Code, Software and Serious Games

One part I found interesting about this first part of Bogost's book Persuasive Games was hisdistinction between persuasive games and persuasive technology, later termed "captology," a subject that he seems eager to critique. I'm not sure I agree with Bogost in giving this field of study/practice the overtly negative label "manipulative technology." Nevertheless, there seems to be a somewhat dramatic distinction between persuasive technology and what Bogost chooses to focus on in this book. The way I would try to summarize this difference is by saying that while persuasive games try to persuade via some form of rhetoric, persuasive technology persuades via psychology, methods that one might use or study within a controlled, experimental environment.

On perhaps a less trivial note, I think it's particularly interesting to look at this book in light of what we talked about in Tuesday's class, namely software and games as allegories of social structures and processes. Because of the computer's increased ability to create representations of processes, Bogost chooses to focus on games and algorithms ("procedures") that "present or comment on processes inherent to human experience," such as processes that affect economic, political, social, and cultural conditions and behaviors. In other words, his focus seems to rest on games that stand as allegories for social processes (maybe more explicitly than the processes at work within software in general). As he argues, "procedural expression must entail symbol manipulation, the construction and interpretation of a symbolic system that governs human thought or action" -- a definition that I think one could apply not only to procedure, but also to ideology.

A quick look at the other sections of the book suggest that this connection isn't all that far-fetched. Bogost separates the rest of the text into three categories -- politics, advertising, and learning -- all of which correspond to the ideological state apparatuses presented by Althusser. Therefore, I think one could make the argument that an important part of procedural rhetoric is the mirroring and, in effect, critiquing of the processes at work in certain ideologies, or in ideology as a whole.