Values, Rhetoric, and Activity in Video Games By Richard Rabil, Jr. Texas Tech University December 2009
Whether we like it or not, video games have permeated American culture and are not showing signs of letting up. In 2008, a study by the Pew Research Center found that 97% of American teens play games either on a computer, console, or mobile device (Lenhart et al., 2008a, 2). A second study in the same year found that 53% of adults play video games, and that one in five of them “play everyday or almost everyday” (Lenhart et al., 2008b, 1). Both studies confirm that video games have reached a status of popularity and positive social engagement that probably would not have been expected when games first begun to catch popular attention. What do video games have to do with rhetorical theory? The question has been asked quite a lot recently among teachers of composition, technical writers, and game studies scholars. For example, the journal Technical Communication published a special issue in August 2008 that explored the links between technical communication and virtual worlds. Also, authors in the September 2009 issue of Computers and Composition examined the rhetoric of user interfaces and the implications of gameplay for composition pedagogy. Common questions raised included: How do video games engage people? How do they deliver visual and textual content effectively? How do they blur the lines between end users and designers, and what are implications of this blurring act? This paper seeks to bring a unique perspective to the discussion among rhetorical theorists by claiming that video games are value systems in which players must actively learn, manipulate, and negotiate the values they encounter. Values are defined as “preferences for conduct”—in short, what is rewarded and what is punished in a video game’s world of rules. On the one hand, this act of negotiation is a highly playful process, while on the other hand it is a highly competitive and rhetorical process that can prepare players for encountering rules and values in realworld systems. Central to this argument are two claims about the nature of video games. The first is that video games are unique simulative systems that tap into fundamental human motives such as overcoming challenges (e.g., rescuing the princess in Super Mario), exploring space (e.g., investigating enormous 3-D virtual worlds such as Albion in Fable), and winning competitions (e.g., winning races in Need for Speed or scoring the most points in Space Invaders). The second is that video games present artificial “realities” that generate rules and challenges dynamically in response to user input, while escaping “normal” time and space limitations. These characteristics, which are both shared with and distinct from the properties of Rabil 1
traditional media such as books and film, provide unique opportunities for players across age groups to recognize, manipulate, and negotiate rules and values in real life. To proceed with this argument, three major sections follow. • Section 1 discusses the relation between values and contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing from such experts as Richard Weaver, Chaim Perelman, Wayne Booth, and Kenneth Burke to illustrate how all rhetoric entails the expression and negotiation of values. Rhetoric is shown to be a competitive act that finds unique expression in video games, since video games involve constant identification and negotiation of values within an established system of rules. • Section 2 considers what video games are, reviewing recent literature from formal game studies, value theories, Activity Theory, and structural semiotics. The section concludes that examining the values inherent in video games leads to a greater understanding of the rhetorical functions of games—namely, their ability to simulate experiences that prepare users for understanding and negotiating the values that are inherent in real-world systems. • Section 3 describes and evaluates player actions within The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006), a popular role-playing game (RPG) developed for the Nintendo GameCube and Wii platforms. Terms and techniques from AT and structural semiotics are used to identify the game’s values, which are then analyzed in terms of how they demand a rhetorical performance on the part of the player. The values of Play and Progress are examined, and observations are made regarding how managing these values within the rules of the game world can train users to manage and negotiate them in the real world. Section 1: Values and Rhetorical Theory What are “values” and what is their relationship to rhetoric? The question is not new. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle wrote at length about the things people generally consider of value, and he offers strategies that rhetoricians can use to appeal to then. Aristotle ultimately implies that value judgments play a role in all three forms of classical rhetoric. In legal rhetoric, we make judgments concerning past actions, and what we should do about them; in political rhetoric, we make judgments concerning what future actions are better or more appropriate than their alternatives; and in ceremonial rhetoric, we appeal to particular cultural values in the hopes of reinforcing them among our listeners, and moving them to behave accordingly. The theme of value emerges no less frequently among major rhetorical theorists of the 20th century. Richard Weaver, for example, was deeply concerned with the subject in his famous essay “Language Is Sermonic,” where he argues that all people are rhetoricians whether they realize it or not. We are by nature creatures whose lives are “characterized by movement towards goals” (1359), whose every act has a motive, and whose language operates as “a system of imputation, by which values and precepts are first framed in the mind and then imputed to things” (1359).
