative efforts amongst individuals and while this is true, there is an entire mechanical aspect of film that has to do with the "manipulation of optic nerves and their time." Aspects that boil down to the tiny pixels and angles used by photographers.

Tom Gunning

Gunning

Not to the discredit of Gunning's writing, but I fear I might have joined the ranks with that insufferable camp of skeptics marching to the credo "There's nothing new under the sun!" During the passages describing the "drying up of experience and its replacement  by a culture of distraction", my first impulse was to completely accept this argument (126). I believe our modern generations had surely fostered a uniquely grotesque culture-less and lifeless environment, replacing the meaning and excitement of pre-industrial life with the monotony of manufactured industrial life. I came so close to believing that in this modern era we had vested so much of what was missing in our lives in the "phantom embrace" of cinema and aesthetic attraction.
Then I remembered the famous opening lines to one of my favorite works of literature:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
I feel that writers like Kracauer, who envisioned the age of cinema as a particularity in relation to the rise of the "cult of distraction" and "pure externality" (the response to a central lack in the life of its audience, particularly that of the working masses), are romanticizing the past. I find it hard to believe that we (humans) were all leading particularly meaningful and conscious lives before industrialization/modernization/cinema. Aesthetic attraction and forms of spectacle have always accompanied civilization. The same things have not always been attractive throughout the ages, but there were nonetheless attractions. I see no reason why we should single the modern experience as fragmented though the succession of attractions when Augustine was writing of the phenomenon of curiositas versus voluptas in the 4th century (124). Humankind, for as long as there has been entertainment, has straddled the line between voluptas (the pure pleasure that accompanies the contemplation of beauty) and curiositas (the disease of curiosity, the desire for knowledge for its own sake, the reason monsters and anything out of the ordinary are shown in theatres, and the power to lead astray) (124).
-James Ghaleb

Summon the Infinite Horde

The use of computer animation to enhance movies has been on a sharp upward trend as the technology has developed. The sheer cost of hiring thousands of extras, not to mention orchestrating them into a coherent whole, would have prevented much of the modern battle extravaganza during previous decades.

 It is interesting to consider the idea of an infinite army of characters. In previous incarnations of film there wasn’t the same feeling of the multitude and infinite nature of on-screen entities. Having the capability to easily stretch the size of the field of view beyond all sides of the frame, allows for creation of a new experience for the viewer. This infinite nature creates in the viewer the feeling of awe, and often invokes images of insurmountable power. Before the age of computer animation, films able to utilize massive scale depictions were few and far between. It is now commonplace to create such epic landscapes as a Greek battlefield, a horde of Orcs, or duplication of the same character, which stretch on endlessly into the distance.

What happens when the paradigm shifts again? Conceptualize the possible coming era of anti-CGI movie production with retro stunts and manual camerawork. Where the magnificent and inconceivably large becomes mundane through overuse, we may touch upon an age of digital regression. Just because it is possible to create a massive army of CGI warriors, doesn’t necessarily mean it has the same authenticity as production value done using actual human beings. Regardless, the central theme of pop cinema is the utilization of cutting-edge computer-aided graphics; a theme that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

The Magic of Film and Cinema

The reading by Tom Gunning titled, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator" really made me think about the relation between magic, illusions, and film.  He talks about how the first audiences encountered film, or moving images, with no tradition with which to understand it, "reduc[ing] them to a state usually attributed to savages in their primal encounter with the advanced technology of Western colonists."  Basically, film and moving images were met with complete shock and awe as if they were magic.  I never truly thought about how deep a connection film and acting has to illusions and magic, they all, as the article says, "labour[] to make visual that which is impossible to believe."

What I find interesting is the various methods by which cinema and the aesthetic of attraction has changed over time.  It went from being a majority of addressing the audience in a very direct way, for example in the early train films, an exaggerated confrontation in the form of experiencing the train flying directly at you, to narrative action and empathy with characters, their worlds, and their situations.  I feel that a huge focus of today's cinema is getting viewers lost in the fictional world and its narrative, whereas past cinema might have had mechanisms to make the viewer aware that they are still watching a film.  It has become about the viewers connection to the world.

A prime and really cool example of this modern sort of structure of film is the video below, a really cool sort of compilation of the filmography of 2012, enjoy.

-Daniel Francis