From Crafters Inventory’s book section, we are delighted to feature on Day 17, a book titled Persuasive games – The expressive power of video games by Ian Bogost.
About the book
Videogames are both an expressive medium and a persuasive one. In this innovative analysis. Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric’s unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion, they realize a new form of rhetoric.
Bogost calls this new form procedural rhetoric, a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers. He argues that videogames have a unique persuasive power: not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, they can also disrupt and change those positions. He looks at three areas in which videogames persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and education.
Bogost is both an academic researcher and a videogame designer, and Persuasive Games reflects both theoretical and game-design goals.
