The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice

Procedural Habits

Steve Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351399470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Retórica

The Rhetoric of Videogames as Embodied Practice offers a critical reassessment of embodiment and materiality in rhetorical considerations of videogames. Holmes argues that rhetorical and philosophical conceptions of "habit" offer a critical resource for describing the interplay between thinking (writing and rhetoric) and embodiment. The book demonstrates how Aristotle's understanding of character ( ethos ), habit ( hexis ), and nature ( phusis ) can productively connect rhetoric to what Holmes calls "procedural habits": the ways in which rhetoric emerges from its interactions with the dynamic accumulation of conscious and nonconscious embodied experiences that consequently give rise to meaning, procedural subjectivity, control, and communicative agency both in digital game design discourse and the activity of play.

Part 1
Theorizing Procedural Habits

1 Persuasive Technologies in the Rhetoric of Videogames

The first two chapters of this book (Part 1) offer an introduction to the concept of procedural habits, while the remaining chapters (Part 2) apply this concept to case studies centered on habit-shaping elements of contemporary videogames. In Chapter 1, I begin my efforts to define procedural habits by considering the neglected work of the only contemporary digital rhetoric researcher who takes behavior change in mundane and commercialized interface design elements as a serious and important rhetorical force: computer scientist BJ Fogg and the idea of “persuasive technologies.”¹ At first glance, this choice, particularly in the context of videogame rhetorics, makes little intuitive sense for several reasons. While James P. Zappen’s pioneering essay, “Digital Rhetoric: Toward an Integrated Theory,” mentions Fogg as a foundational figure in digital rhetoric alongside Barbara Warnick and Elizabeth Losh, few in our field have engaged his claim that algorithmically prompted behavior change is rhetorical.² Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice, Douglas A. Eyman’s exhaustive catalogue of past and current work in digital rhetoric, does not offer so much as a footnote to Fogg’s book Persuasive Technology.³

This oversight is worth exploring given the growing number of game and interface designers who have engaged (and criticized) Fogg’s thinking. The idea of persuasive technologies has even generated derivative concepts such as “prescriptive persuasion” across computer science, mobile media, and game design journals. Fogg currently sponsors an international conference on persuasive technologies with published conference proceedings and offers annual designer boot camps. Notable boot camp attendees include founders of popular social media interfaces such as Instagram, LikeALittle, and Friend.ly.⁴

As I will acknowledge in my discussion of his work in the first section of this chapter, there are good reasons why Fogg’s work is not considered beyond our field’s tendency to neglect interface design and computer science as part of rhetoric. He does himself few favors by failing to engage with rhetoric and composition scholarship or even rhetorical history, and furthermore, he largely fails to justify or explain why behavior change should be a form of rhetoric in the first place. Along different lines, most games studies scholars would not view Fogg as a legitimate contributor, if for no other reason than the fact that his work is aimed primarily at non-videogame technologies. In Persuasive Technology, Fogg features a brief discussion of an education game HIV Roulette, which I will discuss in detail below, but he remains concerned primarily with helping companies such as Amazon.com utilize persuasive technologies in their interface design to stimulate customers to make additional purchases at nonconscious levels. If we were to use persuasive technology as a lens for videogame rhetoric, instead of addressing the meaningful narrative, visual, or interactive elements on the screen, Fogg’s work would address the ways in which players’ habits of play are shaped through a designer-driven, non-symbolic, and nonconscious realm of behavioral affectivity.

At a very basic level, I suggest here, and throughout this book, that a literal use of Fogg’s work offers a great deal of descriptive value, as the implicit use of Fogg’s behavior change heuristics (The Behavior Wizard) can be found in habit-shaping mechanisms in a wide variety of contemporary videogames. While it is easy to locate explicit habit-shaping mechanisms in free-to-play social media games, Fogg’s work also alerts us to the presence of basic habit-shaping mechanisms in more conventional videogames, such as the first-person shooter videogame Star Wars: Battlefront,⁵ which does not have habit-production as an explicit design theme in the same sense as Candy Crush Saga (CCS).

My suggestion is that Fogg’s important—albeit unintentional—contribution to rhetoric and composition studies lies in the fact that he usefully functions as a limit case for rhetorical conceptions of videogames. Not only does he require us to acknowledge the mundane habit-shaping design elements of videogames, but Fogg also provokes us to wrestle with the degrees to which our field remains entrenched in certain expressive rhetorical paradigms—all elements that procedural habits seeks to call into question by locating rhetoric with non-mechanistic forms of repetition.

