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Persuasive Games:
The Expressive Power of Videogames
Ruffin Bailey
North Carolina State University
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Overview
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Bogost’s Background
What are Unit Operations?
Discussion of “Rhetorics”
Discussion Questions
Bogost’s Background
• B.A. -- Philosophy and Comparative Literature
-- USC
• M.A. and Ph.D. -- Comparative Literature -UCLA
– Worked with N. Katherine Hayles
• Faculty at Georgia Tech
– School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
– Works with Janet Murray
Bogost on the Report
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Unit Operations: Definition
• “modes of meaning-making that privilege
discrete, disconnected actions over
deterministic, progressive systems.”
• “unit operations privilege function over
context, instances over longevity.”
• “unit operations give us a lever for
understanding any form of human production
as potentially procedural.”
Unit vs. System
• “I contend that unit operations represent a shift
away from system operations…”
• “a movement away from the simple, orderly,
static categorization of things.”
• “In human biology, DNA nucleotide bonding
displays unit operations; the Darwinian idea of
acquired characteristics illustrates system
operations.”
• “The Internet, the brain, human genetics, and
social fads are examples of complex, unitdriven networks.”
Traditional “Rhetorics”
• Socratic
– Technical
– Vs. Dialectic (“unknown conclusions”)
• Sophistic
– Demonstrative/performative
• Aristotelian
– Philosophical
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Burke Broadens
• “While rhetoric still entails persuasion
for Burke, he greatly expands its
purview, arguing that it facilitates human
action in general” (20)
• “Wherever there is persuasion,” writes
Burke, “there is rhetoric. And wherever
there is ‘meaning,’ there is ‘persuasion’”
(21).
“New Rhetorics”
• Visual
– Emotional vs. Philosophical? (21ff)
– Manipulated vs. Persuaded? (34)
• Digital
– Digital non-digital
• Procedural
• “Success means effective expression, not
necessarily effective influence” (20)
McDonald’s Video Game,
“anti-advergame” (29)
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Save the Whales; Rhetoric?
• “but the actions themselves are designed to
generate provocation, not to make arguments
for policy changes.”
– Provocation isn’t rhetoric?
• “Topics like taxation, deforestation, and
globalization are not the usual subject matter of
videogames… Procedural rhetoric is not
limited to such anomalous specimens…”