ABSTRACT
This
article discusses first steps towards a specific rhetoric of digital games where
general rhetoric makes up the scientific discipline of strategic communication
and symbolic action by means of identification and psychagogy. Therefore, this
work contributes to the fundamental and general question why and how players become
consubstantialised and persuaded with game designs, and stick to gameplay these
games. Accordingly, a first conceptual model is introduced and discussed. It
features three interrelating dimensions which engage a symbolic, a structural,
and a systemic coupling between player and game design during gameplay within
an experiential eigenworld of reciprocal control, mastery, and empowerment.
Keywords
Rhetoric
of digital games, persuasive games, general rhetoric, psychagogy, digital
games, theory of games, game analysis, game design, game design patterns.
INTRODUCTION
Why,
and how do digital games make us play with them – what, for example, are
their argumentative strategies of make-believe like, shaped by possibilities
and necessities? How, on the other hand, do games induce constant cooperation
and persuade us to play, and keep playing[1]? And thus: What signifies the
relationship between game design(er), gameplay, and player?
Let
us sidestep typical answers according to which the fundamental reason for playing
human-computer based games is either learning [9] [10], or motivational captivation through aspects of intrinsic
motivation such as confidence, control, challenge, fantasy, or curiosity [24]
[25]. Rather, let us combine these introductory questions by asking more
precisely: What is the – empirically approximated and social-, media-,
and neuro-psychologically rooted – rhetoric of digital games?
Granted:
Comprehensively responding to this last matter would likely take much longer
than one paper. But the attempt is worthwhile, and overdue to commence with:
When designing digital games requires thinking about digital games, and
thinking about these games requires designing - or at least: prototyping - them
in the first place, a rhetoric of digital games can ultimately serve the
purpose of bridging the worlds of creating games (that is, applying such a rhetoric) and thinking
about games
(that is, analyzing games along such a rhetoric). This paper shall provide a
first attempt to offer such an anastomosis.
General
rhetoric - as the mother of all media theory - has provided specific rhetoricae with this same goal for other
forms of symbolic action, strategic communication, and effective expression, as
well: think of speech and public performance [1] [8] [30]; painting [37];
interior architecture and ornamental design [14]; design aesthetics and general
aesthetics [27]; general design [4]; interface design [3]; and entertainment
mass media such as radio, TV, and film, see e.g. [33][2].
As a performative approach towards means such as participant entertainment
and/or enjoyment, general rhetoric may best be explicated with the Greek term
“psychagogy”, that is, literally, guidance [in the sense of: tossing, spw] of the
soul.
Hence,
in this paper, I define gameplay as a rhetorical performance between player(s)
and game design, a symbolic action that takes place amongst agents involved in
playful human-computer eigenworld cooperation on the basis of
identification-making, and persuasive operations. I will use my German-English
neologism eigenworld
because (1) it elegantly describes an autarkic, idiosyncratic, but still
self-constrained social situation; and because (2) there is no equivalent
translation to the original term “Eigenwelt” I would use in German, rather.
Triadic Relationship between Game Designer, Game, and Player
Above
mentioned rhetoricae encompass
a triadic relation between the (1) designer and communicator of a certain content (in
classical rhetoric, usually referred to as the orator); (2) the communicans itself including its
performance; and eventually, (3) its receiving audience, which can be a group
of agents, or an individual agent. The whole of the process I understand as
symbolic action in the sense of rhetorician Kenneth Burke, see [6].
Hence,
one could define rhetoric as the science and art of persuading a receiver to
couple with a message, and through the message, to couple with the
communicator. Although mostly unidirectional in its original communicative
process setting - a message is conveyed from the most important communicative
factor, the orator, to the audience, see [8] - and without any agent participation of technological mass
media, modern mass media force modern rhetorical theory to re-read this
pristine triad which had been best expressed by Aristotle’s original definition
of písteön tría eídë
[1].
