I felt uneasy with Bogost’s centering of procedurality, specifically in how it undervalues the role of play and interaction – the overall role of the player – in the interpretation of media. Although meanings and subjectivities may be embedded in the rules, it is only through playing with the game and poking at its boundaries that we come to some meaning. Everybody brings something to the game, and meaning arises out of that dialogue between the player and the material.
Sicart pushes back on this somewhat in his “Against Procedurality” (2012), a fairly direct challenge of Bogost’s conception of procedurality in games. Sicart argues that the designer is not necessarily the meaning-creator in the equation, and that the players in conversation with the game – playing it – are also central to the meaning-making process. I agre with Bogost in that procedurality can certainly explain how games can promote certain behaviors and lead to reflection from the player. But the other component of that experience is the play, and it felt like that discussion was missing from Bogost’s piece. Whatever meaning is embedded in a game, the personal ethics and politics of the player are integral towards the disentangling process that renders that content into something comprehensible and meaningful.
I particularly loved Sicart’s reference to Tati’s Playtime used to underscore his argument – that structures and architectures motivate certain behaviors and carry certain politics, but it is still up to the individual to engage with this environment, wring the meaning out, and act upon that knowledge. This complements Flanagan’s earlier writings on radical game design, and the post-human possibilities found in the world of play.
With respect to the meaning embedded in games, I’m reminded of the Metal Gear Solid series, with it’s cinematic 80’s-style action hero gunplay and grandiose international espionage scenarios within a world plagued by the ills of neo-colonialism, widespread wealth inequality, environmental catastrophes, and nuclear proliferation. I’ve never felt the games shy away from critiquing the US government or western hegemony, and yet it feels like a game series where it’s really easy to miss that message amid all the cool and hyper-stylized action sequences.
My experiences have also shown me that despite the game’s ostensibly more left-wing political orientation, its’ players readily assign it a meaning based on their existing political and ideological orientations – and so Snake can be a fascist colonizer or an anticolonialist freedom fighter, depending on how you look at things. The whole series seems to be in conversation with Truffaut’s old adage about there being no true anti-war film – that perhaps you can’t depict war objectively through visual media, or in our case interactive playable media, without also glorifying and romanticizing the events depicted secondhand.
As with all art, we arrive at a meaning by interacting with the work, but in the case of games, this interaction is – ostensibly – all the more immersive due to the gamified, structured, rules-based environment in which they’re encountered. However, I think that interactive quality in and of itself does not necessarily make a work more engaging, as witnessed in Brianna’s in-class example of Nox, by Anne Carson, wherein a physical, non-digital work renders the material more immersive and engaging in it’s design than would its’ digital analog. Since a physical book can be manipulated in more immediate and tactile ways than would a digital copy, the format engenders a different form of engagement and immersion between the work and author – one that gets partially lost in the digital format. And so, digitality is not necessarily a shortcut to immersion, but can be an appropriate component of an immersive experience depending on context and application.
Hayles’ writing on digital literature brought this exact parameter to mind, since the multimodel potentials of many of the works listed – namely Patchwork Girl – really render the author as more of an auterist designer than simply a writer. This is particularly applicable to those examples which incorporate art and music and other stylistic components. Many of the works listed were masterminded and coordinated by individuals (if not by very small groups), mirroring the auterist qualities of the cinema of Wes Anderson or Hong Sang-Soo. I thought these examples really laid bare the distinction, or lack thereof, between the role of an author and the role of a game designer – I’d have to place the writers of digital literature closer to game designers on that spectrum due to the greater control they retain over aspects of the finished product. For instance, in how writers generally don’t have ultimate control over binding, font, typeface, illustrations, cover art, etc., while creators of digital literature (especially in the free for all of web 2.0 in the late 90s) encountered greater freedoms in these additional aspects of publishing. This calls to mind the potential liberatory or democratizing potentials of the Web, although I’d argue that those potentials seemed a lot more attainable in the context of late 90s web culture than in the context of today’s.
However, it was designed to be static, the person represented was passively seated in the wheelchair with their arms stagnant on the armrests and their feet positioned firmly on the footrest. In 2011, the 
This may be a stretch but I see this as a type of procedural argument- the symbol, both old and new, constructed a model of how the world works and in the process of updating the symbol, maybe even improved that world with refreshed ideas and promoted policy change. There is also some form of persuasion happening, a characteristic symbols share with images. Certainly, the procedural rhetoric is not computational and not related to videogames in the same way the McDonald’s game implies societal wrongdoings, but I think the symbol has the capacity to reveal how things work in a rhetorical way- through our experiences and interactions with them.
