Transnational Politics in Video Games

Political claims about the real world are abundant in video games, and the medium persuades uniquely through procedural rhetoric, the rules of behavior contained in computational code. The transnational scope of the video game industry makes it productive ground for interrogating how a game’s persuasion might influence international audiences with nationally situated politics. The 2012 third-person shooter Spec Ops: The Line, produced by the German studio Yager Development, depicts the international concern of a fictional conflict in the Middle East and the atrocities of failed military intervention. The game’s core procedural rhetoric, which tasks players to push ahead at all costs, cautions an international audience about the futility of deploying military power abroad, a warning that mirrors particularly German political anxieties. The game’s depiction of extreme violence—and the player’s participation in it—raises further questions about the cultural status of the medium in the country and abroad.

The Emptiness of Hardcore: Consuming Violence in Hotline: Miami

The article explores the challenges to (media) consumerism posed in the indie action game Hotline: Miami (Dennaton Games, 2012). Hotline deconstructs not only indulgence associated with violent gaming but also its main nostalgic interest–the cultural era of the 1980s–through a ludification of excess. I will aim to demonstrate this through an analysis of the game’s “procedural rhetoric” (Bogost) and narrative structure. Overwhelming the player’s senses with intense audiovisuals, and explicitly confronting her motivations for participating in extreme violence, the game balances the game experience between a trance-like state of indulgent overexposure and metaleptic commentary. The sensory overload is also sharply contrasted with the level of precision necessary to complete the levels, bending the adrenaline-pumping core of the gameplay towards mechanics more common in stealth-based games. The system of in-game rewards and the overall narrative structure further complicate the purposefulness of player acts, questioning the teleology of gore in gaming and subverting the conventional notion of video game violence as entertainment. As I will argue, the metaludic commentary destabilizes the game through irony, relativizing the player’s commitment to it. In so doing, it makes Hotline: Miami a prime example of “dissonant development” (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter), a game that manages to both sweep the market and challenge its basic premises as an entertainment medium.

What do text-based newsgames have to do with journalism? An account from Gem Model perspective

The article aims to discuss text-based newsgames as a multimodal artifact, having in mind the goal to systematize their expressive processing and rhetorical strategies as possible tropes for journalistic processes and practices. For that, we have adapted some of the main layers/elements of the GeM Model (Genre and Multimodality), proposed by Bateman (2008, 2014), to analyze a Brazilian text-based newsgame called “A Teia”, having in mind its material regularities and semiotic modes. The game portrays the reality of a woman who has to decide what to do upon situations of continuous domestic violence and abuse carried out by her partner. In the design of trajectory of “A Teia”, the player follows a rhetorical cluster made of a non-linear sequence, according to an event/circumstance upon which the player has to decide, and so on. Another goal of the paper is to contribute for the assessment on how procedural rhetoric of digital text-based newsgames touches crucial aspect of journalistic practices, functions and values.

Making public policy fun: How political aspects and policy issues are found in video games

The study of video games can be fun, and it is interesting to see what players can explore inside video games. This paper explores public policy practice and its political content or aspects in video games. The very idea itself may sound vague and unclear; can such a thing be found inside a mere video game? To strengthen the argument of what kind of political aspects can be found in video games, the authors use a comparative case study, comparing two games: Animal Crossing: New Horizon and Genshin Impact. By comparing the two games, this paper forms an understanding of how political aspects are found inside each game and their influence on affairs and issues in certain countries. The result of this research shows that video games have become an election-winning strategic political marketing and communication policy. Video games have also used procedural rhetoric, which reveals how game producers promote certain ideologies through legislation and rules in their games.

More than just a game: exploring the gamification mechanics and procedural rhetoric of the Air Miles Loyalty Program community

This major research paper explores the use of gamification mechanics and procedural rhetoric to engage loyalty program communities on social media. In doing so, this study investigates the influences of online communities, the applications of gamification mechanics and procedural rhetoric, as well as the role and agency of consumers. A quantitative content analysis was used to analyze a sample of 10,000 tweets related to the Air Miles Rewards Program. The results showed that gamification mechanics and procedural rhetoric were present in the Twitter conversations. However, they were used differently to achieve various elements of community based on competing interests by authors. Findings from this study contribute to the academic and professional world of communication, and can inform digital marketing and social media strategies for community engagement

More than just a game: exploring the gamification mechanics and procedural rhetoric of the Air Miles Loyalty Program community

This major research paper explores the use of gamification mechanics and procedural rhetoric to engage loyalty program communities on social media. In doing so, this study investigates the influences of online communities, the applications of gamification mechanics and procedural rhetoric, as well as the role and agency of consumers. A quantitative content analysis was used to analyze a sample of 10,000 tweets related to the Air Miles Rewards Program. The results showed that gamification mechanics and procedural rhetoric were present in the Twitter conversations. However, they were used differently to achieve various elements of community based on competing interests by authors. Findings from this study contribute to the academic and professional world of communication, and can inform digital marketing and social media strategies for community engagement

Persuasive Games, A Decade Later

More than a decade ago, Bogost invented the concept of ‘procedural rhetoric’—the idea that games and software can make arguments through their mechanics. Even earlier, he founded a studio called Persuasive Games that adopted procedural rhetoric as a design philosophy. These ideas have had some influence on game studies and design, including finding their way into the title of this volume. And yet the promise of persuasive games in the world as a force that would introduce systems literacy to the mass media has not been successful. What happened, and what—if anything—can be done about it?

Labour and the Ecological Critique of Capitalism in Videogames: The Case of Stardew Valley

In this paper we conduct an analysis of the critical narratives of Stardew Valley and compare them to other relevant videogames in order to develop new possibilities for an ecological critique of capitalist extractive econo­mies. Critical narratives of this game are aimed primarily at the alienating conditions of labour and deeply devastating modes of production under capitalism that impact and severely damage the environment. Analysing these narratives, we superimpose the immediate messages of the game with the procedural rhetoric and material conditions of their existence. Over the course of our analysis, we highlight a material-narrative disso­nance which, in the case of Stardew Valley, fails to function as a commu­nicative strategy of the game and remains its mere external contradiction. Although the game’s critical narrative may seem overly utopian and its political imaginary a bit underdeveloped, the game elaborates on concrete ways to tackle the alienation of labour and resolve the ecological crisis. In addition to this, the paper covers the history of the interplay between the video game industry and the field of global ecological crisis research. We compare the attempts to raise awareness of the videogames’ own material­ity that preceded Stardew Valley. We conclude that Stardew Valley utilises the language of sustainable co-existence and wasteless local production, expanding this logic both to the sphere of labour and the spectrum of en­vironmental problems. In the case of ecological critique, some gameplay decisions in Stardew Valley enable us to come up with new strategies aimed at creating critical narratives about the environment in videogames. Thus supplementing Stardew Valley’s findings with critical tropes derived from other games (mainly, Rain World), we were able to gather a set of theoretical instruments that could facilitate the creation of games about ecosystems. Following Donna Haraway’s emphasis on the crucial role of narrative fram­ing (“it matters which stories tell stories”), we highlight new opportunities for the entire medium of videogames.