In Defense of Procedurality
Procedural Rhetoric, Civilization, and “You Didn’t Build That!”
I want to write a bit of a defense of Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric,” which he defines as “the practice of persuading through processes in general and computational processes in particular” (Persuasive, 3). I particularly want to counter the claims that procedural rhetoric a) ignores the player, and b) neglects the importance of other representative modes like narrative and aesthetics. I’ll use Miguel Sicart’s “Against Procedurality” article from Gamestudies.org (11:3, 2011) as a dialectical counterpart, since it’s easily available and I think representative of the “nay” camp… Continue Reading