Persuasive Games

Persuasive Games
Author: Ian Bogost
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2010-08-13
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 0262261944

An exploration of the way videogames mount arguments and make expressive statements about the world that analyzes their unique persuasive power in terms of their computational properties. Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change these positions themselves, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and learning.

Persuasive Gaming in Context

Persuasive Gaming in Context
Author: Teresa De La Hera
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-03-23
Genre:
ISBN: 9789463728805

The rapid developments of new communication technologies have facilitated the popularization of digital games, which has translated into an exponential growth of the game industry in the last decades. The ubiquitous presence of digital games has resulted in an expansion of the applications of these games from mere entertainment purposes to a great variety of serious purposes. In this edited volume, we narrow the scope of attention by focusing on what game theorist Ian Bogost has called "persuasive games", that is, gaming practices that combine the dissemination of information with attempts to engage players in particular attitudes and behaviors. This volume offers a multifaceted reflection on persuasive gaming, that is, on the process of these particular games being played by players. The purpose is to better understand when and how digital games can be used for persuasion, by further exploring persuasive games and some other kinds of persuasive playful interaction as well. The book critically integrates what has been accomplished in separate research traditions to offer a multidisciplinary approach to understanding persuasive gaming that is closely linked to developments in the industry by including the exploration of relevant case studies.

How to Do Things with Videogames

How to Do Things with Videogames
Author: Ian Bogost
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2011-08-05
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 145293312X

In recent years, computer games have moved from the margins of popular culture to its center. Reviews of new games and profiles of game designers now regularly appear in the New York Times and the New Yorker, and sales figures for games are reported alongside those of books, music, and movies. They are increasingly used for purposes other than entertainment, yet debates about videogames still fork along one of two paths: accusations of debasement through violence and isolation or defensive paeans to their potential as serious cultural works. In How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost contends that such generalizations obscure the limitless possibilities offered by the medium’s ability to create complex simulated realities. Bogost, a leading scholar of videogames and an award-winning game designer, explores the many ways computer games are used today: documenting important historical and cultural events; educating both children and adults; promoting commercial products; and serving as platforms for art, pornography, exercise, relaxation, pranks, and politics. Examining these applications in a series of short, inviting, and provocative essays, he argues that together they make the medium broader, richer, and more relevant to a wider audience. Bogost concludes that as videogames become ever more enmeshed with contemporary life, the idea of gamers as social identities will become obsolete, giving rise to gaming by the masses. But until games are understood to have valid applications across the cultural spectrum, their true potential will remain unrealized. How to Do Things with Videogames offers a fresh starting point to more fully consider games’ progress today and promise for the future.

Persuasion Games

Persuasion Games
Author: Gilan Gork
Publisher:
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2015-05-25
Genre:
ISBN: 9780620658614

This book will change your life. You are playing persuasion games all the time, whether you realise it or not. "Now," for the first time, one of the world's top mentalists teaches YOU the hidden secrets of persuasion and influence that will enhance your personal, social and professional life. In this remarkable and exciting book, acclaimed mentalist and trainer Gilan Gork reveals the powerful psychology of subtle, successful persuasion that you can use on your clients, colleagues, family, friends... and even complete strangers! "Persuasion Games" explores, examines and explains the mind games of influence that are part of everyday life -- and how to win them. You will not only learn how to enhance your own powers of influence in an ethical, responsible way, but also how to protect yourself from persuasive exploitation in any form. Gilan has travelled the world to find the leading experts in influence and study their methods, including the normally private, secret realm of professional 'psychics'. Discover how many seemingly 'psychic' powers are actually persuasion techniques that anyone can learn -- including a psychological model of communication that is one of the world's best-kept secrets.Welcome to the Persuasion Games.

Play Anything

Play Anything
Author: Ian Bogost
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0465096506

How filling life with play-whether soccer or lawn mowing, counting sheep or tossing Angry Birds -- forges a new path for creativity and joy in our impatient age Life is boring: filled with meetings and traffic, errands and emails. Nothing we'd ever call fun. But what if we've gotten fun wrong? In Play Anything, visionary game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost shows how we can overcome our daily anxiety; transforming the boring, ordinary world around us into one of endless, playful possibilities. The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the secret truth of fun and games. Play Anything, reveals that games appeal to us not because they are fun, but because they set limitations. Soccer wouldn't be soccer if it wasn't composed of two teams of eleven players using only their feet, heads, and torsos to get a ball into a goal; Tetris wouldn't be Tetris without falling pieces in characteristic shapes. Such rules seem needless, arbitrary, and difficult. Yet it is the limitations that make games enjoyable, just like it's the hard things in life that give it meaning. Play is what happens when we accept these limitations, narrow our focus, and, consequently, have fun. Which is also how to live a good life. Manipulating a soccer ball into a goal is no different than treating ordinary circumstances- like grocery shopping, lawn mowing, and making PowerPoints-as sources for meaning and joy. We can "play anything" by filling our days with attention and discipline, devotion and love for the world as it really is, beyond our desires and fears. Ranging from Internet culture to moral philosophy, ancient poetry to modern consumerism, Bogost shows us how today's chaotic world can only be tamed-and enjoyed-when we first impose boundaries on ourselves.

