Following on Dennis' post about a "serious" game, I thought I'd bring your attention to this interview about the rhetoric of war in a game called "Turning Point," which is an alternate history game--what if Nazis had invaded the U.S. There's apparently some self-conscious rhetoric at work here, trying to help gamers grasp how rhetoric is just as important in war as guns and bombs. Here's a snip:
What you see on the screen has been crafted and is presented in one format. With games, and this is part of what we're trying to do with Turning Point, you can actually present options, you can present choices and explore those choices and, much like we do in life, we hopefully find new meaning depending on the outcome of those decisions.
I'm guessing this is what I've seen others called "procedural rhetoric." I'm still not sold that players can get past the "Well, what am I *supposed* to do" mentality and really explore these other options.
At any rate, nice to know that some game developers are at least trying to go beyond Phong Shading or whatever and get at some meatier stuff.
"What am I *supposed* to do" is part of the medium...
That feeling is a convention of the medium, like cheat codes and walkthroughs.
It's not a bug, it's a feature, like the intermission in a musical (and the show-stopping solo that ends the first act, and the rip-roaring ensemble number that starts the second act).
I agree that if gamers have to think too hard about what they're supposed to do next, they haven't fully entered the game, but most action games provide some sort of fictional overlay that gives context to the initial missions, just as most musicals provide that rip-roaring community number at the start of Act II in order to ramp the energy back up closer to where it was before the intermission.
Dennis G. Jerz
Jerz's Literacy Weblog