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Language is therefore a “value-laden vehicle,” and the words we choose, along with the manner in which we express them, indicate our inclinations, our values, and our preferences. “We are all of us preachers in private or public capacities. We have no sooner uttered words than we have given impulse to other people to look at the world, or some small part of it, in our way” (1360). Chaim Perelman also notes the connection in his The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. Rhetoric, he says, is concerned with modifying the current state of affairs and obtaining adherence to the modified state (1391). In a section called “The Basis of Agreement,” he draws extensively from the works of Aristotle to delineate two sorts of objects of agreement: facts and truths on the one hand, and values, hierarchies, or loci of the preferable on the other (1394). He then elaborates specifically on the role of values: Values are appealed to in order to influence our choices of action. They supply reasons for preferring one type of behavior to another ... For argumentation, it is useful to distinguish concrete values, such as one's country, from abstract values, such as justice and truth. It is characteristic of values that they can become the center of conflict without thereby ceasing to be values. This fact explains how real sacrifice is possible, the object renounced being by no means a mere appearance. For this reason, the effort to reinforce adherence to values is never superfluous. Such an effort is undertaken in epideictic discourse, and, in general, all education endeavors to make certain values preferred to others. (1394) Note specifically the connection between values, action, and motivation. Values influence what we choose to do. Values, in other words, are motivational – they lead us to make judgments about what is right, laudable, correct, or preferable in a given context, and they motivate actions that more or less correspond to such notions. In this sense, values have a direct connection to video games. Video game designers build values into a video game by defining what actions are permissible and by specifying parameters for success and failure. For instance, in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, slaying villains like trolls and spiders yields health and money. On the other hand, the player is punished for falling off a cliff or not moving quickly enough to dodge an attack. A player may learn to manipulate or negotiate those values within the game’s “reality,” its established realm of arbitrary rules and procedures. For example, a player may choose either to slay a monster or simply avoid it by outrunning or sneaking around it, or by finding alternative means to gaining money or health via exploration of the surrounding terrain. Secondly, Perelman took care in the passage to indicate (1) that different classes of values exist, and (2) that values are always involved in the transfer of knowledge in educational settings. In a similar manner, video game researchers such as Barr et al. (2007) have found it useful to differentiate between the broad Rabil 3
values of Play and Progress, under which more specific values – expressed in activities such as “combat,” “well-being of the avatar,” “acquisition,” and “exploration” – may be categorized (184). Furthermore, all video games set up rules that govern which activities or modes of conduct are preferable to others. As such, video games parallel those activities in education that seek to reinforce certain forms of knowledge or ways of doing as opposed to their alternatives. In this sense, video games have the ability to present situations that force players to participate in and negotiate the game’s built-in rules and values, and to prepare for similar types of engagement outside the video game world. In a later section of his book, Perelman discusses another characteristic of the rhetoric-values relationship that bears special relevance to video games. Under the section called “Creating ‘Presence’”, he explains that rhetoric always involves the act of selectively de-emphasizing certain values while emphasizing others. What an audience accepts forms a body of opinions, convictions, and commitments that is both vast and determinate. From this body the orator must select certain elements on which he focuses attention by endowing them, as it were, with a ‘presence.’ This does not mean that the elements left out are entirely ignored, but they are pushed into the background. Such a choice implicitly sets a value on some aspects of reality rather than others ... To make 'things future and remote appear as present,' that is, to create presence, calls for special efforts of presentation (1395) Rhetoricians thus use their skills in presentation to mediate values depending on what they perceive to be crucial to winning the agreement of an audience. Video games must inevitably do the same thing — they must create a “presence” for certain values instead of others— in order to present a system of goals and rewards that captures a player's attention and keeps them playing. That is, a video game must make certain actions possible while pushing others into the background. For example, the makers of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess enabled the slaying of enemies (thereby emphasizing what we might call “combat”), but chose not to permit negotiating with them (thereby de-emphasizing what we might call “pacifism” or “peace-making”). Barr et al. make a similar point in their paper. Friendship, they say, is not a value that is promoted in the role-playing game Fable (2004), since befriending other people in the game does not make the game or the player progress. Friendship is not valued as a goal or action that rewards or penalizes the player. Wayne C. Booth provides another helpful perspective on the relationship between values and rhetoric in Modern Dogma and A Rhetoric of Assent, where, among other things, he lists seven forms of knowledge we can trust in. The sixth in his list is that in “knowing intentions we often know them under the aspect of values” (1510). It is basic human nature, in other words, to make frequent value judgments regarding the quality of things. He then talks about a seventh type of Rabil 4
knowing we can all be quite sure of: that our values compete. “We talk ceaselessly to each other…trying to show that this value is genuinely superior to that,” he writes (1512). In the same vein as Perelman’s idea of “creating presence,” Booth concludes: But it is impossible, I think, to separate the first real symbolic usage—the first time even a seemingly neutral word like water or fire was used to stand for water or fire not present—from intentions to assert value ... That’s precisely what such usage is—an intention to “call to mind” and thus place some sort of value on what is not present. When anything is called to mind, in this sense, mind is changed. There is always an implicit “ought,” if only “You ought to attend to my way of perceiving and naming…”’ (15121513) This is simply another way of saying what Weaver and Perelman already said: that language and value are inextricably intertwined. On top of this, however, Booth captures the competitive aspect of rhetoric and language, in which we actively engage with other people in the assertion and negotiation of our values. What is desired, in the end, is change, transformation, a modified state of affairs in which we gain adherence to the values we appeal to in a particular moment or occasion. Finally, the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke sheds considerable light on the nature of values and their relation to even the subtlest forms of language use. To Burke, wherever language is used, rhetoric is used as well, including in art, literature, and science. No use of language—or even more broadly, no use of symbols—is exempt from rhetoric. He mounts these claims and their associated theories in A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and Language as Symbolic Action (1966). The connection between Burkeian rhetorical theory and video games may be seen in Burke’s theories of motives. Burke rejected the notion that humans are chemical composites that “merely move,” insisting instead that people act in terms of consciously-motivated behavior. This view is apparent in A Grammar of Motives, where he focuses on understanding why people do what they do, and in particular what statements about action and purpose entail. He introduces five key terms or “generating principles” to carry out his investigation: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. “Any complete statement about motives,” he argues, “will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)” (1298). He writes that these terms constitute the “grammar” of motives—what he called the “dramatistic pentad”—which is basically a syntax for understanding the rules of human discourse. How do the elements of the pentad help us see the relation between values, rhetoric, and video games? The answer has to do with how the terms of the Rabil 5