Overview
In
the following, I present first steps towards a digital game rhetoric by further
investigating a triadic activity relationship between game design, game, and
player. I will first refer to related research; then move on to a description
of general rhetoric and its core operation, persuasion; following which I will
introduce and discuss a draft model that shows how identification-making and
persuasion between gameplay participants takes place through systemic,
symbolic, and structural couplings. I end with future research issues and
conclusions.
RELATED RESEARCH
Researcher
Drew Davidson has presented his own “gameplay rhetoric”. As opposed to my
holistic (both analytical and praxeological) attempt here, which renders rhetoric’s core
feature and duty, persuasion (and identification) multi-dimensionally with
regard to gameplay, Davidson adopts rhetorician Wayne Booth’s idea that there
is a rhetoric of fiction at work in literature, and re-reads this idea
concerning games, where rhetorical elements serve as “‘friends of the [player]’
that exist within” the gameplay of games. These mechanics have rhetorical
elements that serve the purpose of conveying the game’s techniques and rules
enabling play.” [11].
Other
writings that have influenced this article include attempts to standardize, or
systematically bring to terms, and/or examine scientifically (mostly digital)
game design issues, for example the ontologically operating Game Design Patterns
Project [18], Noah Falstein’s fabulous “400 Project – Rules of Game
Design” and his monthly column in the Game Developers Magazine, see e.g. [13];
Rollings/Adams [31]; and Crawford [10].
WHAT SIGNIFIES GENERAL RHETORIC?
In
this section, I define and discuss rhetoric as a scientific discipline
concerned with symbolic action, identification, persuasive operations,
strategic communication, and proper (cross-medial) expression and present its
technical core, persuasion, as well as the latter’s relevance for digital
games.
Analytical, applied, and performative psychagogy
Rhetoric
is the science of strategically communicated symbolic action and choreo-graphed
expression through theory, analysis (lat. rhetorica docens), design/creation, and
performance (lat. rhetorica utens) [36] [21] [22].
At the heart of rhetoric: Persuasion
When
Aristotle writes that “The speaker’s character may almost be called the most
effective means of persuasion he possesses.” [1: bk. I, chapter 2], then I
would like to reformulate this citation with “The medium’s character –
its gestalt, composition, in short: its design – may almost be called the
most effective means of persuasion it possesses”. Thus, the design of any given
artefact is effective should it be able to persuade an individual, or a mass of
individuals, to do what its message, such as entertainment, wants the
individual to do; for example, play a game of Tetris. The process of persuasion
influences the choice-making of others in that it, naturally, persuades them to
change their status of “unplaying” to playing in the instance of playing games:
Persuasion involves influencing the audience’s
mental state, commonly as a precursor to action. Although a number of mental
states may be the focus of a persuader’s attention, social-scientific
persuasion research has given pride of place to attitude, understood as the
general evaluation of an object, such as a policy, proposal, product, or
person. Hence, much of the relevant social-scientific work concerns attitude
change, because such change represents an exemplary case of rhetorical success.
[29]
An
attitude can be defined as a “psychological tendency that is expressed by
evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor” [12]. An
entity – an object of evaluation– can be concrete (for example, a
“digital game”), or abstract (for example, “entertainment”) circumstances. At
the same time, a single entity (somebody else’s newly bought, or rented digital
game) or a class of entities (digital games per se) can exist as an object of
evaluation. Classifiable behaviors (to play a digital game), or a class of
behaviors (a sequence of interactions with(in) a game constituting gameplay)
may function as an object of evaluation. A persuasive message can nevertheless
lead to a change in attitude - a change from inactivity to enactment - provided
only if six information processes phases have been successfully absolved [26].
Players
would, accordingly, (1) need to be confronted with a presentation of a certain
situation to be evaluated; (2) the player would need to spare attention to that
situation given; (3) the player would then need to comprehend the situation;
(4) the player would need to accept or agree with (be positive about wanting to
play) the situation. In order for this act of acceptance and the change of
attitude to become behaviorally manifest (6), the player would need to stick to
this change of attitude in at least temporarily stable fashion [32].
