Persuasive games
"Videogames are both an expressive medium and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. 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. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. 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."--Jacket.
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What Hacker News says
- >In “Persuasive Games,” published in 2007, the video-game designer and professor Ian Bogost coined the term “procedural rhetoric” to describe the use of mechanics for persuasion, which he’d seen in video games going back to the nineteen-seventies.
Some notes on Procedural Rhetoric from a unfinished paper I've been writing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric
Ian Bogost defined the “Procedural Rhetoric” game design philosophy as an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle, that explains how people learn through rules and processes, analyzes the art of persuasion, and focuses on conveying ideology by crafting laws and rules within games. Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.
Procedural rhetoric. (Ian Bogost, Janet Murray)
“I developed my own design philosophy that I called procedural rhetoric, an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle.” -Ian Bogost, Video Games Are Better Without Characters
Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric [1] is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. [2]
Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology.
[1] Frasca, Gonzalo (2003). “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge. 221–37 ISBN 9780415965798
[2] Bogost, Ian (2008). "The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Ed. by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 117–40. ISBN 9780262693646
For better or worse, games can deliver pre-programmed propaganda and procedural rhetoric for advancing ideologies and changing minds. Some designers push clichéd narratives, stereotypical characters, and institutionalized prejudices that normalize and encourage homophobia, sexism, racism, bigotry, and violence.
The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive, tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players impress their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives with tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange.
The Sims presumes to model human minds and relationships, but necessarily makes brazen simplifications due to technological constraints. It optimizes for playability instead of realism, while making concessions to marketability, corporate interests, societal norms, and taboos. But somehow it works, and this paper attempts to explain some of the magic.
Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.
The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters of the Sims microworld. But it magically offloads most of the heavy lifting into the player’s own imagination, incorporating and enriching their intertwingled tapestry of common-sense knowledge and stories about people, families, and communities.
The graphical design of The Sims was inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, in which he illustrated how the “Masking” visual style draws abstract characters against realistic backgrounds, which increases empathy and projective identification, empowers emotional connections, and permits players to easily and deeply identify with characters.
The educational philosophy of The Sims and SimCity was inspired by Seymour Papert’s “Constructionism” learning theory, with which learners construct mental models to understand the real world by building tangible personally meaningful shareable microworlds, and learn by discovery and exploration, by leveraging information they already know to learn more, and architecting their own educations.
This paper reviews the history of inclusivity in The Sims franchise over two decades, and explains some techniques for imagination, persuasion, identification, empathy, storytelling, and education, which can also make other games more inclusive, expressive, and enlightening.
[...]
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13u-kNaWC2AAd-L0_5OoLc_-x...
Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims 1
https://donhopkins.medium.com/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the...
>Just before the 2004 presidential election, I created and programmed a downloadable Dumbold Voting Machine object for The Sims 1, as interactive agitprop to raise awareness about the problems of voting machines. I wrote this article about it, which I’ve now updated and included some new links and videos!
>You can download and install the Dumbold Voting Machine in your Sims installation, then you can place it on a table on your lot, and click on it to pop up a pie menu to play around with the voting machine. Or you can simply read on to find out what it does (which will spoil all the surprises)!
>At first look, it appears to be a fully functional voting machine. But it actually has a lot of infuriating bugs, hidden features, gaping security holes and malicious easter eggs that simulate problems with real voting machines, and it shows illustrated pop-ups to educate players about the real-world problems and issues of electronic voting.
>The High Concept
>The high concept, from a game design perspective [i.e. “bullshit alert”]: The Dumbold Voting Machine is intended to be a simple but intriguing puzzle you can “hack into” (like the cheat mode of The Matrix video game), while learning about real issues. It integrates interactive real-life “public service announcements”, subversive “product displacements”, and constitutionally protected “free speech”. It addresses late breaking news, current events and political opinions. It’s free speech and political commentary rendered as executable multimedia software. The Dumbold Voting Machine acts out the story interactively, in a way that’s fun to play and experiment with. It breaks down in frustrating “failure modes” with egregious “security holes” that illustrate some difficult problems with actual electronic voting machines in the real world. It’s meant to stimulate discussion, illustrate how computer programming is free speech, and why all election software should be open source and publicly inspectable.
