Henry Edelman
Dr. Pruchnic
Project Two: Rhetorical Analysis
Rough Draft
March 19th, 2012
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter A Rhetorical Analysis
William Shakespeare’s plays are commonly argued to be some of the most beautiful forms of art
expression in the English language. Countless art mediums have been influenced and based off
of his great stories of comedy, romance, and tragedy. According to Tom Bissell, a writer and
self-proclaimed video game player and aficionado, other art forms such as dance, sculpture, and
poetry are nowhere near as profitable and as widely seen by the masses as the art form known as
the video game. This statement does have some truth behind it. For example, after only six
weeks from the release date of “Call of Duty: Black Ops,” Activision reported that they had
earned $1 Billion in sales. While video games may not be viewed as an art form by some, they
have all the attributes that a wonderful piece of art contains. As the player battles through the
throngs of enemies being pitted against them or through the engaging story line, video games
invoke as much passion from the player as an excellent movie, piece of music, or writing does to
those who experience them. However, one may deduce that videogames are not as timeless as
other art forms or for that matter the writings of Shakespeare. Grand Theft Auto can only be
played for so long before guns, automobiles, and vices begin to eat away at the psyche to an ad
nauseam degree. In the three years before Tom Bissell wrote the book Extra Lives: Why Video
Games Matter in 2010, he spent most of his time playing video games. During this time, Bissell
began writing notes about the video games he was playing while simultaneously summarizing
the video game as an art form and unknowingly writing the basis for his book. Extra Lives:
Why Video Games Matter contains nine chapters and is written in an almost autobiographical
way as Tom Bissell shares with the reader his vast experiences with videogames, his own
Henry Edelman
Dr. Pruchnic
Project Two: Rhetorical Analysis
Rough Draft
March 19th, 2012
critiques and analyses, and interviews with people from all over the video game industry. In this
essay I attempt to deduce the three artistic proofs of persuasion, ethos, pathos, and logos in order
to provide a rhetorical analysis of Bissell’s writing.
Ethos or the ethical appeal is the credibility of the author and their character. Tom Bissell, born
in 1974 and raised in Escanaba Michigan, is a journalist, critic, and fiction writer. Bissell is
currently an assistant professor at Portland State University since 2009. He studied English at
Michigan State University and at 22, then went to Uzbekistan to volunteer in the Peace Corps
teaching English and was there for seven months. He then returned to New York City to work as
a book editor. He has written five books, among them Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter
was the last published in 2010. Furthermore, he was elected a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010 for
creative arts in general nonfiction, and is the recipient of the Rome Prize, and the Community
College Alumnus of the Year Award. Ostensibly, Bissell is a well educated and learned traveler
and writer and it shows in this book. For example, he talks of his highly coveted literary
fellowship in Rome and on the other end of the spectrum of how he was allowed to sit in on the
then classified intelligence meetings while embedded with the Marine Corps in Iraq. Or how
between 2001 and 2006 during which he wrote several books and published more than fifty
pieces of magazine journalism and criticism with approximately a total output of forty five
hundred manuscript pages is impressive. He writes with an effervescent flow and witty satirical
eloquent style. Bissell is very articulate and it shows in the way his writing and complex
verbiage is chosen. The tone of the writing is informal and the audience is subject to humor,
analogies, and Bissell’s analysis of video games. Bissell in the author’s note admits that this
book is somewhat “eccentric” and at times very “personal.” Bissell writes on page, “As for
Henry Edelman
Dr. Pruchnic
Project Two: Rhetorical Analysis
Rough Draft
March 19th, 2012
video games, very few people over the age of forty would recognize them as even a lower form
of art. I am always wavering as to where I would locate video games along art’s fairly forgiving
sliding scale. Video games are obviously and manifestly a form of popular art, and every form
of art, popular or otherwise, has its ghettos, from the crack houses along Michael Bay Avenue to
the tubercular prostitutes coughing at the corner of Steele and Patterson. The video game is the
youngest and, increasingly, the most dominant popular art form of our time. To study the origins
of any popular new medium is to become an archeologist of skeptical opprobrium. It seems to
me that anyone passionate about video games has better things to do than walk chin-first into
sucker punch arguments about whether they qualify as art. Those who do not believe video
games are or ever will be art deserve nothing more goading or indulgent than a smile.” I feel this
quote represents all the rhetorical techniques presented by the book as a whole. Tom Bissell is
witty, articulate, and humorous as well as analyzes the subject of videos games as an art form
using rhetorical techniques in order to convince the audience of his views.
