Since the rise of the arcade in the 1980s, the persuasive potential of video games has evolved with the creation of new games and transformation of the medium. With their diverse range of messages and target audiences, video games are fascinating artifacts for rhetorical study. That’s why, this upcoming Winter Quarter, Professor Alan Ackmann will be teaching his third iteration of WRD 266: Leveling Up: The Social Rhetoric of Video Games.
Read on for an interview with Professor Ackmann that outlines the class and its relevance to any students interested in media’s persuasive power.
What is the main focus of this course?
AA: The course’s main objective is to think about video games as rhetorical artifacts—they are usually thought of as more trivial or just things you do for fun, but they hold cultural power that is really important and fascinating to look into.
We’ll build on rhetorical ideas that don’t get as much attention in other classes, such as procedural rhetoric–the idea that, in games, people are asked to make choices that impact how the game runs and how they interact with it. This is a way of interacting with a text that isn’t afforded in other text-based or video-based mediums, and studying it yields some interesting analysis about persuasion and the power of interactive messages.
What will students read in this course? Will they be able to play any video games?
AA: The readings will be a mix of primary and secondary sources, meaning that students will engage both with scholarship about video games and with the games themselves. One specific source will be rhetorician Ian Bogost’s book Persuasive Games.
Most readings will focus on a specific aspect of video games, such as adaptive difficulty—the element of games in which choices and outcomes are altered based on how successfully a player navigates the game. This is just one of the many things that makes video games rhetorically unique, but there are many more we’ll explore in the class. Then, students will apply these concepts to various games they’ve played in and out of class—so yes, they’ll have the opportunity to play several games throughout the course!
Speaking of applying these concepts, what projects can students expect to complete?
AA: The centerpiece of the course is a project in which students pick a video game that they’re somewhat familiar with—and a paper that critiques it—to analyze the game’s intended audience, the choices it asks players to make, and what explicit or implicit arguments the game makes.
In addition to this main project, there are a few shorter assignments, typically 2-3 page discussions of specific topics. These are mostly drawn from the readings that we do as a class.
Why is the rhetoric of video games important to consider?
AA: This is an important question! To answer, let me start off with some examples.
In recent decades, during every election cycle there have been games put out by political parties and candidates of all stripes, and they’re designed to communicate a particular point about their candidate or the opposing candidate. In the 1990s, the U.S. Army created a basic training simulation game that would go on to be one of their most powerful recruiting tools. Then, there is an interesting set of games that are essentially advertisements, which were created just to get people to buy certain products in real life. These games are explicitly persuasive, where other games may seem more subtle, but they show us just how influential video games can be.
This brings up another idea: the use of video games to make points about social justice issues, especially through the rhetoric of failure. There are some games that use failure, by making their levels impossibly difficult, to make a rhetorical point. For example, we may look at one simulation game where the player is a picker in an Amazon warehouse, and essentially, as they become faster at picking the right item from the shelves and getting it to the shipment center, the game gives them more work and less time. It’s meant to simulate how, as demand increases expectations for such jobs, work conditions become more and more unreasonable.
Finally, I think that we are seeing a continued surge of using games as opportunities to communicate with people. And with the advent of AI programming, a lot of the lead time usually embedded in the process of creating a video game may be removed very rapidly. When that happens, I think there’s going to be a proliferation of video games in contexts where you might not necessarily expect them.
“Having ways to analyze the messages and persuasive impacts of these video games will be a critical skill in making sense of how our culture is being shaped.”
Professor Ackmann
Who should take this course?
AA: For WRD students, this course gives you a great opportunity to apply rhetorical analysis in contemporary, relevant ways and to engage with rhetorical concepts that aren’t talked about as widely, including procedural rhetoric and several rhetorical concepts unique to video games.
For students outside of the WRD Department, you might hear a word like “rhetoric,” and it may not sound like a field of study bursting with new ideas. However, if you’re interested at all in video games—as a hobby or even as your future career—learning how to analyze them in these ways can open you up to totally new perspectives.
As video games continue to shape so many ideas and interactions around us, learn how to analyze them in depth by signing up for WRD 266 today! To stay up to date with upcoming courses in the WRD department, check out our regularly updated Course Spotlights.