Procedural Rhetoric: Ian Bogost, Janet Murray (Chaim's advisor and Building SimCity endorser)

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. Others like Will Wright conscientiously use it for good.

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.

“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

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

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

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

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

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 imprint their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives using online community tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange.

mistermann: The intuition of a conspiracy theorist is not useful nor interesting nor falsifiable, by definition. Please stop posting unsubstantive flamebait comments and parroting harmful anti-vax lies, and don't try to argue with the moderator, dang. Reminder: "If you keep posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, we're going to have to ban you. We've warned you countless times already, and it's not good that you're still doing it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" -dang https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660693