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Reviewer: John W. Fendrich

Bogost suggests that a definition of rhetoric is the study of persuasive expression. Classically, rhetoric is the art of speaking or writing effectively. With this alteration, the book is an argument for the inclusion of video game expression as rhetoric, specifically with procedural rhetoric as a component. It is thus regarded to be as important to civilization as writing or oral rhetoric. Bogost’s ideas should resonate with teachers, whose careers have spanned the transition from providing educational opportunities for understanding and learning oral and written effectiveness. Ultimately, they seek to provide educational opportunities to understand and to learn computational effectiveness. The book is primarily for video game designers. Bogost hopes the book is also useful to critics and players of video games due to its analysis of the way video games mount arguments and influence players. Procedural rhetoric literacy is added to the literacy mix of what it takes to understand and make effective contributions to current civilization. The book is organized into a short preface, a chapter on procedural rhetoric, and three parts focused on extensive interrogation domains: politics, advertising, and learning, in which video game persuasion has already taken form and still holds great promise. These interrogations include chapters titled: “Political Processes,” “Ideological Frames,” “Digital Democracy,” “Advertising Logic,” “Licensing and Product Placement,” “Advergames,” “Procedural Literacy,” “Values and Aspirations,” “Exercise,” and “Purposes of Persuasion.” For study, there are 60 pages of notes connected to the preface and the 11 chapters; there are 36 pages in the bibliography. There is a helpful index for reviewing the philosophies, philosophers, and the extensive number of video games whose discussions clarify the dense analysis. The order of the chapters suggests that priority is given to commercial video game developers. In short, persuasive expression becomes persuasive games. Procedural rhetoric, a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes that are used persuasively, is discussed. For example, the Public Broadcasting System’s game “Freaky Flakes” gives the user an opportunity both to succeed and to fail in his or her attempt to manipulate the simulated children buying cereal. Through multiple designs, the user is able to hone in on the logic that drives advertisers, which results in increased sales of his or her virtual cereal. This gesture represents a procedural enthymeme—the player literally fills in the missing portion of the syllogism by interacting with the application, and with that action constrained by rules. That is, a set of procedural constraints determines the combination of design strategies that influence kids more or less successfully. Procedural representation is representation, and thus certainly not identical with actual experience. A procedural representation is a claim about how a part of a system represented does, should, or could function. Persuasive games are video games that mount procedural rhetoric effectively. They make arguments about how systems work in the material world, which alter and affect players’ opinions outside of the game—they do not merely cause them to continue playing. The examples of procedural rhetoric in the three domains cover a broad swath of human social experience. These areas have become largely broken in contemporary culture, and are areas that Bogost believes video games can help restore (and not just in a small way). Procedural rhetoric persuades through intervention, and sets the stage for an innovative understanding of what is presently unthinkable. Procedural rhetoric should not be confused with procedural programming. In the learning domain, video games teach their content, and that content transforms into real-world experience. Some examples are “Microsoft Flight Simulator,” “Sin City,” “Ninja Guiden,” and “Grand Theft Auto.” “Flight Simulator” teaches something about aviation—something that players can use to understand how real planes fly. “Sin City” teaches something about urban planning, which players can then use to plan real cities. “Ninja Guiden” incorporates the teaching of “ninjaness,” which is secondary to the game’s use of exploration, including small problems of increasing difficulty, to teach players rules of play that transform skills into strategies, and turn failure into success. These, along with “Grand Theft Auto,” illustrate the simulation gap—the breach between a game’s procedural representation of a topic and the player’s interpretation of it. The robot building system “Mindstorms” is like this in that robotics attracts a player’s interest, but robotics’ educational value is the potential to develop general abilities in programming and creative expression. A comparison between video game learning and narrative media learning is that of learning the orbits of planets from a textbook or lecture descriptions, or learning from an onery (a system of gears that model the planets’ rotations and orbits at the correct relative velocities). Bogost has opened the box, and claims we have far to go. Outside of this book, Project IT Girl focuses on challenging female students to use programming as a tool to create games, which could then be distributed to children around the world—a small step that changes the world in a positive way. Online Computing Reviews Service