[...]
- "The game is not a didactic device that aims to teach a lesson about ecology, conservation, and the peaceful coexistence with nature, just like plenty of works of fiction do not address anything in the real world—they are simply figments of the author's imagination."
The concepts of Procedural Rhetoric[1] argues against this view of games.
"The term "procedural rhetoric" was developed by Ian Bogost in his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as "the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions, rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures" and "the art of using processes persuasively."
...
"Procedural rhetoric also views games as strongly rhetorical--we "read games as deliberate expressions of particular perspectives." The exploration of possibility spaces becomes rhetorical and instructive as soon as games make claims about aspects of human experience, whether they do so intentionally or inadvertently."
- The Sims Design Documents
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/
The Sims Design Document Draft 3 (1998-08-07)
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...
On page 5, Don Hopkins wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game:
The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitely going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to 100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.
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The Kiss that Changed Video Games
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...
The 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, a video-game conference held in Los Angeles, California, was a typically lavish, if bawdy, affair. Here, for three days, the world’s video-game publishers gathered to show off their forthcoming titles to press and to purchasers in an overstimulating marketing circus. David Bowie performed at one of the conference’s orbiting parties that week, and Bill Goldberg and some other glistening-skinned wrestlers grappled one another in a custom-built ring on the publisher E.A.’s gargantuan booth. Away from the action of its main stage, E.A. had stationed a humble area advertising The Sims, an ambitious social-simulation project that almost nobody outside of its development team believed in.
For E.A., The Sims, the latest from Will Wright, the celebrated designer of 1989’s city-planning game SimCity, was a legacy project, inherited when the company purchased its development studio, Maxis. The game had been in stammering development since 1993, when Wright first had the idea for a simulation that would model human behavior, not from the bird’s-eye viewpoint of his earlier game but from the ground zero of domesticity. But replicating the mundane dramas of the living room in game form had proven to be a tall challenge: The Sims was almost abandoned numerous times. “We all knew that if we couldn’t generate any interest at E3 that year, then the game would be cancelled for good,” Patrick J. Barrett III, one of the game’s programmers, told me. “E.A. did nothing to help us. They hid us away. The game wasn’t even displayed on the large screen with the other title’s trailers.” But, within hours, an unplanned, illicit kiss between two of the game’s background characters made The Sims the talk of the show.
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Player Created Content
How to make the leap from smut to art, while continuing to support smut in a plausibly deniable way that you can sell through WalMart? Don’t do smut explicitly, but put the tools to create their own “artistic” content into the hands of the users.
"Time to Penis" -A phenomenon that online game developers had been aware of for years, which didn't have a name until someone came up with TTP. It's traditionally measured in nanoseconds.
Spore Penis Monsters.
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https://twitter.com/itstheshadsy/status/1151868012707962881
Sims developer Don Hopkins released a bunch of design documents from The Sims, including this one from August 1998 with his notes about romance:
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/
It's incredible to see the internal discussion about romance in The Sims written out so strongly like this
For more background: Will Wright's notebooks from the making of The Sims (viewable at @museumofplay !) mention "same sex move-in romance" as a potential feature, but it sounds like there wasn't a plan about how or whether to implement that until Don Hopkins stood up for it here
Here's an article with additional context from Barrett's perspective about when/how same-sex relationships were added. The article mentions "going back and forth for several months" before he joined, which likely refers to what these documents are saying
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...
https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1152266586025332736
Here's the offending "tree code" from "The Sims Steering Committee" internal release of June 4, 1998.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_2sWbsXUAA5UtO?format=png
https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223218416393367554
The Sims turns 20 today! Here's an early pre-release version of The Sims for The Sim Steering Committee, from June 4 1998. #TheSims
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY
https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223218212353060871
The about dialog had a "No Shit!" button, and referred to it as "Project X":
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPm-ekxXUAAqi2a?format=png
----About Edith Edith Version 666 (motb) [No Shit!] Copyright (C) 1997, Maxis. Project X was designed by Will Wright, and programmed by Jamie Doornbos, Eric Bowman, Jim Mackraz, and Don Hopkins.Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.
