When trying to come up with a good example of procedural rhetoric in a game, I struggled to find the answer. My background in gaming is stupid battery wasting apps on my phone or the Nintendo DS games that I played in middle school. My younger brother actually plays games professionally and enters in a competitive league with his friends to win money. They even started a gaming club at my old high school while the most I've ever done with video games is get a perfect score on cooking mama. 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." A specific example of that mentioned in the article is "demonstrative advertising" where the features and functions of goods and services directly correlate with advertising messages. One game that really demonstrates this is a game app called pewdiepie's tuber simulator. Although the app is free, in order to obtain certain features like money boosts or more missions to complete, you have to watch a thirty second ad until you can use it. I feel like this associates the functioning of the game with having to go through these ads which suggests what content a player of the game should consume.
The whole point of this game is to start your own channel and choose between titles given to you on what kind of videos to make in order to obtain more subscribers and more channel views which are used as money to buy new things to customize your room and your character. In order to level up, you must gain enough xp through buying things from the shop. Bogost states that "I argue that video games’ usefulness comes not from a capacity to transfer social or workplace skills, but rather from their capacity to give consumers and workers a means to critique business, social, and moral principles." This quote highlights the fact that the point of this game is not to teach people how to run a YouTube channel or to accurately simulate it because pressing buttons on a game are much different than actually producing content. I think the point of the game is to criticize the idea behind being a successful YouTuber and selling yourself out to be more marketable and create pointless content just to make more money. Evidence of this in the game is the fact that you can buy piles of money to put in your room or have the ability to customize your avatar to look like popular Youtubers that are known for making terrible content just for more views. The entire game showcases procedural rhetoric by putting YouTube culture in an app readily available for consumption by people very familiar with the website in order to create a new platform to question and criticize what being "internet famous" really means.
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November 2016
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