In another Bogost work, Alien Phenomenology (2012) he presents the notion of philosophical making as what could be akin to Carpentry “to do carpentry is to make anything, but to make it in earnest, with one’s own hands… carpentry entails making things that explain how things make their world. Like scientific experiments and engineering prototypes, the stuffs produced by carpentry are not mere accidents, waypoints on the way to something else. Instead, they are themselves earnest entries into philosophical discourse” (93). This prior argument from Persuasive Games (2007) emphasizes the gamer, interactor, critic, and reader of the video game in order to elevate games to the level of expressive and persuasive power of literary and other media, but I couldn’t help but feel the maker decidedly left out in this reading of Persuasive Games (it’s the second time around for me). If in the Aristotelian sense rhetoric is related to our capacity to percieve the “available means of persuasion” then Bogost is putting games on the table as an available means of persuasion, and rightly so. As Bogost posits, “procedural rhetoric is a subdomain of procedural authorship; its arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models. In computation, those rules are authored in code, through the practice of programming” (29). Rather than focus on the programmer, however, Bogost reads via the lens of the gamer or the critic, which he more than once acknowledges. “Procedural rhetorics,” he writes in his concluding chapter, “expose the way things work, but reflection creates and prolongs this process. Criticism is one aspect of the reflective process. But criticism requires formal discourse, often limiting itself to the academic and cultural elite. More generally, persuasive games can produce discourse in the general sense, like the blog conversations that crop up around the Dean game” (334).
I figured that today I’d think somewhere between Bogost’s two arguments, between critic and maker, where individuals who have a certain level of “procedural literacy” (re: Chapter 8) turn the rhetorical tools of the game toward their own uses, often to subvert the dominant expressive narrative of the base game. It’s procedural rhetoric by appropriation — and I think why I was tempted to add “mechanics” to our list in discussion of code and programming last week, because such work necessitates an understanding of the code at the level of exploiting game mechanics created through the code. This is perhaps especially possible in sand-box style games, like The Sims, which Ada described in an earlier post today. Just search in YouTube for any emotional challenge and you’ll find a Sims animated narrative telling that story, like the results for “bullying” demonstrate, for example. There are also narrative videos of players picking up prostitutes in the various versions of Grand Theft Auto (a component of the procedural rhetoric left out by Bogost, as he chose instead to focus on fast food and health in GTA San Andreas… ugh), either as chosen Let’s Play video headings or in montages (I implore you not to read the comments section on these GTA videos).
Games with simple mechanics like Minecraft leave it open to the player to create his or her own narrative, deciding what kind of world to build and how sinister or kind that world might be (toward the environment, for example). This kind of openness leaves room for modding (game modification), where programmers can edit or add portions of game code to alter those mechanics or add new interactions, which is especially vibrant with games like Minecraft. Game packs with certain selections of mods are also often put together with the mod “Hardcore-Quest-Mode” which uses a quest book to set up a narrative and guide the player through the use of the mods. Many of these questing packs start with some type of dystopic setting, changing world-gen to create desolate worlds that players have to rebuild with plant-based resources, or build consequences into a game without much consequence in its base game (have a gander of some of these packs). The persuasion then comes not from the game’s original programmers, but with those who can read and make new mechanics from existing capability of the games, which can then be interacted with by other players.
As I continue to think about programming literacy I feel a personal and intellectual tension. On the one hand, I want to learn how to code so I can make academic work with and through digital means, but on the other hand appropriating and exploiting existing program mechanics can generate productive and expressive avenues for users and thinkers, which requires procedural literacy but doesn’t necessitate programming knowledge, per se. I wonder what’s more important for the general population — being able to read and understand how code is impacting the ways in which we interact with programs on the web and otherwise enough to make/appropriate/exploit those mechanics for one’s own expressive purposes, or learning enough code to invent from the ground up? In many ways I think the appropriative version is more exciting — just give people discursive tools and they’ll act with them. It also takes away (perhaps) some of the intimidation factor of learning and keeping up with ever-evolving programming languages and tools, which is a good thing, no?
