Category: Uncategorized

Procedural Rhetoric

I recently had the pleasure to read an astounding book called “Persuasive Games” by Ian Bogost. In it, he develops the idea of “Procedural Rhetoric” which is the process of conveying a nuanced message through rule-based systems.

Essentially, rather than expressing ideas through the written word like in books or through visual storytelling like in movies, video games have the unique ability to talk about the world through its rules and the emergent properties of those rules.

One of the earliest examples of using this technique was Elizabeth Magie’s original implementation of “The Landlord’s Game“, a board game about the ill’s of unchecked capitalism. The rules of the game necessitated that the player directly engage with and understand the inherent unfairness of their actions.

When directly educated about complex subject matter like economic systems, it is taught in a manner that tends to affirm the structures of the existing world. When taught this way, it is extremely difficult to imagine how desirable (or undesirable) these massive systems are.

A game that attempts to create a simulation of these incredibly complex systems allows one to play with the idea and really explore its ramifications. As Bogost puts it, “Once a procedural rhetoric advances a new logic that a subject interrogates, it no longer remains possible to feign ignorance about that logic”.

Why make video games?

When setting out to do anything, it’s important to really consider why you are doing what you are doing. In my case, making video games. Why? Philosophically, why would one dedicate the work that it takes to make video games? This is a question that resonates deeply with me, and I’d like to explain what games mean to me and why one would subject themselves to this taxing endeavor. This is all just my perspective and I’m not trying to imply that anyone should or shouldn’t agree, but I hope that some may resonate with my reasoning, and come to their own conclusions.

I started playing video games in preschool on the Sega Genesis; I loved Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and played it until its first few worlds were burned into my memory. Back then, games were designed to be difficult, constantly forcing the player to improve if they wanted to see more of the game. The elation I experienced after making it to a new world for the first time in Super Mario Brothers was powerful. Sure, I may have failed innumerable times before that, but it was all worth it when I could see the improvement. Games back then didn’t pull any punches. If you got further than you had ever gotten before, it was because you improved at the game. The achievement felt real because it was real.

In a tangible way, these games taught me to adopt a growth mindset and instilled in me an appreciation for overcoming great challenges. These are powerful lessons, ones that can completely alter the course of one’s life. Simply teaching someone the virtues of working hard or delayed gratification more often than not will fall on deaf ears. Even if someone has continuously heard the good word that nothing worth doing is going to be easy, if their subconscious doesn’t agree, in the big picture of their life, this lesson will have minimal effect. This is not something that you learn intellectually like your multiplication tables; it must be viscerally experienced. And in my admittedly biased opinion, video games are very well suited to instill these kinds of lessons.

I see video games as a potent artistic medium like books, movies and music. But, unlike other these other mediums, games have a particular advantage: they give the individual control over the experience. This has profound implications for what a piece can say and mean. It’s one thing to demonstrate an aspect of the human experience in a compelling movie or book, it’s quite another to allow the user to interact with and experience it themselves. Games allow the player to be the character, be in the situation, and set them free to discover for themselves how a given situation would impact them. What better way to empathize for another person than to be put into their shoes?

It’s easy to sit on a high horse and disregard the validity of the tough decisions that characters make in a movie or book. It’s not quite as easy when you are in the driver’s seat. Wonderful examples of these decisions abound in the subtle interactions in Papers, Please. In it, you play the role of an immigration officer in an authoritarian state. Money is tight, your family is starving, and any mistakes or wasted time drags the player down a slippery slope. Strictly speaking, the player is only obligated to validate passport credentials, but what happens when a terrorist comes through with everything in order? Or a desperate refugee whose papers would have passed if the rules had not changed that morning? Whatever the player does in these moments says something about them and the game is elegantly constructed in such a way that the player is encouraged to really engage with the weight of these decisions. Even disregarding these moments and “just following orders” is itself a choice.

But more than mere empathy or visceral understanding of others, games let us see big picture forces at play, how the systems that we set up in a virtual world and the goals we ascribed to them impact how both individuals and collectives respond. You can take the complex social dynamics of any MMORPG to see microcosms of society form when enough rational actors combine. Or witness the unrestrained anarchy of phenomena like Twitch Plays Pokemon, where pseudo-religions and politics evolved to make sense of the chaos. There’s a vast range of possibilities when it comes to analyzing and harnessing this kind of collective behavior that games have only just begun to tap into.

Games are powerful, they can be one of the most interesting and provocative artistic mediums there is, should we choose to utilize them in that manner. Relatively speaking, they have only just begun to exist, the possibilities are endless, and I’m excited to extract some of that potential.

Quick Tip for Godot 3 Signals

I figured I’d share a quick tip that I found helpful in structuring my project in Godot 3.

Signals in Godot allow you to loosely couple any component in your game tree using the Observer Pattern. This means that any object A can communicate with any other object B simply by signing up to listen for a particular signal.

Neither object needs to explicitly reference or even be aware of the other object as long as they both agree on the same interface. This is very helpful when dynamically generating the game tree out of many scenes since the parent can connect together all of the children as needed.

This works great for simple setups, but as soon as you need to connect parts of the game tree that aren’t direct siblings or children, things can get hairy. You may find yourself creating "pass-through" signals to forward messages down or up the tree. Or you may start making several versions of the same signal to handle edge cases.

I followed a strategy of making "handshake" signals for any major scenes that needed to be accessed throughout the code. My base_level.gd forwards a signal level_handshake that would connect on to any interested receiver’s _on_level_handshake function. In this way, any dynamically generated scene that needs to accessed elsewhere can be broadcast to any node that is interested. It simply says, "hello anyone who cares: I’m the level and here is my reference". The receiver can simply save this and use it as it sees fit.

Following this simple strategy has drastically improved the flexibility of my code in regards to updates and refactors. It’s simple, but it’s effective!