From
the last paragraphs, we can come to the understanding that the change of
activity from “unplay” to “play” can be interpreted as a persuasive operation
where the change of attitude from favoring “play” over “unplay” becomes
behaviorally manifest in the form of starting to play, and keep playing.
TOWARDS A RHETORIC OF DIGITAL GAMES: A MODEL
On
the road towards a specific rhetoric of digital games, we need to rethink
general rhetoric: Thus, we now dare to find a rhetorical key to digital games
themselves.
Identification as a key to a rhetoric of digital games
One
core feature of digital games is interactivity [10]. As a social psychologist,
anthropologist, and rhetorical theorist and practitioner, I am convinced that
we should, complimentary, look at digital games from a human-computer activity
perspective involving symbolic actions.
This
perspective, however, almost immediately calls for (willful, involuntary,
voluntary, conscious, or unconscious) acts of cooperation between human and
computer, because there would be no human-computer activity if there was no
cooperation between these two agents. So we are in need of the putty that
explains why humans cooperate with computers in the first place.
Kenneth
Burke has rethought rhetoric in this context, although without thinking of, or
addressing specifically computer games, or human-computer activities. The term
“consubstantiality” – or, co-equally used by Burke [5] [6] the term
“identification” – signifies the textual metaphor of a social
psychological mechanism which Burke understands as (1) raison d’être of all
cooperation, first, in face-to-face situations, and second and macroscopically
speaking, in society and other communicative settings; and (2) as cause of all
social cohesion. This definition correlates with the social psychological
evidence that identification serves a major role in keeping an individual’s,
and a group’s, psychic balance [16]. Whereas Aristotle put forward an audience
centered rhetoric where the aim of the rhetor is on gaining audience assent, Kenneth
Burke suggests that rhetoric is identification, meaning “The generation and
fulfillment of expectations through the use of symbols (forms)” [5], and that
there cannot be any form of persuasion without a prior form of identification
between two interacting agents.
So
from here on, I define digital game design “as a symbolic means of inducing
cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.” [5]. To Burke, these
identification symbols can consist of “speech, gesture, tonality, order, image,
attitude, idea” [6]. I find it exciting to imagine and analyse digital games,
and specifically their gameplay – def. experiential
human-computer-cooperation-in-symbolic-action – neither as a
story/narrative, nor a plaything, nor an idea, but rather as a multi-medial
(sic!), experiential, possibly delightful, moving, or educational operation of
constant argumentation between player and game design, containing
consubstantialisations and, consequentially, persuasions where the use of one
agent’s symbolic actions induces actions in another participating agent so that
player and game design couple through gameplay – in short: in
(flowing) gameplay, we are observing a rhetorical performance (loop).
This
makes even more sense when we conceive that in digital games, a player enacts
two roles at a time, that of a witness, and that of a player/participant. Media
psychology calls this personal union an act of para-social play between player
and play figure/character. As opposed to entertaining movies, where
protagonists as media figures (a) trigger an affective disposition in the
individual observer and (b) rest upon that individual’s moral beliefs, so
called socio-emotions, in the case of digital games, the witnessing
player/participant addresses herself emotionally in the form of so
“ego-emotions” [20]
With
the found key of identification puttying player and game, one central question
arises once we start thinking about an analytical and applied rhetoric of
digital games in the following section: By the way of which dimensions does
this coupling take place, and how?
I am
of the opinion that we can think of three dimensions which will be discussed in
detail in the upcoming sections:
·
A
systemic coupling
takes place through gameplay, so that gameplay represents an eigenworld of
reciprocal power, control, and mastery. The “player model” and the “game design
model” coincide conceptually (and rhetorically) in(to) the “system image”, that
is, the gameplay eigenworld. This view is analogous to the Aristotelian 'orator
– meaning/message - audience (gr. písteön tría eídë) model when we replace
Aristotle’s “orator” with the function of “game design”, and his “audience”
with “player”. This view is also analogous to Human-Computer Interaction
research’s definition of [game, spw] designer virtually meeting the user
[=player, spw] in the [game] system image by the way of coinciding mental
conceptions [28].