Pathos or the emotional appeal is used to persuade and invoke an emotional response from the
audience. Bissell’s passion for videogames transcends an average person’s appeal for them. In
fact, for three years Bissell was addicted to cocaine and even compared its addictive nature to
video games. His passion for video games is always present to the reader and one cannot help
but enjoy this persuasion. For example as he describes with great detail a gory scene in the video
game Fallout 3 on page 8, “…as I turned to bash in the brainpan of a radioactive ghoul, noticed
the playful, lifelike way in which the high-noon sunlight streaked along the grain of my
sledgehammer’s wooden handle. During such moments, it is hard not to be startled-even movedby the care poured into the game’s smallest atmospheric details.” It is with this attention to
Henry Edelman
Dr. Pruchnic
Project Two: Rhetorical Analysis
Rough Draft
March 19th, 2012
detail that Bissell distinguishes himself from the average gamer. Bissell’s passion for video
games was further verified in his description of his emotions experienced while playing the video
game Left 4 Dead, in which a group of four survivors encounters the endless onslaught of
ravenous zombies. Bissell described his experience as emotions more intensely vivid than any
he had ever felt while reading a novel or watching a film or listening to a piece of music. This is
a very profound statement and represents a key theme of the book; the comparison between
video games and other art mediums. On page 38, Bissell puts to rest any argument between
games and other art forms. “When I am being entertained, I am also being manipulated. I am
allowing myself to be manipulated. I am, in other words, surrendering. When I watch
television, one of our less exalted forms of popular entertainment, I am surrendering to the
inevitability of commercials amid bite-sized narrative blocks. When I watch a film, the most
imperial form of popular entertainment-particularly when experienced in a proper movie theaterI am surrendering most humiliatingly, for the film begins at a time I cannot control, has nothing
to sell me that I have not already purchased, and goes on whether or not I happen to be in my
seat. When I read a novel I am not only surrendering; I am allowing my mind to be occupied by
a colonizer of uncertain intent. Entertainment takes it as a given that I cannot affect it other than
in brutish, exterior ways: turning it off, leaving the theater, pausing the disc, stuffing in a
bookmark, underlining a phrase. But for those television programs, films, and novels febrile
with self-consciousness, entertainment pretends it is unaware of me, and I allow it to. Playing
video games is not quite like this. The surrender is always partial. You get control and are
controlled. Games are patently aware of you and have a physical dimension unlike any other
form of popular entertainment. … Even though you may be granted lunar influence over a
Henry Edelman
Dr. Pruchnic
Project Two: Rhetorical Analysis
Rough Draft
March 19th, 2012
game’s narrative tides, the fact that there is any narrative at all reminds you that a presiding
intelligence exists within the game along with you, and it is this sensation that invites the
otherwise unworkable comparisons between games and other forms of narrative art.” Put
another way by the game designer Jesse Schell, if you compare games to “linear entertainment”
experiences such as novels and movies, while linear experiences involve technology, a story, and
art they do not involve motion, and motion makes a video game a video game. Bissell also
argues that story and game combine to create an experience. He states that the game is not the
experience, the game enables the experience. Compared to movies, movies offer a more specific
and predetermined type of storytelling. In comparison, games have you deciding how to tell the
story because you point the character. As Bissell humorously puts it, there are not many
mediums where you can “ring up Dantes and Homers and talk to them,” and with video games
you can. Furthermore, early film and literature offered experimental surrealistic fantasy, but
early video games depended on rudimentary technology that made realism impossible. Films in
the 1920s were often in response to other films before them. For video games, newer games
provided you with everything employed in older games, however the newer games were larger,
and technologically and graphically much more proficient. Technology literally means
“knowledge of a skill” and is greatly required in modern game design. As Bissell states, “An
average game today is likely to have as much writing as it does sculpture, as much probability
analysis as it does resource management, as much architecture as it does music, as much physics
as it does cinematography.”
Logos, or the appeal to logic, persuades an audience by the use of logic or reason. Bissell uses
logos throughout the book to further explain his theories and analyses of video games and many
Henry Edelman
Dr. Pruchnic
Project Two: Rhetorical Analysis
Rough Draft
March 19th, 2012
analogies to help convey his ideas. For example on page 41 Bissell states, “The impulse to
explain is the Achilles’ heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every
genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection.” In this quote,
Bissell uses the rhetoric of analogies, in this case the “Achilles’ heel,” in order to prove his point
to his audience. Bissell’s point being that the weak point of genre work is that intellection
exposes larger problems that vague works do not contain. Another example of logos is how he
compares the moral dilemmas in the dystopian world of the video game Bioshock to Ayn Rand’s
Objectivism or how he compares the American novelist and literary critic John Gardner’s views
of fiction, a “vivid and continuous dream,” to the fiction presented in video games. Or even
through the comparison of two seemingly unidentifiable relationships, the video game industry
to the automobile industry. Bissell claims that both were the “unintended result of technological
breakthroughs, both made a product with unforeseen military applications, and both have been
viewed as a public safety hazard.” Bissell also uses many definitional arguments, such as the
fictional “present” versus the “ludonarrative” in games. The “present” narrative is shown by cut
scenes or cinematic elements which take away the control from the gamer by making them just
sit and wait as the scene unfolds. The other form, “ludonarrative” is not scripted and is
determined by the gamer. Bissell also brings to light a very profound fact found through study
by the Electronic Entertainment Design and Research. The EEDAR tracks industry trends, and
they found that “people like playing as people”, and they like “playing as people that almost
precisely resemble themselves.” Through all of the above logos using advanced elocution,
analogies, and interesting arguments, Bissell provides the reader with a compelling and
persuasive rhetorical technique.
Henry Edelman
Dr. Pruchnic
Project Two: Rhetorical Analysis
Rough Draft
March 19th, 2012
In conclusion, through the use of the rhetorical aesthetic appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos,
Tom Bissell effectively summarizes the video game as an art form. By the end of the book, one
cannot help but notice Bissell’s extremely competent writing, satirical wit, and compelling
arguments as if they were along for a journey. To use the allegory of video games, it was as if
the reader almost had completed a video game, and Bissell was the setting and driving
protagonist. Bissell’s candid and at times unique views of video games and life in general
allowed the reader to connect with him as one would connect with any involving piece of art.
One may consider that the Aristotelian rhetoric employed by Bissell to persuade the reader of the
claim of video games as an art form was absent in the earliest forms of video games. Video
games are one of the youngest forms of art expression available today and even though there has
been decades for game designers to perfect this form, video games will continue to grow and
progress into the ever-changing future. The fundamental questions posed by Aristotle came to
the video game through the evolution of the genre.
Works Cited
Bissell, Tom. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. New York: Vintage, 2011. Print.