I do not play video games. Honestly, I think a large part of that is because I never learned how to use a game controller. At this point, it almost feels too late to learn. Whenever I have tried to play something, the controller feels completely foreign to me, and I have never had enough of a desire to play a video game to warrant actually sitting down and learning how everything works. Because of that, I also don’t spend much time thinking about video games in general. Before this reading, I definitely wasn’t considering whether or not they could be rhetoric.
After reading Bogost, though, I can understand the argument that video games can be rhetorical. The idea that a game can communicate something through its rules and what it allows or requires a player to do seems completely tangible to me. A game doesn’t necessarily have to directly tell you what its argument is. The player has to operate within a system, make decisions, and experience the consequences of those decisions. In that way, the structure itself can communicate something.
Strangely, the first example I thought about was Minecraft, specifically survival mode. Even though I don’t play it myself, I know that when you start the game, you have to gather resources and build some kind of shelter before it gets dark. If you don’t, you are putting yourself at risk. The game creates its own set of rules about survival. You need resources, shelter, and preparation to stay alive. Nobody necessarily has to write out a message telling the player that survival requires preparation because the player learns it by participating in the game. Thinking about Minecraft this way helped Bogost’s argument make more sense to me.
I still think studying video games in a writing and rhetoric class feels like a bit of a stretch. I can recognize that some of this probably comes from my own bias against video games. Since they aren’t something I interact with, I don’t naturally view them as important objects to study. At the same time, Bogost made me reconsider how limited my idea of rhetoric can be. If rhetoric is about how something communicates ideas or persuades an audience, it makes sense that we shouldn’t only look for it in traditional writing. I might not be convinced enough to pick up a controller anytime soon, but I can at least see that what happens on the screen can be doing more than I previously gave it credit for.
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