Emm's Digital Library

When I go to play any video-game, usually my purpose is to escape from the real world for a while, for whatever reason. From what I understood, Ian Begost in “Rhetoric of Video-Games” is trying to make a point that playing games is never just playing games. They’re a set of cultural arguments that are wrapped up in rules, choices, etc., as well. Similarly to De Certeau’s idea of cities being designed to push us to take certain paths, video-games are pushing us towards certain ways of thinking and acting. I got the chance to play the Mcdonald’s game Begost talks about, and quickly realized the rhetoric behind the actions you are forced to take in order to succeed as a fast food chain. To be successful at any rate, you have to make ethically questionable decisions, which points out the ways the game is trying to say that the fast food industry is exploitative. It’s a different, more hands-on way to persuade the players of a certain ideology.

This idea makes me think of when I would play Grand Theft Auto with my brother. The way to climb up the ranks and gain success was by getting money, cars, and power, no matter what law you had to break to get it all. What I always thought was the most entertaining was how players would find ways to do that without the actual process. I remember there was always someone finding out how to glitch the game and recieve an absurd amount of money, allowing you to buy whatever you wanted. Like I talked about in my De Certeau post, this money glitch was my digital ‘desire path’. The developers of the game created it in a way that allowed a set system for how you were able to advance, but players always found new ways to bend the rules and make their own paths. I guess that would be resistance in its own, digital way.

I’ve never necessarily thought about it, but I do think that we should study video-games in a digital rhetoric class. They can tell us cultural values, what these values reward, and what rules to follow within that culture, just as well as text; in some contexts, better than text can. Although video-games are highly entertaining, they’re not just entertainment, they’re teaching tools as well.