All weekend I have been trying to untangle Bogost’s term, Procedural Rhetoric and more so Persuasive Games. And I only intermittently understand their full meaning and circumference. I understand that Persuasive Games does include interactivity, multimodality, and elements of layered institutional critique. This means that whoever creates the game must be working from a stable set of values. They must know where ethics have been cornered and dismantled in order to create something like an un-winnable game that leaves a player with a clear understanding that a real-world set-up (like the fast-food corporate business model) must be changed. It should leave the player with more than an intellectual understanding, i.e. with an impetus to act.

Perhaps the McDonalds game was the clearest example. To be put in the position of financial loss and business failure or ethical compromise and moral failure at every juncture of trying to run a big fast food corporation can only have one of two transformational outcomes.

Bogost and the games’ creators look at only one possible transformational outcome. They approach the game without cynicism, so they expect a player failing to “win” to turn into a moral actor. This means they expect the critique to take hold in the player. They expect the rhetorical maneuver of the game to work. I tend to be more cynical and think about the dangers and possibilities of this rhetorical approach misfiring/failing. If, as the player, one is cornered in an ethical dilemma, why not opt for burning it all down and adopting the pure capitalist mindset a la “screw everything but the money”? Could games like this accidentally teach callousness? I can’t answer this in any satisfying way, but I wonder how much games like this depend on a salvageable core morality, that popular culture has done its best to undermine since the arrival of the anti-hero… And then again, perhaps this moral core, if latent, can be roused.

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PS: This is my second encounter with Sarah Gailey’s STET. I once used it as inspiration for a “margin story” I wrote, although without the interactive elements. STET is a bit like a theatrical play (a correspondence, albeit time-delayed) that happens in the wings (If we see the text as the main stage).  As one reads through the marginalia, more and more is revealed about the fictional author/protagonist, who is caught in (and fighting her way through) the impossibility of a journalistic assignment. The editor guides toward a more palatable, neutral digestibility. The author refuses.

I suppose the text, in its way, dramatizes a persuasively rhetorical game. 

By tracing the exasperation and story of the author, pressed by questions and concerns from the editor, the issue at the center of the critiqued text becomes ever more consequential for us as readers/clickers/interactors/players of this text. The initially dry copy becomes suffused with personal meaning, and, in its transformation, the piece extracts and makes visible a larger critique that gains urgency with each “STET” the author/narrator insists on.

A little more than a week ago, I attended an in-person academic conference. The conference used the Whova (Hoo-va) app to share programming and all other vital information.

A quick rewind: Before the pandemic, attending this conference had many more analog features. Most importantly (in the context of this post), the organizers provided a printed program. As attendees, after receiving the program booklet, we took a seat on the hotel carpet, got our hotel pens out, and began circling the sessions we wanted to attend. In the process of working through the paper program, we read many session descriptions, which sometimes swayed us to see sessions we might otherwise have skipped or overlooked. The program became a map, an artifact, and a piece of memorabilia.

Now, the app obviously saves the trees (or, as the Whova advertising would have it: “cuts down on printing costs”), and what’s not to like about that? I support saving the trees, but the app is much more and much less than a printed program. As is often the case, when an app offers to streamline and enhance an experience, the interventions create additional cost & labor for the user, for you, the conference goer.

It begins like this: you have to download the app from your trusted app store (that everyone has a smart-phone is assumed). And then, to make the app functional, you click through agreements you don’t have time to read (because you are feverishly working on your conference presentation). For all you know, you have just sold all quantifiable aspects of your soul and given the Whova-people the okay to keep an eye on you and your data.
Welcome!

Before you even attend the conference, the app already wants you to “engage.”
As a presenter, you’re asked to upload your bio and your presentation (never mind that a time-honored tradition of conference attendance is finishing your presentation about 10 minutes before you give it or while you give it.) You’re reminded that sharing your work on the app makes it accessible to people. How accessible should your work be, you wonder? Should it be part of the Whova’s archive? You don’t have time to think about that. The only thing that keeps you from uploading your work is that you haven’t finished it.

As an attendee, you are also asked to introduce yourself to all the other attendees via an icebreaker post. A bland, prewritten message is available. Or else you can spend time and creative energy on crafting your own. On the introduction board, 900+ people said hello. And really, what does one do with 900+ cute hello posts? You have no time to even think about that.

You’re at the conference finally, at that hotel atrium, and people have their Whova-branded conference IDs and are walking around staring at their phones /at the app. Everybody is receiving messages about drink tickets, ramen meet-ups, and all other conference events, including the agenda of presentations. There are too many events to keep track of, too many to absorb. You focus on finishing your work, but there comes a message that asks you to promote your session.
You shake your head. Were you supposed to have a promotional strategy?
Some people promote their sessions. Those who have social media energy, savvy, aptitude, time & labor to devote to an event-promoting strategy.
You don’t have any of these, and also, you have no time to figure this out. But it starts feeling like you SHOULD get in on this app life.

Not entirely voluntarily, you check the listing for your presentation and find out that you have one like. Yes, there are likes, and you can gather them. Also, people can signal if they plan to attend your session. So, as a presenter, you will likely find out quickly (even before your presentation) whether there’s substantial interest in what you have to offer… or not.

You learn to partially evaluate your contribution by these metrics of general popularity and, thereby, feel nudged to promote your event. You still have no time for that, because you have to revise your work still. But you’ll notice something vaguely shame-like sitting in your gut. You should, shouldn’t you, be “announcing”, “interacting”, “connecting”, and “engaging” via Whova. For the sake of your work!