Procedural rhetoric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric
Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric[1] is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.[2]
Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology.
[1] Frasca, Gonzalo (2003). “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge. 221–37 ISBN 9780415965798
[2] Bogost, Ian (2008). "The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Ed. by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 117–40. ISBN 9780262693646
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SimCopter Himbo Easter Egg was a SimAntics Programming Bug
https://web.archive.org/web/19991109030656/http://www.gamesp...
Indeed, SimCopter was shipped too soon, and as a result, it launched with one of the most controversial bugs in gaming history. A homosexual programmer at Maxis objected to the use of female characters as objects of affection in SimCopter. So, he decided to protest by putting what he termed "muscle boys in swim trunks" into the game. During the game, these characters would mysteriously appear and kiss each other, but only on very rare occasions. At least, that was the idea. Unfortunately, as the programmer told Wired magazine in 1996, "My random-number generator didn't work as I'd planned," and the characters appeared with startling regularity. Upon discovery of the errant code, the programmer was immediately fired, but the transgression spoke volumes about the frenetic and fragmented state of affairs at Maxis.
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Scott McCloud
Reinventing Comics:
https://www.nextchapterbooksellers.com/book/9780060953508
“Anyone involved in interactive entertainment (games, web, etc.) should read this book. Scott McCloud has once again transcended the world of comics and tapped into much deeper issues of creativity entertainment and economics. This time he’s looking into the future rather than the past.” — Will Wright
Understanding Comics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics
Masking, abstraction, concrete background, abstract ground, projecting the reader or player into the scene.
Show vs. Tell
Transition and Gutters
Abstract vs. Realistic
Masking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_(illustration)
The masking effect or masking is a visual style, dramatic convention, and literary technique described by cartoonist Scott McCloud in his book Understanding Comics in the chapter on realism. It is the use of simplistic, archetypal, narrative characters, even if juxtaposed with detailed, photographic, verisimilar, spectacular backgrounds. This may function, McCloud infers, as a mask, a form of projective identification. His explanation is that a familiar and minimally detailed character allows for a stronger emotional connection and for viewers to identify more easily.
It is used in animation, comics, illustration, video games (especially visual novels) and other media. It is common in Western graphic novels and Japanese comics and animation. The psychology behind the masking effect has been extended to rendering antagonists in a realistic manner in order to show their otherness from the reader.
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Tension Between Realistic Models and Fun Game Play
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-...
Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”
Discussion of all the third parties who wanted a version of SimCity that ham-fistedly taught whatever they had on their agenda. Misunderstanding the potentials of Constructionist Education. Ham-fisted attempts at patronizingly didactic pedagogy.
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Nurture -vs- Nature Debate
Can you decide to change your sexual preference? Should you be able to? What makes a game more fun? Does a game need to be realistic? What are the technological limits of the model (complexity, privacy, AI, machine learning)? Do we even know what the correct model is?
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Columbine
The Sims made its debut days before the shooting at Columbine, which triggered a moral panic over video games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre...
How did the Columbine shooting and subsequent backlash against violent video games affect the coverage and popularity of The Sims, as a counterpoint to Doom-type games?
Is The Sims a video violent game? There are numerous cruel and sadistic ways to painfully and violently kill people. Does that mean that The Sims is a violent video game?
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The Sims 4 Patch 34
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sims_4/Patch_34
The 34th patch for The Sims 4 was released on June 2, 2016. It updated the game to version 1.19.28.1010 for PC and 1.19.28.1210 for Mac. The patch allows players to customize a Sim's gender in greater depth and allows previously gender-specific assets to be used by any Sims regardless of gender.
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- This is a follow-on piece from an article Bogost wrote in Gamasutra [1]. It doesn't make a lot of sense unless you are aware of Bogost's previous commentary.
His main point is that gamification is an empty relationship: nothing of value is exchanged by either party. That it "works" is an unfortunate product of our psychological wiring, and is thus more aptly described as "exploitationware."
It's important to note that Bogost has worked for many years on serious/persuasive games as a means of exposing systems. Allowing users to interact with those systems as a means of persuasion or education is, as far as he's concerned, a more enlightening experience.
[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games_...
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