The Rhetoric of Video Games
by Kelly Roden

1. Rhetoric
1.1. rhetoric as a means of persuasion
1.2. negative connotation: "empty rhetoric"
1.3. visual rhetoric: ads, photographs, billboards
1.4. Digital rhetoric: wikis, twitter, email
1.5. But for scholars of digital rhetoric, to “function in digital spaces” often means mistaking subordinate properties of the computer for primary ones. -James P Zappen
2. Procedural Rhetoric
2.1. video games make claims about the world through their proccesses
2.2. "procedural rhetoric for the practice of using processes persuasively, just as verbal rhetoric is the practice of using oratory persuasively and visual rhetoric is the practice of using images persuasively"
2.3. How things work and don't work
2.4. The McDonald's Video Game
2.5. video games are used rhetorically
3. Ways of Using Procedural Rhetoric: Interrogating Ideology
3.1. video games used as a way to explain the hidden ways of thinking that drive social, political, or cultural behavior
3.2. all video games bear biases of their creators
3.3. America's Army:Operations; in game behavior affects ability to keep playing
4. Ways of Using Procedural Rhetoric: Making and Unpacking an Argument
4.1. video games can make claims about how a material or conceptual system works
4.2. Illinois House Republicans made game to show public policy positions
4.2.1. hoped to communicate dry complex topics to public
4.2.2. players not fooled into accepting position, but rather more informed to be able to critique it