How to Do Things with Videogames by Ian Bogost

Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and learning. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change these positions themselves, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. 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. 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.

The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Read 57 reviews from the world’s largest community for readers. 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. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. In contrast, Ian Bogost in 'How to Do Things With Videogames' shows how videogames have transformed society, arguing that games have shaped ,in meaningful ways, essential facets of social life. Videogames are 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. An exploration of the way videogames mount arguments and make expressive statements about the world that analyzes their unique persuasive power in terms of their computational properties.

How to Do Things with Videogames by Ian Bogost