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Disputing "procedural rhetoric as dialectic"

I disagree with Bogost's framing of why procedural rhetoric can be good dialectic. Let's being with Charles Hill's claim about verbal texts. He says they are "made up of discrete meaningful units" (35). Bogost challenges this the uniqueness of this quality to verbal text, pointing out that by the nature of computing, videogames must be composed of discrete meaningful units that are also logically consistent and perhaps even more so than humans. I might be interpreting Hill's claim differently, but I think Bogost misses the point. By "discrete meaningful units" I believe Hill to mean that they are explicit units. By explicit I mean that the propositions in a verbal text are presented to the audience/reader/assembly/whatever in such a way that the audience is well aware that these propositions are being presented. The reason this leads me to disagree with the idea of procedural rhetoric as being good dialectic is because in videogames, these propositions are almost never explicitly declared. Take the following example:


You're playing a video game.

You kill a monster, and you get experience for it.

When you get enough experience, you unlock better abilities, equipment, etc.


Essentially the game is suggesting:

  1. Given, killing = experience

  2. Given, experience = power

  3. Therefore, killing = power


When was the last time a videogame explicitly told you "we posit that the use of force, specifically in the form of violence, is a legitimate mechanism by which to attain power"? They don't and that's why I take issue with videogames as dialectic. Videogames don't even make it known to begin with that they are suggesting a position to begin with. How do you have a debate with someone who doesn't know they're even debating? I suspect that most video game players do not have a Socratic moment when they encounter their first monster in an RPG and say "wait, I must recognize that the designer is positing the argument that violence is a legitimate means to acquire power and must now ponder whether this is morally correct." For a dialectic to be occurring, the parties involved must understand the question being posed to them and that's simply not the case in most videogames.


Another issue I'd like to point out is Bogost's response to procedural rhetoric as not allowing for objections, and that being okay because "One usually makes rhetorical claims precisely

to exclude opposing positions on a subject, not to allow for the equal validity

of all possible positions." (37). This is baffling to me because this suggests the rhetorical claims being made are perfect and impermeable to any and all counter arguments. At least that's the only way any rhetorical claim could not allow for the equal validity of all possible positions. But this is absurd; of course rhetorical claims aren't airtight, of course people can challenge and reply. Unless you're discussing the laws of nature or something, rhetorical claims are never invincible. Bogost's only response to legitimate counterarguments seems to be that legitimate counterarguments are that they simply are not being expressed in the videogame: "This is a reasonable objection; but such a wholesale revision might imply a different simulation entirely, one that would be outside the expressive domain of the artifact." (37). I find Bogost's statement to be an admission of the inability of videogames to be dialectical: he is suggesting that games cannot be dialectical because they are incapable of responding to alternative positions or counterarguments.


Finally, I'd like to qualify my position by saying that while I do not believe videogames can be entire self-contained dialectics alone, it is entirely legitimate to call them parts of a dialectic. I think it is legitimate to design videogames as propositions ("I posit that killing monsters for XP leads to a world that looks like this"). But the back-and-forth nature that is inherent to a dialectic can never be captured entirely by a single videogame.

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