·
A
symbolic coupling
between these two agents of human-computer activity takes place, too,
theoretically based on the works of Burke. In this second case, gameplay itself
can be described as a performance loop of symbolic game action based on the
player's identifiedness
with the game design, and her persuadedness with the third coupling dimension.
·
A
game design’s motivational call character in the form of offers and demands
[20] structurally couples the player’s expectations, motives, and needs through
social psychologically verified “functional circles” [15] in the game
eigenworld. These link joints connect player and game design (a)
sensumotorically[3], (b) semantically; (c)
syntactically and eventually (d) through self-appealing offers and demands such
as order; closure; displacement of self; audit & probation etc., see [15].
Structural and symbolic coupling interrelate strongly, as they root on tagging,
and thus persuasive and motivational processes between player and game.
Figure 1 provides a
visualization of aforementioned dimensions, as well as of processes detailed in
the sections below.
Figure 1: Structural, symbolic, and
systemic coupling have game design and player cooperate and perform through
gameplay.
Symbolic and structural dimensions of a rhetoric of
digital games
In
this subsection, I outline dimensions of my model that describe gameplay as a
performance loop of symbolic game action based on the player's identifiedness with the game design’s
consubstantiality offers and demands, and her persuadedness with the game's argumentation
surfacing in the form of functional circles, its (a) sensumotorics, (b)
semantics; (c) syntax; (d) self-appealing offers and demands such as order; closure;
displacement of self; audit & probation, et al., that appeal to the
player’s motivation and participation. Motivation and participation themselves
rest upon the player’s strategy of expectations, motives, and needs.
Link joints between player and game design
In
his milestone article and book - unfortunately so far only available in German
language – Jürgen Fritz [15] analyses and describes these functional
circles on basis of a number of empirical player and game design studies
conducted at the University for Applied Sciences in Cologne.
In
situations of gameplay, these link joints (as Fritz calls them) engage a social
psychologically based structural coupling between player expectations, motives,
and needs, and the possibilities offered of the game to motivate the player.
Thus, I argue that a given game's persuasiveness comes into play
argumentatively by the way of rhetorical game design offers and demands aiming
to first make the player identify – “consubstantialise” à la Burke - with
the game, and second, persuade her to play, and keep playing; this operation is
an operation of symbolic action between a human and a computer agent, a player
and a game application and its inherent design.
So in
the eigenworld of gameplay between these agents, something is at stake; and
wherever and whenever anything is at stake, power and control, as well as
subordination and resistance - which could also be “channel deflection,” [22],
rhetorically speaking - are being negotiated between agents involved into the
game. This negotiation takes place within a given set of rules, or by breaking
these rules willfully, voluntarily, or accidentally. Especially in the realm of
playful human-computer symbolic action, where gameplay structurally couples the
game designer and the player in the computer generated game world, we can
understand this game world as a system of power, control, and mastery
negotiation between player and game designer by the way of actual gameplay.
Empowering the player in a control environment
From
here, it seems plausible to think of game design as the craft of, literally,
empowering the player whilst at the same time, it is the trade of effectively
controlling and steering the player’s activities. It is here, too, that both
practice and scientific discipline of rhetoric re-appear on the scene.
Psychagogy is the goal of rhetoric, whereas its means – strategic
communication in the possible form of entertainment – follows the
rhetorical end, persuasion. In rhetorical situations – universally
speaking, situations when something is at stake, and parties try to gain medial
control whilst granting rational, emotive, or delightful empowerment -
persuasion most likely appears in the form of argumentation. A speech can
formally and content-wise argue for or against something, as well as a text can
be argumentative, as can be a physical building, a piece of pop music, or a
software application. The whole purpose of any given game design is first, to
have a player identify with a game, and second, to persuade a player to play
the game, and to keep playing: we can call these form of identifiedness and persuadedness a successful structural
coupling between player and game design.
