Procedural rhetoric

Last updated: Tuesday, 02 July 2024

After Ian Bogost, the practice of ‘authoring arguments through processes.’ (Bogost 2007)

Procedural rhetoric … is the practice of persuading through processes in general and computational processes in particular. Just as verbal rhetoric is useful for both the orator and the audience, and just as written rhetoric is useful for both the writer and the reader, so procedural rhetoric is useful for both the programmer and the user, the game designer and the player. Procedural rhetoric is a technique for making arguments with computational systems and for unpacking computational arguments others have created. — Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2007)

Taken together, we can think of game engines, frameworks, and other common groupings of procedural tropes as commensurate with forms of literary or artistic expression, such as the sonnet, the short story, or the feature film. — Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2007)

A form of rhetoric distinct from verbal, visual or written rhetoric; it relies on computation to execute processes and allows interaction. Foundational assumption is that processes and rules in interactive systems can embody or encode specific ways of thinking about how real-world systems work. Procedural rhetoric may support existing cultural, social and political positions, but it can also challenge and change them, altering the user/player’s thinking.

The art of persuading through these rule-based representations and interactions; games can make claims about how things work by modelling processes.

• [⎈] Explore how procedural logic could be applied in other domains, including learning and instructional environments, tabletop roleplaying games, dance competitions, religious rituals, dating “rules”, and constitutional law.
• [?] What’s the difference between procedural and operational logics?
• [&] See also: computational thinking?