Random Game Thoughts

Working on this hybrid tabletop experience has had me really digging back into my dissertation work and the force that medium has on how we render @ibogost.com 's Procedural Rhetoric.

In my work, I found that from a social network perspective, the need for humans to maintain the network decreased by a factor of almost 50-75% when a computer maintains the game state. This is useful because it affords for computer-mediated games to really push at specific kinds of rhetoric but I would hazard to say that this is specifically problematic in that we often separate tabletop games and video games artificially for the same reason we do longhand math and calculators.

The reason for this is that for this experience we're making, I have students working on really thinking through how different medium afford for procedural rhetoric. Focusing at the moment on This War of Mine.

The finding that they brought to me is that This War of Mine is extremely ham fisted and essentially overrides the messaging of This War of Mine's digital experience to the point of ridiculousness.

It really brought back memories of my Master's Thesis and 9/11 wherein Zizek brought to the foreground the fact that most folks' reaction to the WTC's being brought down as, "it seems like a videogame."

Pair this with the new DHS explicitly scrubbing any and all photos of the rubble of bodies and you have a massive disaster with a lot of deaths and it simply resembles a number rather than a reality.

But yet, with This War of Mine, the procedural rhetoric is reversed. The digital game is subtle and yet wears the rhetoric on its sleeve by immersing the user within it to explore the conceptual space. On the other hand, the Board game experience uses the affordance of the mediums it has to show, tell, and immerse readers in the gore of war.

One student said:

"The video game is like a raiding came through town, and you were witnessing the aftermath of said raiding party and the damage that leaves behind."

"The board game is you experiencing the raiders coming through town with more focus on the actual tragedy and not the aftermath of a tragedy like that."

It's subtle but a powerful reminder of the impact medium can have on procedural rhetoric.