Can video games teach valuable life skills? At first glance one might just see games as an enjoyable story and just take them at face value. We read books to escape, learn life lessons in fun ways, and to expand our knowledge. What if video games are just another way to do that? Before deployments soldiers participate in a virtual army experience to prepare for what lies ahead. Sitting in a Humvee, surrounded by a 360-degree screen with pneumatic weapons to simulate real gun fire they are put in real world scenarios to test their responses. This identifies areas of weakness and shows the unit what remedial training is necessary to have a favorable outcome on deployment. It is basically laser tag mixed with VR that provides the opportunity for real world lessons so that they can learn in a safe environment. This a bit more obvious than games such as Call of Duty or Animal crossing, but the premise is still the same. Most parents of adolescents and teens see games such as Call of Duty as violent games that have little to nothing to teach. If they listen to these kids playing and speaking with their friends, they'd be amazed to hear how effectively they're learning to work together with their companions to reach an end goal.
Though using written word, images, and movies is how we expect to see rhetoric every day, video games have their own unique way of putting it into the world such as stated by the speaker in The (procedural) rhetoric of games, “Ian Bogost even goes so far as to say that when games make arguments about the world, they do so through processes exclusively.” (The (procedural) rhetoric of games, 5:47). Video games tend to combine all the typical uses of rhetoric along with procedural rhetoric which is a more direct way of getting a message across. In the second half of the video the speaker uses Farcry 2 as an example. He uses the endless violence, easily replaced soldiers, and more to back up the theory that the creators have a very pessimistic view of war.
In Ian Bogost’s interview for his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of video games he goes more in depth on the topic of procedural rhetoric. He explains that procedural rhetoric is the use of code as a rhetoric. Instead of describing the process, they are showing rhetoric with the actual process. We don’t have to read or view an image of how things work when we play games, we make them work. It is a hands-on approach that brings the rhetoric to life. This is why he coined the term, because video games are in a league all their own. As opposed to reading these life skills, we are experiencing them in a safe environment and learning without the real world consequences.
The (procedural) rhetoric of games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLCaTO8sWZE
Military video games
Ian Bogost Interview
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