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.