Third Session

Advertising and videogames

As I read Ian Bogost’s discussion of advertising I was curious how he would relate that discussion to procedural rhetoric and videogames. He offers a typology of advertising in his discussion of advertising and videogames. The first type is demonstrative advertising: these give direct information and emphasize the functional utility of the products and services being advertised. Infomercials are the latest example of these. The second type is illustrative advertising: these advertising give indirect information about a product, emphasizing the social and the cultural context. An ad illustrating speed in order to suggest the “liveliness” of a product, according to Bogost, is an example of this type of advertising. The third kind is associative advertising: this kind of advertising also gives indirect information (about the intangible aspects of the product or service). However, if demonstrative advertising aims for a mass market appeal, associative advertising aims for a niche market appeal. This type of advertising is related to “lifestyle marketing.”

How do videogames use these types of advertising? For demonstrative advertising in a videogame a product is used, providing direct information. For illustrative advertising a product’s existence and its “incremental” benefits are communicated. For associative advertising the product is associated with a lifestyle or an activity that the game represents. Bogost argues that although associative games are the most common, demonstrative games utilize the most productive procedural rhetorics.

Bogost suggests that advertising in videogames started with Tron and E.T., as the first film/game tie-ins, and games like Kool-Aid Man, although product placement in media have a longer history than that. As videogames and advertising have developed over time, according to Bogost, the interest in advertising is about an interest in videogames to reach to a particular consumer rather than an interest in the unique properties of the medium.  This means “advergames” have become associative marketing strategies. In other words, the advertisers are after “gamers” as a niche market.  

Here is a video on product placement in film, TV and games.

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.

First session

One of the most interesting experiences in reading The Medium of Video Games was the comparison of the development and the evolution of video games to other media such as film and television. Many aspects of this comparison are interesting. Technological developments for the display of graphics and other technological developments are very interesting. However, I found the discussion of narrative and genre the most interesting. The development of characters in video games so they are character-based means the medium entered a period that the initial fascination with simple moving objects was finished and audiences demanded more interesting games.  In cinema initial interest was with moving objects as well. The characters developed and storytelling became the central interesting aspect of film for audiences. The character-based game known as Pac Man showed that the appeal of these characters could be broad, so this game was interesting to both male and female players (as Wolf shows). The complexity that narrative brought to the videogames is another interesting point. I always wondered why the some of the videogames in arcades when they were not being used would have a mini narrative run in a loop. After reading Wolf I realized that this was done to give backstory of characters and other elements of the narrative. What separates video games from other media is the degree of interactivity that the medium allows. The development of narrative and interactivity seems to be two opposing trends.  How do we have a game that has a specific narrative but then it is open to change by the interactivity? As Wolf says one way to handle this was to reduce the amount of narrative that could be placed in a game or to have no narrative at all. The discussion of Space Invaders, Super Breakout and Gadget is very interesting in this context. Wolf shows that interactivity does not have to work against narrative if, for example, multiple lines of narrative are present.