Processes and Procedures, Bogost and Jagoda

 Ian Bogost uses Animal Crossing, a game about acquiring more property/ material goods and making friends as well as providing a model of a society’s cultural, political, and social values. He refers to Zimmerman and Salen’s definition of play as the “free space of movement within a more rigid structure” (rules). Rules create a game’s meaning which we learn through exploration of possible spaces, playing. Next, he moves to procedures (processes), or the interaction of algorithms within a computer, which either limit/or provide possibility spaces. Finding the meaning of the game provides new perspectives of the “real” world. In Animal Crossing players learn about debt, consumption, and environmental protection, while also learning about digital processes, which will be necessary for the future.

The types of rhetoric (persuasive speech), verbal, visual, written, or digital, do not fully explain how video games make claims about the world. Bogost introduces a subcategory, procedural rhetoric, or “the practice of effective persuasion AND expression using processes and models”, as seen in video games. Playing games allows people to interpret the relevant claims of the game in their own lives. Procedural rhetoric interrogates ideology (a concept of an “ideal world”), builds and breaks-down arguments about a society, and ultimately teaches us about these social, political, and cultural issues. In addition, playing video games teaches us about game development, programming, and how to write computer programs (procedural literacy)/ arguments (procedural arguments). He concludes that it is important to critically play video games to explore possibility places the game’s rules provide to analyze their claims about the “real” world. 

Patrick Jagoda uses Braid, a complex game that represents the development of the atom bomb and demonstrates the influence of the use of the digital computer.  Braid not only poses spatiotemporal and procedural challenges to reach a conclusion, but “uses media-specific techniques to make accessible the material effects of the American military-industrial-media-entertainment network on historical consciousness” (748).  Jagoda references Bogost’s idea of procedural representation, processes with other processes that “define the way things work: the methods, techniques, and logics that drive the operation of systems” (761). Braid is procedural by using “gameplay processes (especially temporal operations) to explore the logics that found a world produced by the bomb and computer. The sensorium expands in these rule-bound moments. The player becomes aware, on a phenomenal level, of processes and procedures (761). He concludes that game procedures provide new means of accessing/ processing historical mechanisms.