Game design strategy and argumentation
Thus,
a game design’s strategy and argumentation (its motivational potential) will
consist of relational structural elements – aforementioned link joints
– that, ideally, will connect with the player’s personality traits and
her life context [15] at full. Said motivational potential equals the game’s
“offer”, opposed by the player’s “expectation” [15], and makes up a game
design’s fascination. I will introduce the aspect of “game demand” equal to the
game offer in the subsection following this paragraph. Let me fist name said
functional circles:
·
Sensumotorical
synchronisation.
This pragmatic function circle has a player latch (mostly) corporeally into the
events on display; the player starts to automatize body movements according to
the game design’s requirements until, only ideally, in perfect sync [15.]. This
choreography includes mouse movements to accomplish in-game interface tasks, as
well as mimetic reactions from untrained players who co-curve with their
electronic cars in races, or co-jump with their locum tenens during jump & run games,
for example. I would suggest that with the player, sensumotorical
synchronization can cause the whole spectrum from pleasure and internal
exuberance to feelings of regimentation and, see also [7].
·
Transferral
of meaning. This
semantic function circle encompasses the semiotic events on display which the
player construes. Usually, a player re-constructs the game in accordance to the
(genre-typical) directions the game design implies through its implicit and
explicit meaning structures. An ego-shooter, for example, requires a player to
witness herself shooting other participants, whilst simulating to shoot them
from a first person point of view. Game designs can bear (not-so-)complex
themes, role offers, typical patterns of action, and dramaturgies on many
experiential levels. Graphical, aural, and other sensual semantics transfer
meaning to the player [15].
·
Rule
competence. This
syntactical function circle controls the player whilst the player aims at
gaining power of the rules of the game design, and thus the game-in-play. The
circle contains game rules, and gameplay mechanics such as game world border,
which the player learns to acknowledge, and apply. The player also realizes
relationships between game objects and/or mechanics, and applies the rules (or
breaks them) to approximate a personal in-game-strategy of behaviors to keep up
motivation, and succeed with game events, and challenges. Combined strategies
point at certain game genres, and a player’s competences help her to develop
cognitive skills needed to master the game, eventually. In this case, we can
speak of optimal player rule competence; note that in my opinion, game pattern
[18] competencies, too, are specifically symbolic gameplay action orientated in
that they offer sequences of rules, and mechanics.
·
Self
reference. This
dynamic function circle resembles psychodynamic and psychodramatic game
arrangements [15] with the goal to appeal to, and help express the internal
player world by offering a stimulus configuration it can relate to within a
world without physical sanctions. A player’s wishes, interests, emotions,
skills, and/or fantasies may be allured by (basic) patterns of life
accomplishment re-appearing in digital games uch as order; fight; closure;
course of goals; enrichment; audit and probation; extension and expansion.
These patterns make up for the dynamics of games. Apart from the possibility to
substructure Fritz’s overview, for example “closure” into (a) predictive and
(b) dramatic closure – see [17], I would complement Fritz’s list with
other patterns that may fulfill neuro-psychological functions, for example
displacement of self.
Game design offers and demands
A
majority of players regards computer games in general as a synthesis between
medium and toy [20]. We can describe the motivational potential/”call
character” of digital games (and, implicitly, of their design) not only in
terms of offers as outlined in the preceding subsection, but also in terms of
demands. So simultaneously, digital games do not only offer symbolic identification possibilities to the player, but also
demand symbolic identification necessities from the player once the game is
cooperatively performed through gameplay.
We
can deduct that thus, game design is deeply rhetorical in the sense of a rhetorica
utens, that
is: an applied psychagogy. Not
only the orator (the game designer) is actively pursuing to guide, but the
audience (the player) takes over this role and becomes, temporary, the designer
of the game played herself. Any player, we could say, playing a game, designs
her own game experience in the very moment the game is played; this holds true
especially when we take digital games as forms of experiential human-computer
activity rather than say, functional activities.
