>In “Persuasive Games,” published in 2007, the video-game designer and professor Ian Bogost coined the term “procedural rhetoric” to describe the use of mechanics for persuasion, which he’d seen in video games going back to the nineteen-seventies.

Some notes on Procedural Rhetoric from a unfinished paper I've been writing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric

Ian Bogost defined the “Procedural Rhetoric” game design philosophy as an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle, that explains how people learn through rules and processes, analyzes the art of persuasion, and focuses on conveying ideology by crafting laws and rules within games.
Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

Procedural rhetoric. (Ian Bogost, Janet Murray)

“I developed my own design philosophy that I called procedural rhetoric, an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle.” -Ian Bogost, Video Games Are Better Without Characters

Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric [1] is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. [2]

Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology.

[1] Frasca, Gonzalo (2003). “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge. 221–37 ISBN 9780415965798

[2] Bogost, Ian (2008). "The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Ed. by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 117–40. ISBN 9780262693646

For better or worse, games can deliver pre-programmed propaganda and procedural rhetoric for advancing ideologies and changing minds. Some designers push clichéd narratives, stereotypical characters, and institutionalized prejudices that normalize and encourage homophobia, sexism, racism, bigotry, and violence.

The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive, tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players impress their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives with tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange.

The Sims presumes to model human minds and relationships, but necessarily makes brazen simplifications due to technological constraints. It optimizes for playability instead of realism, while making concessions to marketability, corporate interests, societal norms, and taboos. But somehow it works, and this paper attempts to explain some of the magic.

Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.

The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters of the Sims microworld. But it magically offloads most of the heavy lifting into the player’s own imagination, incorporating and enriching their intertwingled tapestry of common-sense knowledge and stories about people, families, and communities.

The graphical design of The Sims was inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, in which he illustrated how the “Masking” visual style draws abstract characters against realistic backgrounds, which increases empathy and projective identification, empowers emotional connections, and permits players to easily and deeply identify with characters.

The educational philosophy of The Sims and SimCity was inspired by Seymour Papert’s “Constructionism” learning theory, with which learners construct mental models to understand the real world by building tangible personally meaningful shareable microworlds, and learn by discovery and exploration, by leveraging information they already know to learn more, and architecting their own educations.

This paper reviews the history of inclusivity in The Sims franchise over two decades, and explains some techniques for imagination, persuasion, identification, empathy, storytelling, and education, which can also make other games more inclusive, expressive, and enlightening.

[...]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13u-kNaWC2AAd-L0_5OoLc_-x...

Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims 1

https://donhopkins.medium.com/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the...

>Just before the 2004 presidential election, I created and programmed a downloadable Dumbold Voting Machine object for The Sims 1, as interactive agitprop to raise awareness about the problems of voting machines. I wrote this article about it, which I’ve now updated and included some new links and videos!

>You can download and install the Dumbold Voting Machine in your Sims installation, then you can place it on a table on your lot, and click on it to pop up a pie menu to play around with the voting machine. Or you can simply read on to find out what it does (which will spoil all the surprises)!

>At first look, it appears to be a fully functional voting machine. But it actually has a lot of infuriating bugs, hidden features, gaping security holes and malicious easter eggs that simulate problems with real voting machines, and it shows illustrated pop-ups to educate players about the real-world problems and issues of electronic voting.

>The High Concept

>The high concept, from a game design perspective [i.e. “bullshit alert”]: The Dumbold Voting Machine is intended to be a simple but intriguing puzzle you can “hack into” (like the cheat mode of The Matrix video game), while learning about real issues. It integrates interactive real-life “public service announcements”, subversive “product displacements”, and constitutionally protected “free speech”. It addresses late breaking news, current events and political opinions. It’s free speech and political commentary rendered as executable multimedia software. The Dumbold Voting Machine acts out the story interactively, in a way that’s fun to play and experiment with. It breaks down in frustrating “failure modes” with egregious “security holes” that illustrate some difficult problems with actual electronic voting machines in the real world. It’s meant to stimulate discussion, illustrate how computer programming is free speech, and why all election software should be open source and publicly inspectable.

[...]