pentad reveal the values, beliefs, or preferences that underpin any human statement or expression in a given situation. The pentad helps us to identify the ways in which people use language to limit the interpretation of action, rather than shaping action directly. Dr. J. Clarke Rountree explains this idea well: Thus, whenever we perceive a scene, agent, act, agency, purpose, or attitude as having a given nature or quality, or we accept another's characterization of one of those pentadic elements, we "grammatically" limit potential interpretations of all the other terms … relations among grammatical terms function as rhetorical constraints that do not dictate action, but shape the interpretation of action. (Rountree) In other words, the relationships between the terms of the pentad help us to clarify how a person (or group of people) is characterizing a given situation, and in doing so, how that person (or group) is implicitly recommending a set of actions that are more reasonable or “better” than others. That is, when characterizing a situation, a speaker or writer “prescribes the range of acts that will seem reasonable, implicit, or necessary in that situation” (“Dramatism” 14). Hence all utterances, including those that are not overtly argumentative, contain some expression of preferences for conduct. Similarly, all video games communicate preferences for conduct, and these can be best understood through an analysis of their underlying processes and rules. In the same way that human beings use symbols to imply the acceptability of certain behaviors, so video games employ value-laden symbols, rules, processes, rewards, and penalties to imply what is “good,” “bad,” “acceptable,” or “unacceptable” within a simulative environment. Where then does this leave us? Several points about the nature of values may be drawn. • First, all rhetoric is value-ridden because in all cases rhetoric seeks to persuade or dispose an audience a certain way, according to certain values regarding what “ought to be”—e.g., regarding judgments of what is correct or incorrect, good or bad, or what is more good or bad than an alternative—often with the aim of effecting change or preserving something against it. • Second, values are intimately linked with motives, and thus reveal our goaloriented nature. Values lead us to establish and strive for goals, to choose one course of action over another—a course of action which we think is good, better, or more beneficial than an alternative course of action. • Third, there are different kinds of values. Some values are more “concrete” in nature (such as economic wealth) and others are more “abstract” (such as progress and courage). • Fourth, values lead us to select topics or actions for attention instead of others, while pushing others to the background. What is deemed “valuable” or “not Rabil 6
valuable” in a situation may be judged from what is brought to the fore just as much as by what is neglected or pushed to the back. • Fifth, values are at the heart of the competitive nature of humans. By pursuing, promoting, or calling attention to certain values rather than others, we engage in an act of competition and negotiation. From these points, a more focused notion of values in the context of video games may be drawn. Values, for the purposes of this paper, are defined using concepts from Barr et al., who borrow the following definition from social psychology professor Milton Rokeach: “a value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence” (qtd. in Barr at al., 184). In this definition, the emphasis is less on basic philosophical human values such as “dignity” and more on action or preferences for conduct. Specifically, the emphasis on preferences directs attention to the links between player actions and values such as “discovery” and “achievement,” or what Barr et al. have termed “Play” and “Progress” (184) in their extensive qualitative research. Understanding these values is important, because they are extremely prevalent in video games. The following passage elaborates on the meaning behind Play and Progress: Play concerns preferences for conduct which is, of course, playful and largely without explicit direction, while Progress motivates conduct directed toward specific goals of advancement. Thus, in Counterstrike, a value of Play would promote actions such as seeing how quickly the player can run to the other side of the map, while a value of Progress would lead to actions related to winning, such as attacking the enemy. (184) Here, the playful as well as the competitive, goal-oriented nature of values in video games is highlighted. Furthermore, the passage argues that values are inseparable from motives: every action has a motive, and every motive has some value in mind. Values are appealed to as the reason for doing something, the “why” behind an action. And when there are several ways of doing something, or a set of possibilities to choose from, some values must be acted on while others are not. Values, to reiterate, are preferences for conduct, and as such they are at the heart of video games, because video games make implicit value statements all the time: they reward certain actions while punishing others as “against the rules.” How does one go about identifying the values in a game? Generally speaking, they may be understood by what actions are “present”—that is, by what actions are possible—and conversely, by what actions are absent, or made impossible. “If all we can do is move, fight, and socialise,” Barr et al. point out in their essay, “then these are our sensible goals, the only things we can value. It makes no sense to value friendship in Fable, because it is not possible to act according to the value: there is no ‘talk about being a Hero’ button” (192). As will be shown below in Section II, Rabil 7
principles from Activity Theory and structural semiotics can be leveraged to identify and analyze values in a more systematic fashion. Furthermore, through an analysis of an actual game, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, it will be shown that values can be ascertained from the types of play that are possible in the game, as well as the means of fulfilling its objectives. But first, the next section discusses what video games are, and will attempt to show that just as negotiating values is at the heart of rhetoric, so it is at the heart of interpreting and learning to operate within the established rules, processes, and values of video game worlds. By modeling complex rules and processes computationally, and by imposing challenges and constraints (rather than reducing or removing them, as in conventional software applications), video games are unique simulative forms of play and competition that offer valuable opportunities to prepare for negotiating values in the world of real action. Section II: What are video games? On the one hand, video games are not a new medium per se, but extensions of existing cultural artifacts, such as board games, narrative, text, and film (Berger 8; Poremba 5). On the other hand, they are unique objects with unique properties afforded by their computational characteristics, as well as by the fact that they are games. The following subsections first consider some common misconceptions about games, and then review the unique characteristics of video games that are generally agreed upon by scholars in the game studies field. A. Common misconceptions: (1) games are “mere play”; (2) games are “just stories.” Dialogue about the negative psychological effects of games on players, though significantly diminished since the early history of video games, has yet to fade. Video games are often associated with leisure, laziness, and/or non-serious, non-productive play (Frasca, 2003b; Eyman, 245). A recent podcast (2009) among video game journalists at IGN Entertainment, a popular source of news in the entertainment industry, discussed whether the term “game” affects the attitude that games are subpar, non-serious art forms. The podcasters concluded that just as comic books acquired the more respectable term “graphic novels,” the perception that video games are trivial phenomenon will gradually disappear as older generations either die out or are persuaded otherwise. “Games doesn't really match what we do anymore... I do think there's room for a re-evaluation of that,” said one of the editors. “Fallout 3 is not a game, but moving through a narrative experience” (Hatfield et al.). Indeed, video games appear to have seen a significant shift in the stereotypes that were once associated with video game culture. As game studies expert Jesper Juul seeks to demonstrate in his new book A Casual Revolution (2009), video games are being played on a casual basis by more and more people today than ever before.