Gameplay as system of reciprocal power, control, and mastery
I
think it possible to argue that in toto, the major (rhetorical) goal of any
given game design is to convince people to convince themselves to build their
own (eigenworld) game experience. Gameplaying a digital game can thus be
defined as the reciprocal shifting of control and power by the way of Fritz’s
functional link joints that couple game and player, and in parallel, game
design and game design “user”. From less a rhetorical, and more a social
psychological view, games are successful when they have the power over a player
to keep playing, whilst to the player, a game experience is being successfully
mastered when it is under control.
Systemic Dimension of a Rhetoric of Digital Games
Systemically,
and from a digital game design standpoint, game applications represent a form
of rhetoric that is rooted in conventional interactive system design, mostly in
terms of how the game has been designed conceptually to be both understandable,
usable, and
experiential. This way of looking at the rhetoric of digital games interrelates
with the structural and symbolic couplings presented in the above. How exactly
will need to be shown in future research.
We
can define that a given game design operates as a formal rhetorical
argumentation along the Aristotelian triangular model of (a) orator, (b)
speech, and (c) audience; only that in the case of digital game design, the
orator element is represented by the (to a) game designer; (to b) the game
replaces the speech element; and (to c) a single player substitutes a
terminologically rather blurry “audience”. The structure – and. mind, not
its rhetorical origin – of this threefold model is analogous to the
conventional relations of user, product designer, and design product [28].
Conceptual models in interactive system design
In
order to better understand digital game design in general - and argue
specifically towards the rhetoric of digital games - it seems therefore worthy
to look at fundamental aspects in both interactive system, product, and device
design, namely, (1) conceptual models, and (2) the visibility of design
structure and functionalities.
Conceptual
models, cognitive scientist and Human-Computer Interaction Design researcher
Donald A. Norman states, “are part of an important concept in design: mental
models
[italics orig.], the models people have of themselves, others, the environment,
and the things with which they interact. People form mental models through
experience, training, and instruction. The mental model of a device is formed
largely by interpreting its perceived actions and its visible structure. I call
the visible part of the device the system image.” [28] The system image derives
from the physical structure that has been built and makes up the visible part
of a device. In that, all communication between the system designer and the
system user takes place through the system image.
Ideally,
the “user’s model” (the mental model developed through interaction with the
system) is identical with the designer’s conceptual model which Norman calls “designer’s
model” [28] In this optimal case of equivalence , “everything about the product
is consistent with and exemplifies the operation of the proper conceptual
model” [28] including its physical appearance, its operation, its responses,
and its accompanying manuals, documentations, and instructions. When following
Norman’s argument, it becomes clear that the user of conventional software
products acquires all knowledge about the system from its system image.
What
Norman calls the mental model signifies (in the sense of ‘means’) the model
itself, as if a model is something that is unquestionably valid to each and
everyone when properly crafted. Often, experience and empirical research in the
qualitative social sciences show that this is not the case. The problem,
however, does not lie with the model itself, but with individual meaning
making. People tend to take models not for what they are, but what they mean to
them in certain contexts, or, what they want these models to mean to them in
the very moment the models move from periphery to center of attention, or when
they identify a certain model or an element of this model that suits their
concurrent desire best. So the interpretation of models – in Norman’s
rather mechanistic, functional view: their gulfs of execution and evaluation
– often does not fail due to
their deficit of visible self-explanation, but because people have different,
individualised, one could say: custom, highly situative, con- and co-textual
understandings of these models, see [2]. This holds true specifically when
analyzing and designing a playful user’s experience rather than, say, a (albeit
user-centered) usable piece of software for that user.
So we
as game designers have to assume that user experiences differ from subject to
subject not only gradually, but substantially – it is only in real life
projects that we usually cannot weave in this understanding into our products
and apparatuses; one could also say that because players want to engage in a
world-in-action visually, aurally, and interactively, their compelling
encounter of that world represented by a symbol processing machine should have
the human-computer activity designer (in the sense of Brenda Laurel: the
playwright, see [23]) provide (1) actions - and subsidiary to this central goal
– (2) characters/thoughts, (3) language/communication, and (4) enactment
within this world according to the following notion: “Think of the computer,
not as a tool, but as a medium.” [23].
