Bogost Reading

The reading starts out with Bogost talking about a game that was played in the 70’s called Tenure for the PLATO computer system. The game allowed the user a creative and strategic approach to your first year of teaching. Every action has a consequence. Every small thing that you would do now would affect your future coming up. That is when he introduces procedural rhetoric as the practice of using processes persuasively. I'm not big on politics, but it would be very interesting to see a modern day politican game that used a similar concept as Tenure.

Procedural rhetoric is thought provoking, especially in the context it was used. Procedural is the way of creating, explaining, and understanding processes. Processes are defined as the methods, techniques, and logics. The term rhetoric is open to more interpretation.

It is interesting to find out that the term rhetoric is often thought of as negative, and looked at as a smokescreen the with language used to confuse, occulate, or manipulate people. The term was around in Plato over 2,500 years ago. The reading goes through various different definitions of rhetoric. My favorite is the art of persuasion.  

As a designer, I could relate to visual rhetoric also known as visual arguments. Bogost says, to create visual rhetoric, it requires a visual argument. In order to create that argument the visual has to supply the audience with reasons for accepting a point of view. Everything needs to be strategically placed to clearly convey your message. Digital rhetoric did have me kind of confused at what he was trying to say. So is this the study of how we use rhetoric within our various digital media’s blogs, message boards websites?

In my opinion, I enjoy what we are learning about, rhetoric and video games is awesome. But the way we learn about the theory behind the scenes could be presented in a much more effective way. I feel like some of these paragraphs could be shortened to key bullet points a rhetoric filled summary with visual arguments with what is being presented.