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Another misconception is that video games are merely digital extensions of traditional narrative forms such as novels and movies, only with a greater degree of user participation. Proponents of this view typically say video games are subject to the same kind of analyses performed on literary artifacts. Opponents, by contrast, argue that video games cannot be studied using theories derived from narratology, but rather require their own formal discipline, or “ludology,” i.e., the study of game structure and play. These positions characterize the heated narrative versus ludology debate, or what Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. call the “’war’ between ludology and narratology” (195). Many essays and conference discussions later, the debate seems to have come to a general consensus that narrative is not the defining feature of games, but that games do share structural traits with narratives and can indeed tell stores (Frasca, 2003a; Dille and Platten, ix). As Dr. Janet Murray (2004) has argued, “Games are always stories” in the sense that stories, whether in print or cinematic form, usually have several important elements in common with video games: images, text, audio, 3-D space, contests, puzzles, and distance from the real world. Game studies expert Gonzalo Frasca (2003a) gives the examples of “characters, settings, and events” as commonly-shared features between the two. Even games without explicit storytelling components—such as Tetris, Asteroids, etc.—entail storytelling as soon as players describe their gameplay experience to others. At the same time, video games defy the categories of print-bound literary texts in important ways, as Dr. Espen Aarseth argues in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. He calls video games a type of “cybertext,” and that playing a video game involves a “cybertextual process” during which “the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of ‘reading’ do not account for” (1). To characterize this process, he uses the term “ergodic” (which literally translates as “work path”) and argues that as ergodic texts, video games entail a unique type of interaction with human agents that is essentially different from the interaction between readers and other traditional media such as film and books. He takes the rest of his book to elaborate on this idea and its implications. Nevertheless, both Aarseth and Frasca still tend to allow that video games contain narrative traits that are necessary for meaningful gameplay. Seen in this light, though stories do not define games, video games and stories are interdependent (Murray, 2004). B. Video games are software. Video games cannot exist apart from conventional software features such as menus, navigation, graphics, databases, and text. Understanding video games through these familiar software elements helps us understand, in part, how humans interact with them. However, as Barr et al. contend, video games are also much more than software applications, not least because they tend to draw out the user experience, Rabil 9
rather than seeking to simplify it for the sake of productivity (182). These and other differences are detailed below in subsection F. The titles of the next four sections are inspired by Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), where she articulates the procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic properties of computers. C. Video games are procedural, rule-based systems. Murray (1997) defines procedurality as the “ability to execute a series of rules,” and claims this is a core feature of computers. Computer scientists think in these terms every day: “identifying the exact or general rules of behavior that describe any process, from running a payroll to flying an airplane.” Applied to video games, procedurality is related to the authorship of rules and procedures. As Ian Bogost explains in Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2007), developers write code that “enforces rules,” such as a series of if/then strings which tell the computer what pictures, sounds, or content to trigger in response to user inputs. This makes video games generative or simulative systems, rather than mere representational systems such as film, books, and photographs. Video games “generate behaviors based on rule-based models; they are machines capable of producing many outcomes, each conforming to the same overall guidelines” (Bogost 4). The types of rules and procedures within video games are a vast topic for discussion, so for the sake of brevity, this section focuses on (1) how rules and procedures make video games different from other traditional media and (2) how they reveal the rhetorical nature of games. To illustrate the first point, a passage from game studies expert Gonzalo Frasca (2003a) offers helpful insight: The key trait of simulational media [i.e., video games] is that it relies on rules: rules that can be manipulated, accepted, rejected and even contested. Narrauthors have executive power: they deal with particular issues. On the other hand, simauthors behave more like legislators: they are the ones who craft laws. They do take more authorial risks than narrauthors because they giveaway part of their control over their work. (7) In other words, unlike traditional media such as photos and film, video games generate signs and behaviors in response to player participation, according to specified rules. Without such participation, a video game does not operate or unfold. This feature of games has important implications for pedagogy, a point that is considered in more detail in the next section. To illustrate the second point, Ian Bogost provides extensive analysis in his book Persuasive Games. He bases what he calls “procedural rhetoric” on the idea that video games persuade most effectively not through visuals or text, but by using rules and procedures to make claims about the way real-world systems operate. Rabil 10
Procedural rhetoric, in short, is “the practice of authoring arguments through processes” (28). One of his many examples is the game Tenure, a game that uses rules and procedures to model the operations of the schooling system. In effect, Tenure argues the true motives behind actions at schools aren't exclusively founded on lofty pedagogic concerns but political ones as well (2). In taking this approach to games, Bogost affirms the unique ways in which video games can model ubiquitous real-world processes, and thereby make persuasive claims about the tensions and contradictions that are present in the systems in which we live. How does this relate to the present discussion of values and rhetoric? Since rules and procedure are typically concerned with what actions yield awards or penalties, and since they often reflect the designers’ notions of what is “real” and “valuable” within the game, they are inevitably imbued with values about what is the nature of things, what is desirable or undesirable, and what counts as success or failure. In other words, values are embedded within procedural systems in terms of preferences for conduct. This feature of games is further elaborated on in subsection G, where the value-laden nature of games is discussed more from a game studies point of view. D. Video games are participatory, blurring the boundary between read and writer. In contrast to the relatively passive experience of reading books or watching film, video games require and respond to the constant input of players, an act which makes players “co-writers” of the gameplay experience. Specifically, through various types of input devices (e.g., handheld controls, keyboard commands, a mouse, or motion sensors), video games establish digital spaces in which a large degree of interactivity and manipulation of in-game rules and elements can occur. Of course, the degree of control that a game affords varies; some games provide a minimal range of input options, while others provide a wide variety of choices and input avenues that deeply affect the game’s narrative path, or that come back to impact the player in later stages. Take, for example, a description from a review of the recently-released video game Dragon Age: Origins, an epic fantasy role-playing game released by Bioware in November 2009. The reviewer explains what happens when you choose to start the game as a dwarven noble. A couple of noblemen try and enlist your aid on something, but a little research discovers that what seems like a harmless request could actually be quite costly and embarrassing to you. Still, the game lets you choose between what you want to do, and what's interesting is that the decision may very well haunt you much later in the game. Similarly, an Inside Mac Games review (2002) of the popular apocalyptic sci-fi video game Fallout stresses the boundless opportunities for free choices the game affords. Rabil 11