In
comparison to game designer Chris Crawford’s sequential conversationality
principles of well-listening – thinking – speaking [10], Laurel’s
design and analysis principles are much more performance orientated, that is to
say: Laurel applies Aristotle’s qualitative elements of drama, including their
causal relations as found in De Poetica, to the construction and debugging of
human-computer (play) activities [23]. Now, both drama based and
conversationalist perspectives help us to comprehend human-computer activity
from a systemic standpoint, but they do not thoroughly explain why and how
people are persuaded to play, why they keep, and how they can be kept playing.
Why? Naturally, neither Laurel nor Crawford, nor Rollings/Adams [31], think of
human-computer play activities in terms of symbolic gameplay action,
consubstantiality offers (coherent and proper identification possibilities),
and consubstantiality demands (proper and coherent identification necessities)
as outlined with the functional circles that serve as link joints between
player expectations.
Conceptual models as systemic argumentation in interactive game system design^
However,
game designers “try to imagine what players will experience as they work their
way through the game, trying to deliver the most exciting and compelling
experience possible (…)” [35]. They
must still heed functional aspects when designing digital games that encompass
user interfaces. Whereas in conventional design, user tasks play a vital role
for designing these systems, the
two key aspects of the player’s experience are the
goals they pursue and the environment in which they pursue them. Game designers
often seek to keep players engaged by creating three levels of goals:
short-term (collect the magic keys), lasting, perhaps, seconds; medium-term
(open the enchanted safe), lasting minutes; and finally, long-term (save the
world), lasting the length of the game. [35]
The
“interplay” of these levels of goals, together with the tension between
storyline and freedom of interaction gives the player the perception that “they
have free will, even though at any time their options are actually limited.”
[35] This notion, eventually, exemplifies that next to a symbolic, and a
structural coupling, a systemic coupling between game design and player takes
place in the form of performative gameplay indicating a rhetoric of digital
games.
CONCLUSION: TOWARDS AN ANALYTICAL AND APPLIED RHETORÌC OF DIGITAL GAMES: FUTURE RESEARCH
In
this article, I have introduced a first and rough rhetorical model of how we
can approach digital games symbolically, structurally, and systemically, for
both their analysis, and their design. In how far this model of gameplay as
cooperative - consubstantial and persuasive - symbolic eigenworld action and
structural and systemic coupling between player and game design will prove
usable, I will try and examine empirically in the future. Contrary to the
exemplary notion that game design is about “environmental storytelling” [19], I
propose to view delightful game design as the science and art of psychagogical
experience induction, and the conceptual craft of creating strategies of proper
and coherent consubstantiality-making, and successful player persuasion within
the game’s space-time eigenworld.
Therefore,
to me, game design represents the applied and practical aspect of a rhetoric of
digital games. I also believe that this view should be testified through a lot
of game design experimentation. As part of my ongoing doctoral research, and in
order to meet my postulation of a rhetoric of digital games, I am currently
working on building an applicable and analysis library of rhetorical game
design figures (such as a sensumotorical metaphor, or a syntactical metonymy, for example) based on social
psychologically validated functional circles as described in the preceding
sections.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I
would like to thank both Jussi Holopainen (Nokia Research Center) and Heather
Kelley (Ion Storm Game Studio) for discussing this article. In addition I would
like to credit Bernd Jürgen Warneken, Joachim Knape, Rainer Schöbel (all:
University of Tübingen), and Heiner Mühlmann (Bergische Universität Wuppertal)
for their counseling, as well as thank Gerhard Blechinger and Gerhard M.
Buurman (both: University for Art Media and Design Zurich) for their generous
financial support. Eventually, there
would be no research without you, Katrin.
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