Procedural Rhetoric

Hi Rod here,

I wanted to talk about procedural rhetoric in games. My first thoughts were fears of the old records and tapes with recorded messages hidden in the text and could only be found when played backwards. But I guess as most of those fears were untrue, so will any fear be of video game messages I am sure. Just like a story, the narrative of any game is a version of that story. Even given the free parameters to roam around and make your own decisions inside the game framework, you are in fact telling the story of the developers, albeit your own version. How one gets through each stage of a game may come down to personal choices, but you are still ultimately (with obvious exceptions) getting from point A to point B in most games. So you get the Alterbiography as explained in class today. You could have some variant of a story in a book by reading chapters in a different order, or skipping and/or mixing parts of a movie on a DVD to suit yourself-(I particularly liked the Pulp Fiction example) But games alone have the ability for the player to have control on the "how" one gets to (or sometimes does not get to, the player could be killed off!) the final destination. I had not thought of games in this way before.

The other area I wanted to touch on was the "Pleasure of recognition" that Mark brought up in the tutorial yesterday. I never had a term for this until then. Isn't it amazing how just throwing the odd little quirky item at people in either a game or other can change the way one feels about a game or film, it could even be as simple as a few words or some sort of object. For want of a better example "Far-out" gives reference to the flower-power in the sixties. (Not that I was around then but anyway).

Feel free to comment if I am on the wrong track. But interesting anyway.

See you in class...