This is an RPG in the true spirit of the term. You have virtually no real game-bound ethical or moral limits with concern to the character itself, you can choose just how evil or heroic your character is and you pick stats, have percentages and numbers, modifiers and derived statistics and a simulated “roll of the dice,” as it were. The implications of the participatory nature of games are many. Professor of composition Kevin Moberly, for example, argues that players of World of Warcraft (WoW), an online massive multiplayer game that involves avatar creation and continual upgrading in an enormous virtual environment, essentially engage in an act of writing when they create and revise their avatar’s in-game identity, and thereby become coauthors of content (292). Other authors such as Daniel Pink (2006) and Celia Pearce (2007) also contend that avatar creation makes video games a creative form of selfexpression. Of course, such agency problematizes traditional notions of authorship and opens the doors for in-depth studies of the rhetorical implications of the blurred boundaries between author and reader. In her dissertation “Player as Author: Digital Games and Agency,” Cindy Poremba examines these implications at length, arguing that video game designers are more likely to grant agency to player production of digital content (8-9), a practice that is most frequent in “Persistent World” games such as WoW, Ultima Online, and EverQuest. Poremba cites player-produced artifacts such as in-game weddings and seasonal events, which are developed apart from the direct encouragement or support of game designers (18). “These artifacts,” she says, “become vessels of the player's agency, and play a key role in the social validation of their role as authors” (5). Although video games do not provide total freedom to players, they are systems that respond dynamically to player inputs, and it is this characteristic that strongly suggests pedagogical uses. Within virtual game environments, players must constantly perceiving patterns regarding what they can and cannot do—that is, they learn what actions lead to rewards and success, and which actions are forbidden or penalized. This learning process is seldom static. “Unlike what would happen in storytelling,” says Frasca, “the sequence of events in a simulation is never fixed. You can play it dozens of times and things would be different” (Frasca 2003a, 6). Moreover, this process is negotiated in the sense that a player is presented with alternative ways of doing things in a non-linear and experimental manner, albeit within a system of rules and values that restricts the range of possible actions. By putting players in a situation to learn and negotiate the patterns of rules and values of a simulative system, video games can increase players’ ability to draw connections between processes, constraints, and outcomes within a given system. Daniel Pink, author of the New York Times bestseller A Whole New Mind (2005), cites scientific studies that highlight multiple educational benefits of video games, including increased visual perception, simultaneous processing of information, and Rabil 12
pattern recognition (193-194). And as James Paul Gee has written in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, “The fact is that when kids play video games they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they’re in the classroom. Learning isn’t about memorizing isolated facts. It’s about collecting and manipulating them” (205). E. Video games are spatial; video games are encyclopedic. The spatial nature of video games means that computers and game consoles have the ability to represent artificial space, either as virtual 3-D representations of physical reality or as abstract representations of networked systems of information (Mateas 183). The encyclopedic nature of games, on the other hand, refers to the ways in which video games are able to store, index, and retrieve information easily (Mateas 184). At times, these two characteristics can be elevated as the more or less foundational characteristics of game design; however, Mateas and Stern (2007) argue that they are nonetheless derivative of the procedural nature of video games, since both the spatial and encyclopedic properties of video games make use of rules and procedures in order to function (184). The spatial and encyclopedic features are important since they relate to particular player activities such as exploration (which requires movement through space) and character upgrading (which requires encyclopedic operations such as the collection and processing of statistical data over time). Video games thus provide an artificial space with structures and rules in which players encounter a “reality.” It is an artificial reality, of course, and it differs in countless ways from the physical time and space dimensions we live in. Nonetheless, it is a working reality created by designers who established a working set of rules and processes that players learn to interpret and operate within. F. Video games are different than conventional software. Games are media, and games are “games.” Barr et al. make a compelling case for why understanding the differences between software applications and video games is critical to productive studies in HCI, and by extension (this paper argues) rhetorical theory. Barr et al. summarize six key points of difference, drawing from a study conducted by Pagulayan et al in 2003: 1. Games are driven by process, not by results; 2. The goals of games emerge from within the game world and not outside of it; 3. Games inspire a variety of experiences over consistency; 4. Games impose constraints, while conventional productivity applications try to remove them; 5. Visual and audio content in video games are meant to convey environment rather than functionality; 6. Innovation in games tends to exceed that of productivity applications Rabil 13
