Bogost Part 2

I enjoyed this part of Bogost more because he seems to be bringing his many pieces of interesting points together to make a much larger picture.

It was interesting to think of his writing on procedural rhetoric while playing the persuasive games in class today. I thought of his idea of digital rhetoric, and the fact that the medium plays a big part in the rhetoric. I think I saw the reflected in the games. The biggest part that alienated me from the people in the airport game I played was not just how they were drawn or their lack of speech, but how I felt nothing when I was in the middle of forcing them to remove their clothes to go through security. It was the lack of interaction even as I was directly interacting with them that stuck with me.

I also thought of his idea of the visual rhetoric. The three games I played had almost no speech. The front of it was the visuals and the mechanics. The debt game had a ridiculous comic setting but seemed to be using that to ram home how awful the topic could get. The airport game was extremely mechanical, ridged and stress-inducing, adding strong emotion to the simple design.

I'm still trying to figure out the idea of a persuasive game, though. Are all games persuasive? At first I would want to lean toward yes; though I will say that there are many different levels of persuasion.