Game Wars: Bogost Strikes Back

In the second half of the Bogost reading, the author digs into digital rhetoric, procedural rhetoric, interactivity, and video games.

He says that "digital rhetoric tends to focus on the presentation of traditional materials... ...without accounting for the computational underpinnings of the presentation." In other words, digital rhetoric uses traditional forms of discourse without considering the structure which binds everything together. It could almost be considered a not self-aware procedural rhetoric in that it has aspects of other forms of rhetoric but is not conscious of the underlying processes.

Bogost then goes into more details about the ramifications, limitations and philosophical crossovers of procedural rhetoric.

Chris Crawford's relation of interactivity to a conversation, or "a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak" and that "the quality of the interaction depends on the quality of each of the subtasks (listening, thinking, and speaking)"  took me aback.  It's simplicity is baffling.  And in its simplicity, this statement has elucidated how I think about what interactivity means.

Another concept that, to use the cliche, stopped me in my tracks is that video games can be broken down into a system of nest Aristotelian enthymemes that compel the player to complete the interaction.  Even just putting a name to the idea of the enthymeme, leaving out a bit of information in a discourse to have the listener come to it on their own, is both empowering and inspiring.