Greetings fellow liberators of the pale and dull FPS!
So you might be wondering what this title has to do with video games, besides the fact that there is already a Watchmen game published as a download. So perhaps a better title would be, what makes a good watch? A seemingly unrelated question to what we were talking about last week, yes. Is it still appropriate? Yes! And here’s why.
Cue 1960′s Batman TV Series spinning bat wheel. In our last discussion, we talked about some of the issues affecting the development of persuasive games, ranging from lack of a detailed revenue model to the need for a “coolness” factor that can make Master Chief look like a Master Chef. I ended by discussing Ian Bogost’s concepts of what persuasive games can do and how he believes video games can be a powerful tool for procedural rhetoric.
What does Ian mean by procedural rhetoric? Let’s start with defining procedural. Essentially, this means the nuts and bolts, the zeros and ones, the software code itself that enables a computer to be able to carry out a function, executable or otherwise. That’s a pretty basic definition and I’m sure I’m being simplistic, but for the purposes of our conversation it will work.
Now let’s talk about rhetoric. Back in the days of the ancient Greeks, rhetoric was considered an essential skill to have, in fact, life-saving at trials. These weren’t 12-member juries in a courtroom. It was hundreds of members of the community asking you tough questions about why you think you’re right or committed a crime. And it was conducted in full view of the public. Today, we have a very negative view of rhetoric, often associated with key messages ads attempt to communicate or some new thing someone is selling in an infomercial. However, it would be more historically accurate to equate such aspects with sophism. In fact, citizens on the other side of a court case would hire a sophist to make disparaging accusations of their opponent at the trial. You could think of these people as the surprise guest in a Jerry Springer show that no one expects, but everyone loves to see because they make the show more interesting. From a literal perspective, we find the expression “vile sophistry” in verse four of the song “The Minutemen” written during the Civil War in 1861 by J.B Hawkins:
Where your pastures are radiant with Heav’n’s best light
Monopoly moves through the land of the free,
Like a spectre that stalks in the stillness of night,
Its victims alluring with vile sophistry.
One can imagine that this was one of the many places where the term “vile sophistry” got its origins.
So now that we know procedural rhetoric is, it’s time we get back to the main crux: what makes a good watch? For me, a good watch is one that yes, looks snazzy, but also allows me to pair it with any set of my clothes. I can use the watch to compliment various aspects and incorporate it as I wish. It gives me control. It’s this control aspect that I think is criticallyimportant to creating a really good persuasive game.
Bogost provides a fantastic example in the introductory chapter of his book, Persuasive Games. He talks about a PBS Kids game called Freaky Flakes, designed to teach kids the messaging tricks that cereal companies use in their advertising to get kids to buy it. Essentially, kids get to enter some text and out comes a cereal box with a prototypical marketing message. It was a really great idea, but no matter what text you entered, you got the same basic outcome. Bogost had this to say in his blog:
Finally, wouldn’t it have been great if there were also a simulation that you could run on the boxes you create with this tool? Add some natural language processing and a few simple rulesets — it might make the lessons about advertising more effective.
In other words, wouldn’t it have been great for the kids to come up with their own cereal box? What would happen if they designed a healthy cereal? What would the box say? This is why I want to know what makes a good watch. I don’t want the run-in-the-mill watch that gives me the same ol’ time every instance I look at it. Maybe it’s a calculator watch that I can program look any way I want it to. Maybe I don’t want it to be a watch, so I change it to be a GPS system. It goes beyond “colors” to actual functions and aspects of the watch I can modify as I wish. I get to change the procedures.
This is precisely how I am to design my persuasive game. Don’t get me wrong, linear storylines are great and have their place. But if we really want to change people’s minds, they have to feel like they can change their environments. Jane McGonigal, director of Game Research and Development at the Institute For The Future, quoted SETI Director and 2009 TED Winner Jill Tarter as saying the following:
“I’m interested in the possibility that learning to be good at a game makes you good at life, makes you good at changing the world, and gives you skills that are going to allow you to reinvent your environment. Because, in the game, you play against an environment that’s been given to you.”
And in life, we are also given an environment that impacts us. But how do we change it? How can we learn from it? And what exactly would such a game look like? All questions I’m hoping to tackle in my next post, and I’ll also discuss what McGonigal was up to in referring to Jill Tarter’s work. You might remember McGonigal from the innovative World Without Oil game she created.
Stay cool! Or rather, hope I stay cool here in Seattle. It’s dang hot!
