Today’s Plan:
- Google Doc Contribution Issues / Make-Up Assignment
- Homework
- From A Rhetorical Triangle to a Ludic One
- Revised Procedural Rhetoric Heuristic
Google Doc Contribution Issues / Make-Up Assignment
I’ve scored the first assignment–I had a bit of an issue using the “find” feature in Firefox, so I had to double-check with the Google Docs find. If you completed this and I missed it, just let me know and/or copy and paste some of your contributions into Canvas.
If you haven’t completed the assignment yet, then I will give you a 4/5 if you spend some time reflecting on the game you are currently playing and using the rubric I’ve laid out below.
Homework
Keep on playing your game for the first paper and include another entry in your gaming journal Google Doc. I will cover the first paper in Monday’s class–it will be due January 30th. I will do my best to review progress in the gaming journals before next Wednesday’s class. In Wednesday’s class, we will work on summarizing procedural rhetoric.
From A Rhetorical Triangle Square to a Ludic One
I will spend 30 minutes thinking about our current project. I want to revise and adapt the heuristic we’ve been using. I mentioned last Friday that I wanted to incorporate “phenomenology” into our heuristic a bit. Here goes.
In rhetorical studies there’s the concept of the rhetorical triangle, offered by Lloyd Bitzer in his canonical essay “The Rhetorical Situation.” The essay is the foundation of many first-year writing courses, as it teaches us to analyze any “text” (which means message) in terms of its writer (who they are, what they want, why they write), its audience (where are they? what do they already think and feel, etc), and the subject matter and purpose of the text. Over the last half of the 20th century, scholars have turned this triangle into a square, adding context (the social, political, cultural, economic, networks/rules etc. in which the writer, audience, and purpose are enmeshed).
In essence, we’ve been asking similar questions about video games, treating them as a “text” in Bitzer’s sense. We think about the developer and her aims–whether those aims are clear (a serious game) or more ambiguous (which I think would characterize most of the games y’all are analyzing). We are certainly attending to the message/purpose of a game, attempting to identify what kind of changes that game wants to engender in us or our world. And–I hope–you recognize that often a procedural analysis will compare a game to others in its genre, isolating unique mechanics and then speculating as to whether those mechanics work with the game’s thematic and/or rhetorical ambitions or against them.
I want to spend some time today thinking about the fourth corner of the square, then: audience. In our case, I am thinking about us as players. I want to offer “phenomenology” as a philosophical methodology that can help us more thoroughly analyze our own experiences. What makes this tricky is that some of the most famous phenomenological philosophers resist the idea that it can be reduced to a method–that it is more a mindset. Either way, I think it can be helpful. Let’s see where this takes me.
The preeminent phenomenologist is Martin Heidegger. Required acknowledgement: Heidegger is a Nazi, both in politics and in spirit; he is also, unfortunately, the most important Western philosopher of the 20th century and probably the third most important philosopher in Western history. Whether you know it or not, his philosophy has influenced the entire world in which we live and learn.
Okay, back to phenomenology. Heidegger’s approach to phenomenology, influenced by pscyhoanalysis, pushed against previous notions developed by modern, Enlightenment philosophy. Those approaches asked the question: how does the world come into our consciousness? What is, how does the real, external world, appear to my subjective mind? And how can I “cleanse” my perception of the world of subjective noise and bothersome emotions? How do I translate the external real world into the real world (yes, I know, that sounds repetitive).
So, to summarize a bit too quickly here, Heidegger’s answer was both radical and transformative: you can’t. First, subjectivity isn’t something that can be wiped away. There is no way to see the world other than how we see and experience it. Our perspective is always limited by who we are, where we stand, when we look, and how we feel when we look (I’ll come back to this last one). I don’t just mean this physically, either. If I hold up an object, obviously you can’t see behind it. But I also mean this ideologically, where we “sit” in a cultural field of values etc. [Running out of time]. Heidegger then develops a “method” of deep reflection on human experience, one that identifies the primacy of our emotional states and the way that often unconscious emotional states transform/influence the way we perceive and navigate the world.
The philosopher Miguel Sicart applies Heidegger’s method to playing video games. He’s a “post-phenomenologist,” the “post” there resonates with postmodern theorists, such as Jacques Derrida, who would argue that Heidegger’s phenomenology was guilty of assuming that a kind of ubiquity to human feeling–that how I feel playing Walking Dead or reading Jacques Derrida or watching Battlestar Galactica ’04 would be the same as how any of you would feel in that situation–that there was one objective language of feeling that every human (or every “normal” human, but I don’t have time to critique the terror inherent in modern notions of “normal” today)–that every human would feel. So Sicart argues that it is important that we all learn how to analyze the contours of our own feeling and how that might be shaping our experience.
I will pick this up on Monday–two ways that Sicart’s post-phenomenology helps us analyze our experiences:
- Player Complicity (Suspension of Disbelief)
- How do I feel playing this game?
Revised Procedural Rhetoric Heuristic
Developer:
- What do you know about the writer/developer? Have you found interviews in which they talk about the game?
- How do you “feel” playing this game? What emotions do you believe the developers want the game to evoke?
Player:
- How does this game make you feel. Describe your emotions as you play, and what you think is causing them. For instance, are you frustrated by mechanics, or are your emotions more rooted in the game’s story and themes?
- What emotions might you feel while playing? (see Bringula et al)
- Satisfaction, Happiness, Delight
- Excitement, “Flow,” “Fiero”
- Unease, anxiety
- Boredom
- Disappointment
- Irritation
- Pressure
- Do you feel complicit, or is that complicty diminished?
- Do you find yourself playing instrumentally or ethically?
Purpose / Message:
- What is the plot / summary / topic of this game?
- What it the theme of this game?
- Theme is what a game is saying about how we do, should, or could live our lives. It addresses problems that we often face, emotions that we might not know how to handle, and/or seeks to “unfamiliarize” us with the way our wold has been structured (unsettles us, asks questions, provokes critical or creative thinking).
Mechanics:
- Is there any interesting about the scoring system for this game? Is it clear (or possible) to “win” the game?
- Is there anything interesting about the mechanics or play of this game? Does it mess with a traditional genre convention?
- What are some potential “arguments” made by the mechanics or scoring systems?
- In what ways do the mechanics match the argument or “mood” of the game?
- In what ways do the mechanics clash with/ignore the argument or “mood” of the game?
- How might we modify the mechanics to create more procedural harmony/aesthetic impact?
If we have time, I’d like to watch some of this and then use the heuristic.
