Bogost Reading

Ian Bogost starts his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames by introducing us to the idea of procedural rhetoric and what it can do in the realm of video games.  He uses the example of the game  Tenure, where the creator Owen Gaede creates a complex interlinking system to simulate the process that a school actually runs on.  Through its system design, we can see that personal politics affect the operation of the educational institute.  By using these systems, or processes as Bogost calls them, to persuade or comment upon the effect of those processes we can enter into a new sort of discourse-- Procedural rhetoric.

After laying down this large concept, Bogost recognizes the inherent ambiguity in those terms and digs into defining what he interprets procedural and rhetoric to mean as separate ideas.

Bogot outlines the history of modern Western rhetoric.  He starts with how in Socrates' time, rhetoric was public speaking for civic purposes. He continues on with Aristotle's definition of rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" and the difference between rhetoric and dialectic speech--reasoning that leads toward an unknown conclusion.  After that Bogost touches on the more recent developments of Kenneth Burke in the 20th century.  Then Bogost gets to the juicy stuff, the idea of a visual rhetoric --a rhetoric completely unique to visual media--  which is just started to being understood.  He hits us last with the scramble over digital rhetoric, which he and other researchers believe is not being properly addressed.  There is a temptation to use spoken and visual rhetoric to define all of digital rhetoric, but there is one element unique to digital rhetoric that is not being considered -- procedurality.