I agree that there is a strange tension running through Bogost’s work, and I think you’ve captured it. I’m honestly not sure yet if this is a good and productive tension or not. On one hand he echoes the OOO entreaty to finally decenter and humble the human and pay proper respect to what objects are in and for themselves. In Alien Phenomenology, this is primarily gestured toward by Bogost’s “ontography.” It’s a big, strange world of fascinating objects; the best a gaggle of hapless featherless bipeds can do is wonder at their internal lives and start the endless process of cataloging them via lists or “Latour litanies.” On the other hand, he reproduces a rhetoric of the grand creator through “carpentry.” Go forth and make things, ye mighty human!
This becomes especially evident when read in conjunction with the procedural rhetoric celebrated in Persuasive Games. Bogost often seems to assume that created procedural rhetorics will be successful, or that the intended procedural model will be transmitted from programmer to gamer. But gamers may not play the way the creator intended, bugs become features, etc. You noted that the maker often seems left out in Persuasive Games, but perhaps this is because it seems to assume an effortless transmission of rhetorical intent from maker to gamer, bypassing any resistance of the media object itself. As a prior post indicated, there are some RL procedures that are just difficult to model in computer games, at least up to this point. I wonder if spending more time thinking on either the hardware or software things in themselves would yield any insights.
I really like your discussion of Minecraft, because I think you’re right that the interactivity in this game, the modifications and manipulations allowed to a player, are important to Bogost’s argument–perhaps the perfect example of dialectical rhetoric in which the game–and, as you point out, other players–react to the character’s choices in meaningful ways. I still think that there’s something substantively different between what the creators of Minecraft (or any game) did and what the player is able to do. I don’t think you’re ignoring that difference–in fact, you’re addressing it directly in your last paragraph where you talk about coding and creating digital texts from the ground up as opposed to modifying them.
I’m curious to hear more about why you’re intrigued by the idea of modifying existing programs. I, for one, am not quite sold on the creative possibilities there. Or perhaps I haven’t thought it through sufficiently yet. My first reaction, though, is to say, “Of course it’s more valuable to learn to make something yourself than to modify what others have made!” I think it’s because of what I discussed in my post–the relationship between what we create, how we structure the texts we create and how they, in turn, structure us and all “readers” of the text. Creating your own text allows you to think about its structure, to create it in a way that jives with your understanding of the world–you might be able to comment on someone else’s when you modify it, but it seems different to me that original creation. But coding is a different beast from writing, and it’s possible that my ideas about how code functions to structure our thought as we produce (and consume?) it are misguided and result from a poor understanding of coding. Anyway, I’m eager to discuss this more!
Great post! I think maybe part of the issue here is the fractal nature of procedurality. Yes, we can talk about the basic procedures that are built from the ground up in code, but we can also talk about the more complex procedures that govern the logic of playing a game from the top down. In that sense, I think that Bogost’s answer to your question of coding vs. manipulating would be that both of these are procedural, and that you need to go with the option that’s more immediate to what you want to accomplish. That is to say, the brilliance of procedural rhetoric, something that Bogost really goes whole-hog with when discussing object-oriented ontology, is that its scalability makes it possible to interface with it at any level as long as you have the procedural literacy to do so. So sure, if you want to learn to code, then do it, there’s work to be done there; however, it’s not like you’re necessarily losing something if you don’t code. After all, until you get down to the ones and zeroes, even the programming language itself is already a procedural layer, and those layers scale up to the level of modding/exploiting/hacking. Powerful interventions can be made at every level, and I think he would totally agree with you about the intimidation factor attached to coding.
I think the question you raise here, about whether having a fuller understanding of code matters when dealing with the rhetoric of video games, is an interesting one. I do feel in recent years there has been a movement towards a kind of “accidental video game sublime” in fan culture that seems predicated upon /not/ understanding what is happening in a game’s code, rather reveling in a sense of totally contingent accident. One irreverent example of this, contained within the GoldenEye 007 engine, which I do not understand at all, can be found here: https://youtu.be/SP5c_MEs9mo (my apologies for the ableist language in the description). There seems to be a rhetorical function to such glitch clips, in that a game that has been popular for over a decade is made anew by the bizarreness of the glitch. I wonder if there is something particularly transgressive about using a game engine against itself to create such effects.