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Procedurality
◦ Procedural rhetoric = rhetoric of a system
◦ The use of unit operations, systems, rules, and procedures to persuade or express.
Visuals
◦ Graphics, editing
Audio
◦ Music, sound effects
Words
◦ Print, spoken

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Games are systems—they are a combination of rules and units—they embody procedural rhetoric.
◦ Games have persuasive qualities, and some games are designed to be persuasive.
What makes procedural rhetoric better/worse/different at persuasion than static or linear forms?

Commercial off-the-shelf games have advertising
• Licensing and Product Placement. This perpetuates a recursive network—deepened relationship with product. Game increases exposure to product, exposure increases game sales.
◦ Licensing – sponsoring producer or representative product within game. Illustrative and associative
◦ Product Placement – placement of product in game. A soda machine, baseball bat, or clothing line. Also, static/linear advertisement in game.

We are focusing on advergames:
An Advergame is a game whose sole purpose is to promote a service, product, or brand. Any game created specifically to host a procedural rhetoric about the claims a company wants to make about its service, products or its brand.

1. Demonstrative – communicate tangibles about the nature of a product
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Demonstrations, simulations, and/or descriptions of product
“Let me show or tell you how it works”
 http://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/customizer/
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Advergames: Use of product in game; descriptions in game.
2. Illustrative – indirect information through presentation of product in social or cultural context
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Object used or referred to in context, but sometimes incidental to gameplay or used in novel way.
“Play hockey using a lifesaver as a puck”
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Advergames: Communicate existence of the product through gameplay
◦ http://crazysquares.com/games.html
3. Associative – indirect; focusing on the context/social and intangibles.
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Lifestyle marketing; associating product with who buyer wants to be.
“Play pool on this cool Jack Daniel’s Pool Table.”
Advergames: Relate product with game/lifestyle
 http://www.happymeal.com

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Not mutually exclusive
◦ Sometimes an ad can be demonstrative, illustrative, and associative.
◦ Rarely is an ad equal parts demonstrative, illustrative and associative.
◦ We look at the focus of the ad—what is its primary means of communicating.

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Demonstrative, Illustrative, Associative?
◦ Slap Chop
◦ Camel Cigarettes
◦ Heineken

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The Coke Zero Game
Get the Glass!

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“Mass media allowed companies to manufacture wants rather than satisfy needs” (Bogost 150).
“Advertisers focus on the procedural rhetoric of the frames themselves— integrating ads into rules of consumers’ perceived cultural station” (Bogost 152).

Advergame:
$10,000 – $400,000
Primetime commercial:
$100,000 – $200,000
30 second spot
30 commercials run during an hour long TV program
Playing food advergames led to children eating more
(Folkvord et al., 2012)
Dorito’s Hotel 626 won 8 awards, and videos on
YouTube of people playing have reached over 1 million hits

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Focus on advergames for this assignment because they (can/should) are based on procedural rhetoric.
They are “persuasive” games. Persuasive games foreground a product, lesson, or ideology.