Ian Bogost

This week in class we discussed Ian Bogost’s The Rhetoric of Video Games, it was actually an article that I enjoyed. He was easy to understand and he got his point across well. I thought his description of the game Animal Crossing was well done and actually intrigued me into wanting to play the game.

            Then when we got to take a closer look at the game the whole time we started to play it I was thinking through Bogost’s interpretation of the game which really helped me see further into how the game is designed and the rules it sets. I thought it was very interesting to see how the game defines its players by making you answer specific questions that sort of have hidden meanings behind them. As Bogost states in his article, “The possibility space of play includes all of the gestures made possible by a set of rules,” and his analysis of both Animal Crossing and the McDonald’s Videogame you definitely see how there are rules that define the game and how the player manipulates those rules to suit them. That’s why every game is different for each person because just because it is a game doesn’t mean that your own personality doesn’t come through. Everyone plays a little differently and goes about the game in a different sequence and style. I really found the last line of the article to be a great summary of this and pulls together his whole opinion; “Rather, we need to play video games in order to understand the possibility spaces their rules create, and then to explore those possibility spaces and accept, challenge, or reject them in our daily lives.”

            Also I find his use of the different forms of rhetoric to be helpful for our up coming paper. It definitely will aid me in going through a game and picking up on the specifics that before this class and article I probably would have never caught on to. Now I know that there is procedural, verbal, and visual rhetoric.