Bogost Reading

To be honest, this reading was a bit too "academic" for my attention span. That said, I think there's some important stuff here. The rhetoric of video games can be really interesting. This reading for me seemed like it was more trying to explain that video games are expressive/rhetorical, where I was hoping it would be more detailed about how video games can be persuasive and what designers can to do to take full advantage of that.

So what stood out most to me were the ideas of procedural rhetoric and digital rhetoric. Bosost defines procedural rhetoric as "a technique for making arguments with computational systems and for unpacking computational arguments other have created." To me this basically just means that how a programmer designs a game or writes the code determines what rhetorical discourse can occur when someone plays the game. I think this is an interesting perspective because I would normally think of rhetoric as more of a conversation, with more immediate interactions between people throughout the discourse, but with video games and this "procedural rhetoric" there seems to be more of a separation between the programmer and the player. There's no real give and take, it's more like a programmer puts something together with certain intentions or guidelines/procedures put in place, and then it's left up to the player to engage with it as much as they want.

The other interesting idea was the distinction between visual and digital rhetoric. I'm pretty into photography and movies, so I get visual rhetoric and how that works, and I've always carried that over to digital things like websites and video games, but Bogost separates the two. I'm not entirely clear on what he means by digital rhetoric, but I think it's something to do with how code is structured to support things like visual and written texts in video games. Good stuff...