In the following chapters you will learn about games as a means for instrumental and conceptual thinking, for critically tools for social issues and as a way of mounting critiques. Through the concept of critical play in its many various forms we will focus of one of the ways critical play can manifest itself, namely as procedural rhetoric. This concept of procedural rhetoric is key in this lesson, as it allows us to see games as deliberate expressions or particular perspectives, as interactive models and systems of behaviours. At the end of the lesson we ask you watch a TedEx-video and read a chapter on the subject matter of procedural rhetoric before ending the lesson by writing your own short essay on procedural rhetoric.

In “Videogames of the Oppressed,” game designer Gonzalo Frasca argues that digital games can effectively address “critical thinking, education, and tolerance.” To further this argument, Frasca designed the game September 12th: A Toy World (2001). The game is considered to be a newsgame, which is typically defined as a game with journalistic intent that aims to subvert culture, critique or address real world issues.

Before you continue, watch the video of the gameplay and reflect on the following: What kind of message do you think the game is trying to convey? How is the game doing this? How do we as players experience that? What are your choices as a player in playing the game?

September 12th: A Toy World (YouTube)

September 12th (the day after the World Trade Center attack on 9/11) is designed to make the player experience the core message of the game by playing the game. That is, the content of the game, the rules and the rule interaction we as players have when playing the game (both the affordances and limitations of those rules) are build to let the players experience a new perspective on its sociocultural theme.

It communicates the message as follows: The game is simulating a missile attack on an unnamed Afghan village. At first glance the game resembles first-person shooting games, where the players is positioned in a ‘God’s-eye view of the gameworld, with crosshairs aiming at enemy targets we know so well as gamers. The object of the game is to fire missiles at enemy terrorists while avoid also hitting the civilians. The terrorists constantly move in the game space and the accuracy of the missiles are less than perfect, which inevitably results in collateral damage; hitting civilian buildings and killing more civilians than terrorists. Once this happens, other villagers run over, cry at their losses and mourn their dead, and then, in a rage, morph into terrorists themselves. Following this, the player gets many chances to fire missiles—as many as it takes to effectively eviscerate the entire village—yet every missile launched will kill terrorists, kill civilians, and make more terrorists.

The implication here is that the actions of the player, as the missile launcher, cause people who start out as “neutral civilians” to become violent. For every “terrorist” you kill, several more pop up in his place. This narrative is meant to model the paradox in the American-Middle Eastern conflict: the fact that inevitably, “collateral damage” will occur when generic combat models are used to fight terrorism. Here generic combat models are referring to both the American tactics employed to “combat terrorism” as well as the game mechanisms used in many first-person shooters, where the player’s goal is to kill as many enemies as possible regardless of the casualties. What is different about this game is its goal, which is not so straightforward. You do not “win” this game by eliminating all of the terrorists, as that destroys the village as well as the lives of the innocent bystanders. In fact, you do not “win” this game at all – its object is to show the player that killing terrorists simply creates more terrorists to kill - that violence breeds violence.




Reference

• Frasca, G. (2001). Videogames of the oppressed: Videogames as a means for critical thinking and debate. MA. Thesis, Atlata: Georgia Institute of Technology.