These differences tie directly to the idea that video games are unique artifacts by virtue of their simulational, process-driven properties, which are based on algorithmically-defined rules and constraints. In light of such differences, Barr et al. emphasize the importance of giving credence to the emerging discipline of game studies, or ludology, which has begun to develop theoretical approaches that characterize and describe video games in their own right, rather than through theories derived from literature or narratology. The field of ludology has shown, for example, that games are media, or electronic texts that are just one category within a broader range of categories that constitute what Espen Aarseth calls “cybernetic systems” (Frasca, 2003a, 2). Additionally, ludologists have shown that video games are games, and as such they are a different type of software that have a special type of interaction—gameplay. In keeping with these conclusions, Jesper Juul (2003) proposes the following definition of video games: The game definition I propose finally has 6 points: 1) Rules: Games are rule-based. 2) Variable, quantifiable outcome: Games have variable, quantifiable outcomes. 3) Value assigned to possible outcomes: That the different potential outcomes of the game are assigned different values, some being positive, some being negative. 4) Player effort: That the player invests effort in order to influence the outcome. (i.e., games are challenging.) 5) Player attached to outcome: That the players are attached to the outcomes of the game in the sense that a player will be the winner and "happy" if a positive outcome happens, and loser and "unhappy" if a negative outcome happens. 6) Negotiable consequences: The same game [set of rules] can be played with or without real-life consequences. These six points emphasize the “gameness” of video games, and in particular the strong link between gameplay and values (point 3). After quoting this same definition in their essay, Barr et al. elaborate on the values emphasis. If we are interested in the interactions between players and the interface, they say, then games should be examined as value systems (Barr et al, 184). This point, which is central to this paper’s thesis, is elaborated in the next section. G. Video games are value systems On the one hand, video games are social “texts” that emerge from the communities in which they are developed (Berger 6). Created at a particular time, by particular people, and for a particular audience, video games inevitably reflect the personalities and experiences of their makers, the anticipated values of the audience, and the value systems of the societies in which the developers live and/or were brought up (Berger 7). Video games persuade players to accept their version of reality at least in some superficial sense, in order for a game to be noticed and played. A video game must, moreover, correspond to players’ conceptions of Rabil 14
success and failure, and establish desirable goal and rewards. Video games do this in multiple ways: unlocking new levels, upgrading the player-avatar’s strength, giving the player a high rank, etc. (Salen et al., 346). Such rewards are associated with values, and these values, according to researchers like Barr et al., are exactly what make a game a game. Commenting on Juul’s definition quoted above, Barr et al. contend that the values of a video game emerge both from their essential nature as media as well as gameplay: As media, games contain values as information which is communicated to players through elements such as the game’s narrative and aesthetics. Although the narrative of a video game is not always deeply linked with its nature as a game, the narrative still conveys values to the player which may shape their gameplay in ways different to rules. Furthermore, the playful aspect of games is somewhat lost in Juul’s definition [quoted above], but is another important component of any general discussion of video game values: players often play according to their own values, and many games do not even present rigourous evaluations.” (Barr 183) Barr et al. then quote Milton Rokeach to define values in a more pragmatic sense as “an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence” (183). They assert that Play and Progress are overarching values in most if not all video games, and that under these two broad categories a hierarchy of values and actions may be associated. A prime example of the value of Progress would be avatar upgrading in WoW, whereas the value of Play might look like spatial exploration through a vast virtual world, a key activity in games like EverQuest, WoW, and Fallout. What is the connection here to rhetorical theory? Simply this: in the same way that rhetoric cannot be understood apart from action and motives, video games cannot be understood apart from player conduct and values. The values of Play and Progress are fundamental motives in gameplay, and fulfilling them entails actions such as driving over ramps, accepting quests, collecting rubies, shooting zombies, or exploring every possible terrain in Norrath from EverQuest. The unique thing is that these actions are made possible within a virtual, simulational space that is in some way modeled on real-world processes and values concerning what is possible or preferable, while at the same time being unconstrained by conventional time and space limitations (e.g., a “day” in the virtual world of Twilight Princess is not a “real” 24-hour day). By first interpreting a game’s rules—i.e., by learning what yields points or what results “game over”—and then by overcoming the imposed constraints through a repetitive process of failure and success, the end user enacts a rhetorical performance that entails learning and negotiating the rules and values of the game. Rabil 15
But what is the process for identifying and analyzing the values in a video game? Barr et al. argue that one must analyze the ways in which players can act in a game. Furthermore, one must understand the motives that drive those actions. Barr et al. thus propose Activity Theory (AT) and structural semiotics as theoretical frameworks that can be used to identify, describe, and evaluate player conduct in video games. The next section briefly explains what these frameworks are, why they are effective analytical mechanisms, and how they are used to analyze and evaluate video games. H. As value-laden systems, video games are conducive to the analytical methods of Activity Theory and structural semiotics AT is a school of thought that stems from cultural-historical Russian psychology, and Barr et al. argue that it is an effective framework due to its central concern with values, goals, and motives (185). On the one hand, it is “a conceptual approach that provides a broad framework for describing the structure, development, and context of computer-supported activities” (Kaptelinin and Nardi 158). On the other hand, it is a “philosophical and cross-disciplinary framework for studying different forms of human practices as development processes, with both individuals and social levels interlinked at the same time” (Kuutti 5). In short, it is a way of examining human behavior in the context of “activity systems,” recognizing that human activity and human psychology are fundamentally interdependent. Numerous essays and books by experts in the HCI field demonstrate that AT is becoming more and more prominent among HCI theorists, as it provides a flexible set of tools, terminologies, and heuristics for understanding the conduct of humans in relation to computers (Barr et al. 185; Kuutti 10). The basic components of AT are helpful for studying and understanding player actions in a video games, and are summarized below. 1. An activity system is the unit of analysis in AT. An activity system is a “structured collaboration with long-term and/or continuously renewed objects, such as building a house” (Dayton 2). 2. An activity system has activities, and all activities have motives. An activity is a “process in which one or more people transform an object in an acknowledged cultural or social context” (Barr et al. 185). 3. All activities have constituent chains of actions, and these, in turn, have conscious goals that make sense in the larger context of the activity. 4. Actions, when performed again and again, consist of operations, or “habitual responses to conditions both evoking and mediating an action” (Dayton 2, emphasis mine). Other less prominent elements of AT include subjects, objects, mediating tools, and outcomes. To illustrate how these parts come together, Barr et al. developed a model of the activity of Terrorist Elimination in Counterstrike. “Each level of the hierarchy,” they conclude, “yields a distinct way of thinking about values in
