We Become What We Behold is a scary game about us. The way it the game works is you take pictures of whatever you want and it shows up on TV. The scary part is that the only pictures anyone seems to care about are one's that promote hate and violence.
The game employs an unsubtle brand of procedural rhetoric. You can take pictures of whatever you want, but nothing will really happen, the game won't progress at all, unless you take a picture of the thing you're clearly "supposed" to take a picture of. You'll get a nice little repetitive headline ("Just some normal peeps," "That's too many crickets," etc.) but for some reason these don't seem to have any impact on the world. To really affect any change, you have to report on what the "audience" apparently wants to see. And apparently what they want to see is people being mean to each other.
When I say the procedural rhetoric here is unsubtle, I don't mean to knock it. The message, to me at least, is a compelling one, and the inability of my actions to turn the course of the news cycle away from its spiral into fear and prejudice really made me feel the inevitability of the negativity in a powerful way; I felt responsible and impotent. I'm not sure that reporters and media workers are quite as beholden to "what the people want" and incapable of controlling the news cycle as the game suggests, but it certainly had me thinking about my responsibility as a consumer of news and feeling some empathy for the pressures and dilemmas faced by media workers.
There's something ironic about the lack of subtlety in the game's procedural rhetoric, though. When I incessantly tried to take pictures of only the protestors, not wanting to put more fuel on the Squares vs. Circles fire, I was annoyed that this endeavor produced nothing but the repetitive "Give the audience what they want" headline. Like, I'm the reporter, why do I have to do that? Where's my agency to tell my own story? As with most games, you don't really have the full freedom to tell your own story here. That's the flip side to procedural rhetoric; in order to tell the story about news and media that Nicky Case wants to tell, Case uses the mechanics of the game to force the player into telling a particular news story. Just like the reporter is compelled to report a story they may not want to tell, the player is compelled to play out a story they may not want to live. I'm not sure if the critique of procedural rhetoric is intentional or not, but it is interesting to see the parallels.
Like you mentioned, I do think that the lack of agency the player has in WBWWB is an important part of the game, as it contributes to the game's message about mob mentality and the "powerlessness" of media workers to staunch the public's hunger for sensational media. However, I think your point about how "you don't really have the full freedom to tell your own story" is an interesting one. It reminded me of the Freaky Flakes game that Bogost wrote about in one of the pieces we read, which was aimed at children and intended to reveal the tricky and manipulative side of advertising techniques. The game had its shortcomings, however, in that kids were limited in their choices…
While I can understand your frustrations of the lack of freedom of choice within the story of We Become What We behold, I think the frustration is slightly misplaced. Surely, you must provide what the audience wants as stories. To wish to tell other stories is well and fine, however, if the audience does not enjoy the stories as well, they will simply go to another outlet gives them what they want. It's very simple supply and demand, and peace just isn't in the demand to be shared. This is true for real life as well as the videogame, as the more violent news gets the higher the ratings for the news become. This is because we are all…
I empathize with your frustration at the lack of control given to the players in We Become What We Behold, and its effective deliverance of a sensation other reporters may face. The relationship between varying players and the effects of WBWWB's linear gameplay was a looming curiosity throughout. To a certain subset of players, there may be an eeriness to being inclined to follow a certain set of actions that is exacerbating the community simply to progress through the game. To another subset, that eeriness or reluctance may be muted out by an ultimate objective: finishing the game. Then to another subset, the entirety of the game may seem boring and unamusing: a lack of cumulative progression or competition may…