You don’t, though. Because you have the actual work to do. You don’t look at the app until…

After your presentation (which goes well, and dammit you finished it!), you’ll get a notification from Whova about how many people attended. Perhaps that notification will come with confetti graphics and maybe a little banner that says “high-attendance session” or something like that. This makes you feel good, and you also know that Whova’s headcount can’t be right. You were there. You know that there were people in the room who did not attend your session. But that’s not the important part. You wonder how the app even knows how many people attended or were in the room. You suddenly understand that the app knows exactly where in this Hyatt you and your phone are at any given time. It will simply mark you as present. You think that Whova also knows which bathroom in this Hyatt you visited and when.

When checking your event on the app, you see that it would have given you the opportunity to lead a Q&A in-app or to poll your audience. You did not do that, and at this point, you don’t care. You’re just glad you’ve finished your research and presented it.

A propos polls: Sometimes, the conference organizer might want to foster engagement by creating a conference-wide poll. This can be done with more or less nuance and purpose. Expect some less nuanced polls like “How sick are you of hearing about (insert topic here)?” With answer choices from “not at all” to “enough already!”
As you ponder the basicness of this poll you were nudged to participate in, you wonder: This fosters what kind of participant engagement exactly? What is the definition of “engagement” here? “Engagement” seems to mean a haptic signaling of rudimentary opinion by pressing the “like” button, pressing an answer option on a poll, or pressing “post” for an icebreaker message. All these superficial emissions are legible as “engagement” in app-world.

From this poll-driven, comparative atmosphere, it’s only a quick jump to explicit gamification. And yes, you get a message about the leaderboard. Whova has a leaderboard. And yes, Whova has badges. What is rewarded is the extrovert commenting on a lot of things lightly.

Finally, during a last glance at Whova while you’re waiting to check out of the Hyatt, you notice that you’ve accumulated 4 likes! You should have more. Or you should care less. You remind yourself that you did get confetti. You can’t believe you’re weighing confetti and likes.The likes and the confetti, they do something.

And what they do is dispositionally herd you from a context of scholarly exchange into one of social comparison. When, previously, you would have engaged by thinking about an academic project deeply with others, your attention is now partially diverted to creating an online performance of engagement, scholarly worthiness, and popularity.

You have to admit it; you failed at Whova, and the only thing that makes you feel redeemed is a look at your self-awarded failure badge.

As we’ve heard via Bogost in his preface to Play Anything, games are appreciated because of their confined nature. “Games aren’t appealing because they are fun, but because they are limited.” (x) Huizinga’s Magic Circle (a graspable shape with a firm border) speaks to this idea of a game as something bordered (i.e., constructively confined) as well. And (most) novels offer a similarly bordered thrill — a confined word for a reader to discover and conquer. Not Tristram Shandy.

TS is an unwieldy (conceptually) unlimited piece of writing and hints at the interconnectedness of all events and things. Our narrator, Tristram, finds more and more causal and temporal connections between his life and … everything else. And he willingly opens the door for everything else to enter; he invites the sprawl via digressions. (This is why even 20 volumes would not have been enough.) 

Faced with the task of making the TS sprawl playable, we had to make a decision (although, in the beginning, we didn’t know that this was the most consequential decision). We could go one of two ways: We could either tame and straighten the sprawl, and create a clear circle so the game would conform to the expectations of play as clearly bordered, or we could NOT do that. The NOT had no clear precedent.

In group discussions (and as Bri mentioned in her post), we found that all ideas pointing to the straightening of the narrative strands and leading to a more traditional game didn’t feel right. And so we trusted our instincts, which led us to imagine a play experience that re-creates and amplifies our reading experience of Tristram Shandy and would offer the player a digressive, tenuously bordered, and interconnected journey into the text.

In the game’s introduction (which the player has to traverse to enter the “actual game”), we tried to achieve something similar to the reading experience, namely, an opulent, fatiguing, but hopefully also entertaining dedication + training module/s. Here, the soon-to-be player has to read sequentially, and after accepting a dedication, they must acquire knowledge and skills that will let them play the game consciously. Each time a player completes a module via a checkmark, a new one opens. The modules lead the player into digressions on game theory, the maneuvers of clicking and scrolling, and the times and life of Lawrence Sterne, e.g.

Finally, once the player enters the actual game, disorientation rules. Instead of repeating the original’s horizontally sprawling nature and our introduction’s digressive nature, we aimed to create something vertical. I say vertical because the discovery of the text invites scrolling, which registers as a vertical activity and suggests a deepening.

By obscuring almost all (or large parts) of the texts, the player has to scroll and click through layers to finally reveal the whole text. In her blog post, Bri described the layers we developed. I would add that the layers unveiled themselves to us in layers. Meaning we didn’t make a list of layers and then implement them. We discovered them incrementally in conversations during the design process. Additionally, aspects of the text’s humor, which we had perhaps reduced in redaction, found new modes of integration: GIF popups tied to any mention of Hobby Horse, a Morse Code movie, and other Easter Eggs interrupt the vertical experience while re-capturing and momentarily foregrounding the humorous elements of TS.

As Bri described, the process was truly collaborative; everybody participated in the conversation, and we collectively felt our way toward what seemed right. During my first reading of the text, I was trying to untangle the plotlines and was especially intrigued by Tristram’s direct commands to his readers. I tried to lift out these commands. Initially, we thought that the commands could be player instructions (and we used some in our introduction), but as our concept of the game shifted, we realized that they would serve better as their own layer. In addition to lifting out the meta-discourse and commands, I wrote the introduction with Bri. As she explained, we initially divided up the task but ended up working simultaneously, inspiring each other to evermore Tristram-esque flourishes.

I am particularly proud of the way the game resists readers’ (myself included) desire for quick intellectual graspability and yet precisely offers Tristram Shandy’s essence. 

Thank you, team Tristram.