Procedural Ethos: Confirming the Persuasive in Serious Games

Classical Rhetoric In Modern Digital Video Games

Christopher Lasch once observed, “Among the activities through which men (sic) seek release from everyday life, games offer in many ways the purest form of escape” (Lasch, 1977, p. 24). Though commercial-off-the-shelf games for the most part are designed to maximize entertainment and engagement (Van Eck, 2006), they are also superbly suited as an interactive media to make real arguments about everyday life. This seductive potential has attracted instructional designers and game developers for intentional implementation in formal and, increasingly so, informal learning environments where focus is on higher-order thinking skills including decision making, critical thinking, and creativity (Evans, 2010). Bogost (2008), in his work, effectively demonstrates how persuasion can be understood and leveraged in digital games by applying the model of classical rhetoric to games whose “arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models” (p. 125). Bogost employs Aristotelian terminology and concepts for his work (p. 123); and therefore this article, which attempts to complement and extend Bogost’s work to establish a more comprehensive case for modern digital video games as instructional technology, adopts the same model.

Aristotle is the father of classical rhetorical theory, and his Rhetoric is still regarded by most rhetoricians as “the most important single work on persuasion ever written” (Golden et al., 2007, p. 67). “Persuasion,” writes Aristotle, “is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated” (I.i.1354b). And in his Rhetoric, he identifies ethos as what is required in a speaker to make an argument persuasive (I.ii.1356a). Ethos, Aristotle insists, is not mere moral competence, as the term is often employed. In persuasive rhetoric, ethos has three essential components which the speaker (or medium, in our case) must always demonstrate to an audience: phronesis (practical knowledge, demonstrating how the argument is truly based upon fact and that the speaker has a knowledgeable view of the world), arête (integrity, fairness, justice, virtue, demonstrating that the argument is fair and the source trustworthy), and eunoia (goodwill toward the audience, demonstrating that the argument is made with sincerity, disinterest, and a concern for the hearer). It is simply not sufficient for an audience to be moved (pathos), and for an argument to be logical (logos). That effect is often called “empty rhetoric” today. Without ethos, the audience will not be persuaded but rather respond, “That is just your opinion.” We see this as a productive challenge for serious games that attempt to leverage mechanics from the game development industry while producing titles that are educationally sound, underpinning the obligations designers and developers have to not only content, but ethics. By placing this additional requirement that serious games be judged on the degree of procedural ethos, game developers, instructional designers, and learning scientists desiring to advance the field of serious games may have an additional criterion to judge the appropriateness and value of new titles that appear on the market and are the receivers of federal funding and scholarly investigation (Joseph, 2007; Przybylski & Ryan, 2009; Small, 2011). One such title, The Redistricting Game, published by the USC Annenberg Center, deserves the type scrutiny being advocated in this article. As the designers note in regard to the intent of the game (Swain, 2010):