contextual studies: ethnics in games

Procedural rhetoric first mentioned by Ian Bogost in his book 'Persuasive gaming'- the term is defined as persuading an audience without them knowing about it; this is used in many games from the 'McDonald game' by 'Molleindustria' to 'Grand Theft Auto 5' to prove a point.

The 'McDonald' game reveals to the player what major companies can do to our environment as well as what they hide from the public to make their business popular.


While  'Grand Theft Auto 5' gets their message across by having the player's character have the need to eat to survive but the only food there is, is from fast food restaurants with the junk food costing less than the healthy food, overall this can lead to a fatter character that cant run as fast and even to the extreme of death. This gives the player a chance to put themselves into an similar but exaggerated american's shoes and understand more than  just telling them directly.

In our contextual studies we were split into groups and design a game mechanic using procedural rhetoric that could be used to explore a political issue:
my group discuss the idea of how the police is perceived by different people including the media as well as how the police deal with situations by the laws that they are given or by there own morals.

an idea for our game was based around a similar concept to the 'SimCity' where the player is a police commissioner who must decide laws and techniques that they use to make a successful and supported police force.
the player would go through the different periods of history starting from the 'Peelers' to the modern day police force, this would allow the player to not only be educated through historical events such a 'jack the ripper' to the miner strike; but the player will learn more about the social side of policing and how different sides of the UK as well as different social classes see's them.
In the game the player will have to respond to a variety of problems with each choice having both a consequence and a reward for example the medias thoughts on how the player handled a situation could give them either a good or bad reputation and as a further consequence the government will not want to give as much money to the force leading to future problems for the player. On the other hand giving the public more leeway might seem nice at the beginning but could end up with the police force looking lazy. the player would have to learn how to balance this to win the game.

Other controversial issues we were interested in covering:

• Gun crime
• Police arms
• Legality of strikes
• Stop and search
• Preventative measures e.g. against football riots
• Discrimination against races
• “dirty” police
• Informants
• Violent and non-violent protests
• Use of force