Collocation is practically very tough for Chinese English learners because English and Chinese belong to two distinct language systems. And English and Chinese learners always tend to use distinct ways of thinking, that’s the root of the difficulty for Chinese students to learn English. However, during the half of the semester we learned, shared, discussed the new concepts together, I’ve gained much more knowledge than I thought. From analyzing reading materials like Mary Flanagan’s “Critical Play” as well as Ian Bogost’s “Procedural Rhetoric,” to present our understanding and thoughts, the process of translate obscure definitions into our lucid explanations makes every student fully understand and learn something new. The keywords we encountered in the readings and presented are interactivity, procedurality, value goals, design goals, critical play, and play. I noticed that the concepts of some of the words are highly collapsed, like value goals and design goals (they even use the same chart on the presentation); and all the terms are interconnected.

One of the group presentations attracted me and made me think a lot. The definition of interactivity they gave us is that interactivity provides inputs into a system and waiting for a response and interactivity explains how we are connected to the world around us. That is quite interesting to know this definition because interactivity is not that complicated or elusive as proceduality, on the contrary, interactivity is a common word that people mention a lot nowadays. When we talk about interactivity, we used to think the interactivity used in video games or social media; but this group gave me more thoughts about it like even talk to others and open the door are interactions with the world. The forms of interactivity expression are active control which is a voluntary action that influences the controller’s experience like online target advertising, and two-way communication which is a communication from user to user like pop-up windows or registering for a newsletter. The presenters then talked about personal interaction occurred verbally and nonverbally like conversation and paralanguage. They pointed out the importance of nonverbally personal interaction like eye contact, facial expression, or body movement can provide information, regulate interaction, define the nature of the relationship and impression management. They also emphasized the flaws of interaction, that our judgment is not always accurate as we think during the interaction, we may misunderstand what others actually means.

In conclusion, we can not fully understand the concepts of the two reading materials without the analysis of each groups’ presentations. And not only we gain more comprehensions of each term, but also generate some new thoughts from the connection of them.

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.

Thinking about “Procedural rhetoric, then, is a practice of using processes persuasively. More specifically, procedural rhetoric is the practice of persuading through processes in general and computational processes in particular” (Bogost 3). According to Bogost, procedural rhetoric is a technique using expressive persuasions to lead the users to process the games or systems, for learning and creating sometimes. It is quite an abstract concept, yet we can make it clear once using it in the games. 

Taking the game Her Story for example. The interactive form of imitating the situations that interviewing a suspect (or suspects)  drags players immerse into the game, and that achieves the goal of the game designers which is making the game addictive. I have played several interactive video games like Florence or the Walking Dead, but Her story is quite different. This live-action game is so real while the players watching the clips of video of police interviews that I was thrilled when I piece together the whole story and discover the truth. The ambiguity and less of guide was designed purposely by the game creator to construct an atmosphere of strange and abnormal, and this is a kind of persuasion. 

At first I thought Hannah has Dissociative identity disorder and Eve is her another personality, until the tattoo on her arm reminds me that they actually are twins. Because the game has no clear explanations and is open-ended, I believe some players may not notice that and may have a totally different story in their mind. Also, by searching different keywords in the database can obtain different video clips and thus lead to different conclusions of the story. That is the wonderful design of procedural rhetoric that makes Her Story a perfect detective game.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

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