In groups of two, I would like you to “divide and conquer” with the reading and outline and pull quotations you feel are relevant from your particular section of the text:
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Page 136:
– “Video games are models of real and imagined systems”
– “playing video games is a kind of literacy”
– video games give us opinions about the system in which we live
– the lessons are important for every age
– educators can use video games in teaching, and as more than a supplement to the lessons
PAGE 124
-“Civil rhetoric never disappeared entirely, and indeed it remains a common form of rhetoric today.”
-“While rhetoric still entails per- suasion for Burke, he greatly expands its purview, arguing that it facilitates human action in general.”
-“Thanks to the influence of Burke, and amplified by the increasingly inescapable presence of nonoral, nonverbal media, increasing interest has mounted around efforts to understand these other, newer modes of inscription that also appear to serve rhetorical ends.”
-“a need to understand how those new, nonverbal media mount arguments. This subfield is called visual rhetoric.”
-“Visual rhetoric offers a useful lesson in the creation of new forms of rhetoric in the general sense. One would be hard pressed to deny that advertisements, photographs, illustrations, and other optical phenomena have no effect on their viewers.”
132
The player in this game can manage the money in lawsuits and school funding systems. They control the level of the schools as well as the insurance policy in the state.
“This procedural rhetoric embodies the candidate’s policy position: maintaining multiple standards across the state made the educational system on the whole difficult to manage.”
The player must understand the political/social needs of the town.
Page 118
“In real life, when we pay our mortgage bill we don’t see where that money ends up. But in Animal Crossing, the player experiences the way his debt makes bankers wealthy.”
“In contrast, the player participates in a full consumer regimen: he pays off debt, buys
and sells goods”
“one’s own debt makes the bank rich”
“While the player spends more, Nook makes more”
Basically the players gets to watch their own debt make someone else in the game rich.
pg 131
‘Take Back Illinois’ is a game commissioned by the Illinois House Republicans to represent their positions on several public policy issues. The game is made up of four simple, but complexly related, mini-games. The mini-games target the issues of medical malpractice tort reform, education standards policy, and local economic development, as well as citizen participation. “These subgames interrelate; play in one affects performance in the others.”
Page 129
Comparing different fighting games: America’s Army vs. Counter-Strike
“Whereas Counter-Strike encourages the player to log as many kills as possible, America’s Army players collaborate in short missions, such as rescuing a prisoner of war, capturing an enemy building, or assaulting an enemy installation.” America’s Army follows actual rules of engagement, so it is more realistic and intense than other average fighting games.
Page 130
This page talks about how the video game shows similarity to the army. Characters can earn “honors” and they symbolize commitment and expertise. When a character does something immoral, then they lose credibility and it takes “considerable effort to rebuild”. This page also discusses if making games similar to real life jobs or situations has positive benefits.
Some quotes throughout the page include:
“The correlation of honor with the performance of arbitrary and politically decontextualized missions offers particular insight into the social reality of the U.S. Army.”
“Ribbons, medals, and other designations reward successful completion of military objectives. Training, professional development, wounds, completion of missions, and many other events earn soldiers decorations,
which when worn on a dress uniform speak to the honor and nobility of the bearer.”
“The game insists on the mission orientation of the US Army. Above all, soldiers must be team players, following army values and
rules.”
“the game models the values and practices of the army, giving the player an embodied experience of the recruit”
Pg 127, the goal of the Mcdonald’s game is to make as much profit as you can through your third world farms. Problems occur when public interest groups attempt to sue you for your violations. Corruption is part of the game as you can attempt to pay off any of the public interest groups that have a problem with your method. “The McDonald’s Videogame mounts a procedural rhetoric about the necessity of corruption
in the global fast food business, and the overwhelming temptation of greed, which leads
to more corruption.” Your goal is to battle between your ethical and material choices.