As a case in point, the preference for traditional texts and expressive rhetorics makes it difficult for our field to grant habit a similarly productive role in rhetoric by engaging two of the most dominant paradigms of videogame rhetoric to date: Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetoric and social-epistemic rhetoric. The latter category includes seminal work on the rhetoric of videogames by Ken S. McAllister, Christopher A. Paul, and Gerald A. Voorhees, who are more in dialogue with games studies and communication scholarship, as well as work in rhetoric and composition studies that is social-epistemic in all but name. In my reading, procedural and social epistemic rhetoric correspond respectively to expressive definitions of rhetorics through what Richard Lanham calls the “weak” and “strong” defenses of rhetoric. In the second section of this chapter, I locate how the weak defense that undergirds procedural rhetoric specifically figures habits as a priori coercive or manipulative through a Platonic conception of the self (pre-fixed, rational). This is a view that I find Bogost and other game designers using to unequivocally reject Fogg’s persuasive technologies. I specifically discuss a persuasive game, Barter, which was designed as an app to encourage Britons to spend locally, in order to demonstrate how a cognitive/embodied split carries a number of consequences for how we theorize videogame rhetoric in operation through the weak defense.

In the third section, working through a particular version of the strong defense, I demonstrate that the use of social-epistemic rhetoric rejects a rational Cartesian-subject to locate rhetoric in social contexts rather than rational subjects. These approaches do in fact allow us to include mundane design elements or commercialized videogame texts as rhetorically expressive. However, social-epistemic approaches to rhetoric nevertheless retain mechanism by default since these specific invocations of the strong defense turn upon a dualist nature/culture split. As a result, any discussion of procedural habits will tend toward a discursive object or an effect of signification rather than encourage us to examine procedural habits as non-purely-discursive or social physiological forces that produce and shape rhetorical beings in a more fundamental and creative sense. In this regard, Lanham’s strong and weak defense enables me to identify how the theoretical underpinnings of procedural and epistemic rhetoric fail to adequately theorize habit’s role in videogame rhetoric beyond mechanism.

In the fourth section of this chapter, I introduce two of the theoretical paradigms that I use throughout Procedural Habits to highlight some of the limitations of the strong and weak defense of rhetoric: Latour’s actor-network theory and Bennett’s new materialist thinking. While the strong defense locates rhetoric in social contexts separated from embodied and material networks, both thinkers—from related but different orientations—help us to see that the “social” has always been produced by the interconnected agencies of human and nonhuman actors. In part, I use these related but distinct theoretical frameworks to reiterate that Fogg’s primary usefulness is as a limit case for videogame rhetoric. He forces us to recognize our field’s preferences for traditional texts and expressive rhetorical forms by claiming that habit formation through mundane interface design elements should be “expressive” (i.e., rhetorical) in itself and not just expressive when it is an effect of discourse. However, this claim does not mean that we can or should accept all elements of Fogg’s thinking. While my subsequent chapters will demonstrate that his work functions quite well as a descriptive tool for locating and examining habit-shaping interface design elements in videogames, it is necessary to expand his conception of rhetoric and habit. Nevertheless, I suggest that despite these and other problems that I will discuss below, Fogg importantly offers us a starting place for using mundane habit-shaping elements to re-envision what videogame rhetoric means through developing—and not avoiding—alternative views of habit’s role in rhetoric. In the end, Fogg’s largest problem is that he simply fails to use his insight that habit can be part of digital rhetoric to reach a richer or more complex view of how habits more broadly function in constitution of digital rhetoric, which is why in Chapter 2 I argue it necessary to articulate the idea of procedural habits.

Examining Fogg’s Persuasive Technologies as a Form of Videogame Rhetoric

Given the comparative lack of attention to persuasive technology in rhetorical studies, a brief introduction to how Fogg’s thinking can be applied to videogames is useful. Fogg coined the term “captology,” a portmanteau for “computers as persuasive technologies” in his doctoral thesis.⁶ Later in Persuasive Technology, Fogg fully defines persuasive technology “as any interactive computing system designed to change people’s attitudes or behaviors.”⁷ Despite this relatively simple and expansive definition, unpacking Fogg’s understanding of rhetoric requires no small degree of effort for the reader. His nearly 300-page book contains only a half-page sidebar on the history of rhetoric,⁸ and it demonstrates no engagement with twentieth-century rhetorical studies.⁹ Fogg’s novelty lies in his unexplained leap from a philosophical view of rhetoric toward nonconscious behavioral reinforcement. It is not Kenneth Burke or Lloyd Bitzer, but social and behavioral psychologists who, he maintains, have continued to advance the “formal study of persuasion” in the twentieth-century.¹⁰

Fogg is very straightforward in his belief that persuasive technologies are a central part of the legacy of updating “behaviorism,” “instrumental learning,” or operant conditioning popularized by B.F. Skinner’s classical conditioning.¹¹ As an example, Fogg references one of his students’ projects called the “Telecycle,” in which a user pedals a computer-monitored exercise bike connected to a blurry television screen.¹² When a user reached a target speed on the exercise bike, the screen shifted to a clear resolution. Receiving a clearer picture was the stimulus to produce the desired behavior change. While the Telecyle invokes brainwashing sce...