How to Talk about Videogames

How to Talk about Videogames
Author: Ian Bogost
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2015-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452949875

Videogames! Aren’t they the medium of the twenty-first century? The new cinema? The apotheosis of art and entertainment, the realization of Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk? The final victory of interaction over passivity? No, probably not. Games are part art and part appliance, part tableau and part toaster. In How to Talk about Videogames, leading critic Ian Bogost explores this paradox more thoroughly than any other author to date. Delving into popular, familiar games like Flappy Bird, Mirror’s Edge, Mario Kart, Scribblenauts, Ms. Pac-Man, FarmVille, Candy Crush Saga, Bully, Medal of Honor, Madden NFL, and more, Bogost posits that videogames are as much like appliances as they are like art and media. We don’t watch or read games like we do films and novels and paintings, nor do we perform them like we might dance or play football or Frisbee. Rather, we do something in-between with games. Games are devices we operate, so game critique is both serious cultural currency and self-parody. It is about figuring out what it means that a game works the way it does and then treating the way it works as if it were reasonable, when we know it isn’t. Noting that the term games criticism once struck him as preposterous, Bogost observes that the idea, taken too seriously, risks balkanizing games writing from the rest of culture, severing it from the “rivers and fields” that sustain it. As essential as it is, he calls for its pursuit to unfold in this spirit: “God save us from a future of games critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study.”

Persuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue

Persuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue
Author: Răzvan Săftoiu
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2015-09-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027268363

Persuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue is about the rediscovery of humans as proficient users of language in the sense that – while involved in a dialogue – they listen, observe, discuss, reason, evaluate and conclude; in other words, speakers are no longer interested in defeating the other and proving him/her wrong, but in learning from the other. The volume comprises 12 articles, distributed in two sections – Persuasion in Political Dialogue and Persuasive Strategies in Professional Dialogue – which approach the topic of persuasion as it unfolds from political and professional communication. The articles in the proposed volume depict relevant theoretical and practical issues related to persuasion in two communication sites: politics and workplace, and they are results of consistent research conducted by the contributors in various settings. The contributions provide critical, valuable insights into the dynamic process of creating and maintaining relationships at an individual and at a professional level.

Unit Operations

Unit Operations
Author: Ian Bogost
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2008-01-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262261898

In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to analyze particular videogames. Moreover, this approach can be applied beyond videogames: Bogost suggests that any medium—from videogames to poetry, literature, cinema, or art—can be read as a configurative system of discrete, interlocking units of meaning, and he illustrates this method of analysis with examples from all these fields. The marriage of literary theory and information technology, he argues, will help humanists take technology more seriously and hep technologists better understand software and videogames as cultural artifacts. This approach is especially useful for the comparative analysis of digital and nondigital artifacts and allows scholars from other fields who are interested in studying videogames to avoid the esoteric isolation of "game studies." The richness of Bogost's comparative approach can be seen in his discussions of works by such philosophers and theorists as Plato, Badiou, Zizek, and McLuhan, and in his analysis of numerous videogames including Pong, Half-Life, and Star Wars Galaxies. Bogost draws on object technology and complex adaptive systems theory for his method of unit analysis, underscoring the configurative aspects of a wide variety of human processes. His extended analysis of freedom in large virtual spaces examines Grand Theft Auto 3, The Legend of Zelda, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Joyce's Ulysses. In Unit Operations, Bogost not only offers a new methodology for videogame criticism but argues for the possibility of real collaboration between the humanities and information technology.

Newsgames

Newsgames
Author: Ian Bogost
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2012-09-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262289083

How videogames offer a new way to do journalism. Journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle to survive. But most online journalism just translates existing practices to the Web: stories are written and edited as they are for print; video and audio features are produced as they would be for television and radio. The authors of Newsgames propose a new way of doing good journalism: videogames. Videogames are native to computers rather than a digitized form of prior media. Games simulate how things work by constructing interactive models; journalism as game involves more than just revisiting old forms of news production. Wired magazine's game Cutthroat Capitalism, for example, explains the economics of Somali piracy by putting the player in command of a pirate ship, offering choices for hostage negotiation strategies. Videogames do not offer a panacea for the ills of contemporary news organizations. But if the industry embraces them as a viable method of doing journalism—not just an occasional treat for online readers—newsgames can make a valuable contribution.