Procedural Rhetoric in Political Games

In chapter 3 of Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost discusses games that are based around politics, while giving examples of such games. One game he discusses in particular, Bushgame: The Anti-Bush Online Adventure, deals with an adventure featuring pop culture icons to combat the Bush Administration and save the world. While the idea of incorporating statistical information into a satire game appealed to Bogost, he pointed out that despite the content, it still cannot be considered procedural rhetoric. This is probably because the game does not seem to have a way of persuading people towards a certain way of thinking. Instead, it just lists President Bush’s problems in leadership in “pop-up texts and graphs”. A game that I think may have procedural rhetoric is a game based off of another political game, Power Politics and the Doonesbury comic, entitled: The Doonesbury Election Game.
The Doonesbury Election Game is a political game developed in 1995 by the makers of Power Politics and the artist of the Doonesbury comic, Garry Trudeau, where the player is placed in the role of the Campaign Manager for a presidential election campaign (http://pc.ign.com/objects/659/659635.html). A distinguishing feature of this game is that in addition to choosing from a list of real presidential candidates, you can create your own presidential candidate (http://www.listentome.net/games64.php), whereas in other political games, only the first option is available. This feature alone helps to convey the rhetoric where the player is being convinced of a certain ideology where their custom candidate and their ideals are justified over the other candidates. In terms of procedures, the game is very organized and almost self-sufficient. It handles carrying out the daily events on the campaign trail and most of the debate. Together, the game exhibits some procedural rhetoric.

Although the game has been panned by some critics (the last link above and http://www2.worldvillage.com/wv/gamezone/html/reviews/elect.htm ), it is praised for its unique option of creating a candidate that the player feels passionate about enough to campaign for. It also brings some amount of entertainment to those who are interested in politics and almost realistically depicts how a campaign is run, without parodies of other presidents’ administrations found in many other political games. Overall, the dated game effectively persuades people through their own choices and uses a very organized system to do so.