Blog 2

To understand procedural rhetoric, we need to make clear the essential meaning of each word and the basic form of expression. Procedural rhetoric is often used by creators especially in video games for guiding users persuasively to achieve success in the tasks. Designers may use some techniques like dialogues with NPC or change of background sound to lead players push through the story. Also, the designers that use procedural rhetoric as persuasion can achieve their goal during this process.

Every video game is designed to reflect designers’ ideology and persuade players to accept that ideology. Bogost introduces an idea about procedural rhetoric and videogames is an example to explain this idea. Video Games are persuasive and expressive during interactivity. On the foundation of videogames are interactive, players can experience meaningful expression and persuasion. According to Bogost, “But video games are uniquely, consciously, and principally crafted as expressions. As such, they represent excellent candidates for rhetorical speech — perception and expression are inexorably linked” (Bogost, 45). Video games are designed purposely to persuade players immerse into the games, and sets the interactivity to achieve meaningful expression and persuasion. Video games represent the meaning of rhetorical for it shows effective and persuasive expression during the process of playing games. As the game her story shows, the designers assigned all video clips and persuaded players to find out the whole story by themselves. That’s a good example of that video games are consciously and principally crafted.

Obviously, procedural rhetoric is crucial and useful in many areas. We can say every design of interactions or rule-based representations that exists in our lives is using procedural rhetoric. We can learn ideology or thinking of the designers that they want to convey through the interaction. And the players may also have a good experience though the process of enacting. In another way, the persuasion used in the process of procedural rhetoric sometimes in a way that compels users to be addictive on playing the games. For example, slot machines utilizes psychological configurations of players, the eagerness of winning, to get players addicted to gaming by spit out coins intermittently to reward gamblers. Nevertheless, some video games can bring effects to the players’ decisions or attitudes of the material world, like developing new interests, learning some new skills, or expanding horizons. Video games have much more significant impact than we think in our daily life.