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activities, from being embedded and unconscious, to consciously deliberated on by individuals, or with regard to high-level motivations” (186). With this framework, is it necessary to draw additional tools and analytical concepts from structural semiotics? How would principles from structural semiotics assist AT in finding and assessing a video game’s values? Barr et al. use a specific concept from the semiotics called opposition, whereby the meaning of a word or symbol is understood by seeing how it is different from other words or symbols. “Opposition” is rooted in the theories of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who famously argued that signs (i.e., words) cannot be understood except in relation to other signs. Based on this concept, Barr et al. developed a heuristic called “oppositional play” as a way of investigating the values inherent in gameplay. They explain that oppositional play, “concerns playing video games ‘the wrong way’ on purpose, often guided by the construction of a semiotic square to guide play. By seeing how the game responds to opposed forms of play, we gather evidence for the values that are emphasised in the gameplay” (188). Incidentally, this notion of opposition is similar to the concept of “creating presence” discussed in Section I. Both oppositional play and “creating presence” recognize that the values of a game may be understood by what actions are made “present”—that is, by what actions are possible—and conversely, by what actions are absent, or made impossible. So for example, playing as a pacifist in the first-person shooter Half-Life 2 quickly leads to death, showing that pacifism is not a value that is possible to act on. The technique can also be used to simply identify what actions are either forbidden or ineffective in a game. For instance, refusing to move forward through any of the maps in games like WoW or EverQuest, or even to restrict movement to a particular sphere, naturally results in boredom and lack of progress. In these ways, oppositional play yields insight into the preferences for conduct (i.e., the values) that are built into the game world by the designers. The next section draws from concepts of AT and oppositional play to identify and analyze the values inherent in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Specifically, the activities of item collection, combat, and exploration are examined to demonstrate how the game presents a structured system of rules, processes, and values that players must learn to operate within, manipulate, and negotiate. Section III: An Analysis of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is an action-adventure game that centers on Link, a young ranch worker and aspiring warrior who lives in Ordon Village. One day, when preparing to depart on an errand to Hyrule castle, the village is attacked by monsters, and the children of the village are kidnapped. Link is at first knocked unconscious, but after recovering he swiftly follows the monsters, only to encounter a wall of Twilight, where he is suddenly pulled in by a shadow beast, turned into a wolf, and put in a prison in the Twilight Realm, a dark and sinister void which corrupts the land and strikes fears into its inhabitants. He escapes with the help of Rabil 17
an imp called Midna, who then guides him to Princess Zelda. He learns that a usurper king of Twili known as Zant has defeated the Light Spirits (mystical guardians of the land) and taken over Hyrule. To save Hyrule and rescue the kidnapped children, Link must restore the Light Spirits and defeat Zant. In the process of doing so, Link goes on a series of quests to find the items he needs to fulfill the story’s objectives. One of the first quests in the game is to rescue a group of children who get lost in Faron Woods. The player-avatar must follow the children’s trail and acquire a lantern in order to proceed through a cave where giant spider webs block the path. The player must then use the lantern to burn the webs and explore the caves to locate a key that will open a gate that bars the entrance to Faron Woods. While completing the quest, the player-avatar encounters different types of monsters that can be destroyed with a wooden sword, damaged or killed with a sling shot, or avoided by running past them. Eventually, the player-avatar continues through the woods to find one of the kids locked in a cage, and the only way to free her is by breaking the cage open with his wooden sword. Later on in the game, there are a series of much weightier quests, one of which entails collecting “tears” held by enemy Twilight creatures in order to free one of the Light Spirits. The player-avatar is in the form of a wolf at this point, and receives a “Vessel of Light” with which to collect the tears. The player must then follow indicators on a digital map to go about collecting the items. The player soon learns that the tears are held by sinister Twilight spiders, which are only visible when activating the wolf’s sharp senses, and which must be slain before the tears can be collected. Additionally, the player cannot traverse through the different locations without the help of Midna, who not only provides a special weapon called an Energy Field to kill several Twilight creatures at once, but helps the player-avatar jump high distances or across large gaps. By observing the activities the player-avatar can or must enact in these quests, as well as the rules governing what defines their success and failure, several values may be identified. As described in the extended discussion of values in Section I, values are “preferences for conduct” that lead players to make judgments about what is right, laudable, correct, or preferable in a given context, and they motivate actions that more or less correspond to such notions. The following analysis describes the actions that the player-avatar has the ability to perform, identifies the values associated with those actions, and considers the flexibility the player has in negotiating them. First, it becomes obvious that in order to succeed at all, the player-avatar must engage in extensive inventory management, an activity that is at the core of every quest. The player-avatar cannot advance through the game without finding keys to open doors or without leveraging the items he or she acquires in the game world to overcome in-game challenges. For instance, a wooden sword is needed to slay monsters and break open a cage where a child is imprisoned, a lantern is Rabil 18
needed to traverse through dungeons, a gale boomerang is needed to reverse the direction of wind-powered bridges, and iron boots are needed to sink to the bottom of pools of water and discover underwater pathways. Moreover, the game includes a multi-panel interface for inventory management, and there are numerous points in the game where the player-avatar must become adept at switching rapidly between items to defeat bosses. The player-avatar is penalized for poor item management (e.g., by not being able to advance to the next part of the quest), but is rewarded when he or she does it well (e.g., by destroying enemies or gaining access to new levels). These activities and the rules surrounding them point to the value of effective item management, a value that relates to the larger concepts of Play and Progress. Interestingly, this value allows for a considerable range of experimentation and negotiation. The player-avatar must not only find new items, but through a process of deductive reasoning learn how to leverage their properties within the game world to solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and access new parts of the virtual environment. Players may equip the items whenever they want, practice them at almost any point in the game, and try them out in different combinations without incurring penalties. Of course, there are specific combinations that are “right” in that they are necessary to defeat a boss or move to the next level, but even the “right” combinations can be executed with some variation. The player-avatar usually has a range of movement and an unlimited amount of time within which he or she can maneuver, probe the weaknesses of the enemy, and figure out what items and strategies are most effective. Another primary activity in the game is combat. The player-avatar cannot