125
Procedural rhetoric—using processes for persuasive purposes
Clasically, persuasion
Modern, expression—convey ideas
Persuasion through rules of behavior/dynamic models (in this case, lines of
computer code)
Makes claims about how things work
Video games make claims about the world via modeling (concrete and abstract
models [physics to economics])
Page 135 –
-Talks about Spore –
-hits quite a few topics “The game is a rich and complex one that clearly addresses a number of topics, most notably the tension between evolution and natural selection (creatures evolve, but the player carefully designs their attributes)”
-the game designer was meant to get across was astrobiology
-In a book an argument may be made my reading but with the game it is learned by “playing in the possibility space the games create”
-“This act of discovering a procedural argument through play is endemic to procedural rhetoric”
126 – My page introduces the McDonald’s Video Game. Bogost introduces the game by saying “Artifacts that deploy procedural rhetoric can also make arguments about how things don’t work just as easily as they can make arguments about how they do.”
The game puts the player in charge of the four main McDonald’s production stages, in which he/she must make difficult business and moral decisions to run the company effectively.
134
“Bully models the social environment of high school through an expressive system of rules, and makes a procedural argument for the necessity of confrontation. Confronting bullies is not a desirable or noble action in the game, but it is necessary if one wants to restore justice. The game privileges the underdogs—nerds and girls—and the player spends most of his time undermining the bullies and the jocks in order to even the social pecking order. Bully is part social commentary, part satire.”
This page talks about a game called Bully. The game is a highschool setting and the player controls a character named Jimmy. The game depicts highschool politics and the player is supposed to keep Jimmy (presumably some kind of underdog/nerd type character) out of trouble with the other cliques.
PAGE 119
-“But Animal Crossing is also a game about long-term debt. It is a game about the repetition of
mundane work necessary to support contemporary material property ideals.”
-“In this sense, the people who play video games
develop values, strategies, and approaches to the practice of play itself. ”
-“When understood in this way, we can learn to read games as deliberate
expressions of particular perspectives.”
It is mostly about how video games can represent certain perspectives and cultural values, and the author uses Animal Crossing as an example of this.
Page 120
“The possibility space of play includes all of the gestures made possible by a set of rules. As Salen and Zimmerman explain, imposing rules does not suffocate play, but makes it possible in the first place.”
Play is often considered a children’s activity, a trifle that occupies or distracts kids and which they eventually grow out of, turning to more serious pursuits.”
“play is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure.”
Page 133.
Essentially goes over examples of games that include procedural rhetoric. Procedural rhetoric is where one action directly affects another in the game. The first paragraph, which occupies most of the page along with a picture, focuses on the game Take Back Illinois.
(Page 128) “For Plato, the disparity between the ideal and material realms can only be reconciled through a recollection of the forms, a claim that assumes that our souls were once connected to these forms and, therefore, are also immortal.” The difference between the true and the conceived things is only relatable by remembering what was truly seen, making us connected to the sights and thus immortal.
Page: #121
“…first they create
a possibility space, then they fill that space with meaning by exploring the free movement
within the rigid structure of literary rules.”
This quote is the essential premise of my portion the article. It is saying the restrictions or can actually enhance the creative process by making an individual create something new or organic out of what parameters is presented. For example a haiku’s has certain restrictions but you can still create an original idea. Video games have rules and boundaries you have to follow but one can still alter their course hence Skyrim.
pg 137- Programming education must take care to ensure that it supports sophisticated responses to the medium, rather than reinforcing the idea that play is equivalent to leisure, and that video games are intended to produce fun and distraction rather than critical response.
Teaching programming can be really good for today’s kids, but only if we present it in the appropriate light. If progammers can be taught to think critically about the games they are creating and not just make something for the sake of entertainment the culture of video games can change
“This link between debt and acquisition gives form to a
routine that many mortgage holders fail to recognize: buying more living space not only
creates more debt, it also drives the impulse to acquire more goods. More goods demand
even more space, creating a vicious cycle.” This quote explains what the game is all about and what it teaches player.
Page 122
“Procedure often invokes notions of officialdom, even bureaucracy”
“Among computer-based media, video games tend to emphasize procedurality more than other types of software programs.”
“Video games depict real and imagined systems by creating procedural models of those systems, that is, by imposing sets of rules that create particular possibility spaces for play.”
This is all about Procedurality and how in real life it is viewed as being negative, while it’s integrated in video games. And video games are very rule-based.
if anyone is interested, this is an article with video of the skyrim serial killer.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114443-Creepy-Skyrim-Serial-Killer-Keeps-Heads-on-Shelves