Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames

June 21, 2007
Ian Bogost | Georgia Tech, Professor of Literature, Communication and Culture

Video games are often perceived as brain-draining flights of fantasy that have no meaning beyond escapism and yet it is an industry that takes in more than $7 billion a year. In fact, there can be much more to video games than mindless entertainment, and the “serious games” movement argues that video games are not only a mirror to our culture but create ways to play with and manipulate important social and political questions.

How? Videogames are an expressive and persuasive medium: they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively-yet videogames open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric.

We call this new form “procedural rhetoric”, a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule based symbolic manipulation. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt these positions themselves, leading to potentially significant social change. There are three social areas that already show considerable potential for “videogame persuasion”: politics, advertising and education.

Speaker Details

Ian Bogost is Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a video game designer for a company he founded, Persuasion Games. Bogost also teaches courses in the undergraduate program in Computational Media and the graduate program in Digital Media. Bogost has a BA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from USC and an MA and Ph.D in Comparative Literature from UCLA; and is also co-editor of Water Cooler Games, an online resource about videogames with an agenda.