substantive thinking | Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames

Dense | Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames | Ian Bogost

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	• Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames Ian Bogost The MIT Press, 2007 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Groundbreaking

As a University lecturer, I found this book very useful in showing the applications of Bogost's theories (from "Unit Operations" onwards). Some of the examples are better than others, but reading Bogost's work you have the sense that he really "gets it," as in he understands the game-changing (forgive the pun) new ideas behind the culture, audience, and especially the software that makes video games tick, and exactly why they are different from established media like cinema. This book is directly applicable to all sorts of modern media, and although the title has "Games" in it I would recommend this to any person with an interest in modern media theory.

I do agree with the other review that this book can be very thick at times, but my impression is that you are expected to re-read sentences more than once. The words seem to be carefully chosen and parsed for meaning, something I appreciate, even if it doesn't make the book a speedy reader.

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substantive thinking

Ian Bogost really practices what he preaches. The way he builds and reconfigures ideas and concepts, he effectively illustrates how procedural rhetoric can be done textually as well as through games. This book (along with his earlier _Unit Operations_) shows Bogost doing some of the most substantive thinking in the game studies field.

Dense

This is important work but god all mighty is it hard to get through. Not the most gifted writer but he makes important points about the legitimacy of video games and a expressive and persuasive medium. Worth a read if you can handle that its written like a research paper.

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*Invitational* Game Criticism...

Although Ian Bogost clearly has a vested interest, as a game designer and critic, in the ability of games to communicate powerful, evocative messages, Persuasive Games seriously challenges some pervasive assumptions behind games, reception and interactivity-- taking a run at how games communicate all the wonderful (or terrible) things they are assumed to communicate. Bogost makes several rather clever moves in this book, including linking the development of a 'procedural rhetoric' to the theorization of visual rhetoric-- of course games use both, but such nitpicking isn't the point of this book. Persuasive Games isn't an instruction manual for making compelling games, but it will start to the kinds of discussions we need to make more compelling games possible.

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Videogames are both an expressive medium and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric.

Bogost calls this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change those positions, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and education. Bogost is both an academic researcher and a videogame designer, and Persuasive Games reflects both theoretical and game-design goals.

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