Second session

Procedural rhetoric

Ian Bogost's project is an important contribution. He clearly shows the expressive power of videogames in a unique approach to rhetoric. He shows that visual, verbal, and written rhetorics cannot explain the unique properties of procedural expression. He is interested in showing how things work. As a subcategory of procedural expression, he is interested in videogames. For Bogost, procedurality is about creating, explaining, or understanding processes. A computer's ability to execute a series of rules is understood as procedural.

We should remember procedure should not be viewed negatively. What I find interesting is the point that Bogost makes about the logic that structures behavior in all cases. Commenting on Weber's observation about mechanization and rationalization, industrialization (or its machines) "act as medium for expressing this logic."

According to Bogost, a procedural representation, which is a form of expression that uses processes instead of language, explains processes with other processes. The analyses of videogames he does in this project describe the function of processes.  Bogost argues that procedural representation "requires inscription in a medium that actually enacts processes" instead of just describing them.

What all of this means for me is that the concept of rhetoric I had in mind is put in a larger context. By offering his views on procedural rhetoric, in a way, he comments on all types of rhetoric. I had never thought about processes and the kinds of rhetoric that might be able to explain them. Classical rhetoric, which deals with oratory, deals with words. Contemporary rhetoric has covered other aspects beyond words (that includes images for example). What both contemporary and classical rhetorics have in common is that they both deal with technique, according to Bogost. They cannot explain or account for procedural representation. Bogost talks about digital rhetoric and how it might move in the direction of accounting for such representation.