proceed from one quest to the next without slaying major bosses or killing monsters. The rewards for killing minor monsters include health points or rupees (the fictional currency of the in-game world), while the rewards for killing major bosses includes enhanced weaponry, improved fighting techniques, and increased health capacity. On the other hand, poor management of the combat controls results in damage or death. It is forbidden to find alternatives to defeating enemy units using persuasion or negotiation, and most combat ends in irremediably killing a monster or enemy, rather than critically wounding them. However, the specific approach to combat varies according to a number of factors, including the environment the player-avatar is in, the weapon he or she chooses to use, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy object. In many cases, the player-avatar has the ability to choose either to slay a monster or simply avoid it by outrunning or sneaking around it. The underlying rules and procedures of the combat system thus point to Play and Progress. The player-avatar can, for example, choose to take the challenge of killing certain monsters when he or she is not constrained to, an action which is largely playful. On the other hand, the rewards that result from combat contribute to the player-avatar’s health, skill, and overall progress within the game world. Rabil 19
The final activity that will be examined is movement and exploration. Twilight Princess is rich with large open spaces and complex level designs, and the controls make it easy to navigate the environments and command a 360 view of one’s surroundings. These elements imply that spatial progress is an essential value: the player cannot find items or do combat without covering large distances, exploring every corner of an environment to “find the way out” or “locate the key,” or getting the help of Midna to cross perilous terrains. Spatial progress is further reinforced by the static presence of an on-screen map that indicates where playeravatar’s position in relation to the game’s virtual space. There are no options to accept or deny quests without sooner or later being forced to complete them in order to advance the plot. Nevertheless, the player has some freedom to test the boundaries of the environments, and can spend large amounts of time exploring houses, talking to characters, and going back through different portions of a level without incurring penalties for wasting time. This is an example where the physical limitations of time do not usually apply to the virtual reality of a game. The playeravatar does not, for example, lose health points for not sitting down to eat a meal, and in Twilight Princess, the player-avatar is not bound by a time limit within which the Light Spirits must be restored. To sum up, Twilight Princess operates on a model in which inventory management, combat, and exploration are central activities that players can act upon. Inventory management contains the value of effective item use; combat contains the value of aggression; and exploration relies on the value of spatial progress. On a broader conceptual plane, all three activities relate to the values of Play and Progress, since each activity entails a performance on the part of the player to fulfill desires to have fun and advance competitively through a game world. These values, in turn, are governed by complex rules and procedures within a simulative “reality” that does not conform to conventional time and space constraints. Through a repetitive process of trial, error, and instruction, players must learn the game’s rules and patterns concerning what actions result in success or failure, awards or penalties. Although the game’s plotline is fairly linear and there is no way to fundamentally alter the ultimate narrative progression, the player still has flexibility to manipulate and negotiate the values of the game by choosing how to use his or her items, when to perform certain actions, and where to direct his or her avatar in open 3-D spaces. This range of choices, along with the range of ways in which players can act on them, amount to a rhetorical performance that involves detecting the rule-based patterns behind a given “reality,” interpreting the values that are associated with those patterns, and manipulating them in order to win the game and ultimately have a meaningful gameplay experience.
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Conclusion Through an analysis of contemporary rhetorical theory and game studies literature, this paper argued that values are fundamental to language use and gameplay conduct. In the first section, a review of contemporary rhetorical theory was conducted to draw out the relationship between values and rhetoric. The section concluded (1) that all expression is sermonic, (2) that values are always therefore embedded within language, and (3) that negotiating those values is an ongoing and highly-competitive process wherein people assert their values as better, more reasonable, or in some way preferable to their alternatives. Moreover, this paper attempted to show (1) that values are fundamental components of video games, and (2) that video games are unique phenomena that allow users to engage playfully in a “reality” that does not conform to conventional time and space conditions. Section II thus discussed the unique properties of video games, focusing specifically on their rule-based, participatory, spatial, encyclopedic, and value-laden properties. Several conclusions were drawn. First, video games are unique artifacts in that they use complex rules and models to respond dynamically to input from players. Secondly, they require the active participation of human agents who are motivated by goals and values. Such participation has considerable pedagogical benefits, such as teaching skills in pattern recognition and information processing. Third, video games are filled with values or preferences for conduct, and players must become adept at learning and negotiating those values in order to succeed. Principles from AT and structural semiotics were introduced to explain the procedures by which one could identify and analyze the values inherent in video games. Finally, in order to demonstrate these theories at work in an actual video game, an analysis of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was performed. The game’s major activities and their associated values were examined using terms from AT and principles of oppositional play. The conclusions of the analysis support the thesis that player participation in video games (i.e., gameplay) is a rhetorical performance that entails learning, manipulating, and negotiating the values inherent in a dynamic, simulative system of rules. Two conclusions may be drawn from this study: (1) as artificial, computational worlds with 3-D spatial properties that are fundamentally rule-based and simulative, video games offer unique opportunities to fulfill basic human desires for competition, play, and self-expression; and (2) as value-laden artifacts, video games constitute competitive rhetorical spaces in which players must recognize, manipulate, and negotiate the game’s rules, patterns, and values, and in doing so, prepare for similar acts of negotiation in the real world. The implications for pedagogy are especially noteworthy. Through the way they demand recognition, manipulation, and negotiation of rule-based patterns, video games can teach valuable rhetorical skills, such as the ability to perceive the value judgments that underpin the rules and procedures of real-world systems. Moreover, video games Rabil 21
can train users how to behave effectively within those systems and mount effective arguments that ultimately lead to change, or to a modified state of “victory” or “success.” It will be exciting to see whether if and how these opportunities for teaching are used in new and effective ways.
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