Ian Bogost writes in his piece “Procedural Rhetoric” that by the works of Aristotle, rhetoric has come “to refer to effective expression—writing, speech, or art that both accomplishes the goals of the author and absorbs the reader or viewer.”  While he doesn’t use it in reference to modes of persuasion, this definition nonetheless applies to the documentary videogames Bogost, Simon Gerrari, and Bobby Schweizer detail in “Documentary” that were meant to convey a communal, emotional angst but received criticism for callous and offensive material.

In JFK Reloaded and Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, videogames that the above authors reference, the intention of the creators was to portray a series of actions that pinnacled in a single historical event: the assassination of President John F. Kenny or the student-shooting of Columbine High School.  In the latter case, the creator of the game had a deep and personal connection with the events he depicted, signifying what I feel like would be the opposite of an attempt at mockery.  In both games, I feel like the creators used visual rhetoric to not influence the attitudes or opinions of their viewers, but to affect their awareness of the events.  After all, as Bogost says, “images are move ‘vivid’ than text or speech, and therefore they are more easily manipulated toward visceral responses.”  For an audience in which the majority of people did not have an eye-witness account of JFK’s assassination, these games have a more evocative power than any description could hope to possess.

Bogost has two similar ideas that conflict with the goals of human interest/documentary videogames.  In “Documentary,” he says that “experience means something much more abstract: the emotional sensation of an event…if citizens were able to experience the sensations of an experience through simulation rather than by description, perhaps they would better connect world events with [emotions] in their own lives.”  Similarly, Bogost says in “Procedural Rhetoric” that “the closer we get to real experience, the better…the best interactivity [comes] closest to real experience.”  Through this appeal, those who play games like Darfur is Dying or September 12^th should become more perceptive and aware of the facts: the choices a family in Darfur had to decide between to get water, the consequences of their actions, and why they were made to act so in the first place.  Why, then, have these types of games received so much criticism?  Is it investigative reporting devolving into “fear-mongering,” or that the general public just isn’t ready to have videogames rip open old wounds with evocative images?  Considering the fact that JFK was killed almost 50 years ago, I’m less likely to concur with the latter and draw my own conclusion that people consider these historical events to be taboo (makes people uncomfortable to talk about to a certain extent) and therefore would really prefer to not have related graphic images shoved into their faces reminding them of what they shouldn’t/won’t talk about.

As Lev Manovich states it in her piece “The Database,” society has recently—in the past 20 years—entered into a chaotic system where pieces that were once structured and organized have fallen into unmanageable disarray.  The narrative model that was once used to view the world and that was relied on to structure the world’s “collection of images, texts, and other data” has been replaced.  We now see the world as a database, a collection of algorithms and the symbolic form of the computer age.

One of the distinctions that I found most interesting between narrative and database models was the concept of being finished.  Narratives almost always have an ending, or a conclusion that brings all of the story’s actions to a close.  Some databases that hybrid with narratives, such as video games, also have endings, which appear at the end of each goal or task assigned: shoot everyone around; get to the checkpoint first; retrieve a certain item, etc.  But, databases that are web-based, and most of them are these days, can never be said to be finished.  Their content can be easily added to, edited, or even deleted, which “contributes to its antinarrative logic.”  Each hyperlink or reference that is added to this one database splits its trajectory of into another direction, linking it with a million other databases, a million other trajectories, and a million other possibilities.  Even if these changes blend seamlessly with the original database, because they’ve occurred over time they are no longer considered part of the “story” but have created a collection.

Gilles Deleuze concurs with this in “Postscript on the Societies of Control” when he writes “in societies of control one is never finished with anything.”  These societies are analogous to the world-models that Manovich describes, and the one of control he refers to the database we view the world as now.  Roland Barthes makes the same connection in “The Death of the Author,” by deemphasizing the importance and role of the author.  He states that “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”  Authors create endings; scriptors create extensions.  Barthes also connects with Monovich’s assertion that the database has taken priority over narrative when he writes that “it is language which speaks, not the author…to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’.”  The only question that is left is one of cause-and-effect: did the development of the database trigger the death of the author, or was it the death of the author that forced society to create the database?

Rules.  A set of preset algorithms that determine a computer’s response to interactor-input.  At least that’s how it is defined in Janet Murray’s piece “From Additive to Expressive Form.”  It is through these rules and the “defining ability [of the computer] to execute” those rules that programmers were able to manifest life in an inanimate object: Eliza.  These rules turned out to be so functional that their execution though Eliza was able to convince cognizant individuals that a machine really “understands what is said to her” and “whatever is happening around her.” Her.  As if the program wasn’t life-like enough, programmers decided to assign a gender-specific pronoun to it.  I guess this helps my thought-process while reading the piece and then in connecting Murray’s purpose: these programmers were able to combine classic technology with aspirations of its potential, the procedural algorithms with the variety of input, to create situation-based responses.

This whole schema to me feels like a Stepford moment, not in the sense that we’re turning our spouses into robots, but that we’re humanizing the machines.  We don’t call them algorithms, but don’t humans also use rules, programming us through life experiences, to decipher input and determine the best response?   Both humans and programs such as Eliza and Zork test their capacity and the extent to which a response is warranted.  The way Murray arranges the argument, it seems like the range the programmers set for computer-based technology starts with these algorithms and ends with something as close to human mimicry as possible.

Another point of Murray’s that resonated is her reference to digital environments as encyclopedic and how they are sometimes used to “develop multithreaded stories composed of many intersecting plots.”  Having not read this article first, I was unaware of the concept when I went through Andy Campbell’s “Dim O’Gauble,” a story told through a digital forum.  The story is presented in pieces and seems simple enough to progress through (the viewer just clicks on the yellow arrow to get to the next linear slide).  The intricacies play in, though, when a certain slides allow you to click on highlighted words that take you to a tangent event, like an encyclopedia that refers you to another entry for clarification.  After so much clicking and backtracking, in the words of Murray, “it leaves readers/interactors wondering which of the several endpoints is the end and how they can know if they have seen everything there is to see.”  But these multiple pathways were created purposefully by the author to mimic the non-linear tangle of human emotion.  Once again, the programmer has humanized the machine.