Tag Archives: blog post #4

Bogost Associations. STET.

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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.

Is It Procedural?

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As an editor by day, I found myself particularly drawn to the project Stet by Sarah Gailey. The back and forth conversation happening within the comments section reflect the conversations I have with writers nearly every day. Though thankfully much of my comment conversations are generally easier to resolve.

But it raises issues I wangle with regularly about objectivity and subjectivity, and how my edits affect the author’s voice and the experience of the assumed audience. I edit content for the website of a large hospital system, and I edit all sorts of different content, but a large part of it is intended for a patient audience. I have pages and pages in my style guide about our voice and tone and how we try to meet patients where they are, with the information they need presented in a way that they will understand it (i.e., not too jargony, not too scary). But our content doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the writers are always being instructed to write about care in a way that emphasizes what makes our hospital and doctors better than other hospitals and their doctors, and the success of a page is measured in its transactionability—in page visits sure, but even more so in conversions (patients clicking through to schedule appointments). So very cynically (but accurately) you can argue that as much as we may try to write in service to patients, we are always actually writing in service to the business needs of the hospital.

And that’s what I find so powerful about this piece; it takes what may seem like generic and objective textbook-esque text and reveals what’s below that surface: real people and their lived experiences. And, as much as I don’t want to be on the side of the editor in this piece, I do appreciate that this project shows the editorial work that is almost always hidden from a final publication.

But is this procedural rhetoric, as defined by Bogost’s reading this week? The processes of editing have been revealed, and that is where the argument is being made, but we the readers are not really going through those processes. Bogost doesn’t seem to make interactivity a necessary condition for procedural rhetoric, but all of his examples have interactivity, so I admit I’m a bit confused and not entirely sure on the answer. Is it procedural because we can see the procedures in the comment bubbles? Would it be less procedural (or not procedural) if the same text was explained and presented in a linear story format? What if this were a game instead, and we could play either the role of the writer or the editor and we made the choices leading up to this outcome (or variations thereof)? That definitely feels like it would be procedural rhetoric. Are there degrees of procedural rhetoric? Or just degrees to which it is more or less effective? (I’m not really sure.)

On a completely different note, as Bogost mentions pinball as a non-persuasive game, I find myself wondering what procedural rhetoric could look like in a pinball table. I think he’s definitely right in that manufacturers and operators are interested mostly in coin drop, finding that sweet spot that keeps you interested but not able to play for too long in between needing to feed the machine more money. The technology on new tables is such that many of them have video game modes on the back screen, controlled by the flipper buttons (and sometimes extra buttons). So you could make a persuasive game in that part of a new table, the same as you could for any other videogame. But what about in the actual mechanics in the table’s playfield? It’s pretty standard that certain shots affect other parts of the table, so if you assigned different images and labels to them, you could explore cause and effect potentially. The first thing that comes to mind is what would a climate change pinball table look like? Maybe you’ve got a forest represented by drop targets, and unlike in normal pinball where you want to hit the drop targets to increase your score, hitting the drop targets decreases the oxygen levels, and if you hit all of them, then the game stops and your ball drains. But perhaps there are other shots you can hit (tied to things that could curb climate change) to replenish your forest and bring the drop targets back up? It’s definitely a simplification of a complex topic, but I’d play it! It would be a nice change of pace from the usual table themes: superheros, movies, and famous musicians.