Toward a Rhetoric of Serious Game Genres

Given the purpose of this collection—to examine trends related to serious games/gaming from a variety of disciplines and place them in dialogue with each other—I begin with the question of what affordances might be gained from using rhetoric to study serious games. At a general level, rhetoric seems like a perfectly suitable set of ideas to bring in for the study of serious games, especially for the kinds of serious games that are specifically designed for persuasive purposes. I use “rhetoric” here to foreground the persuasive and symbolic potentials of discourse, design, and human expression, carried out not only through language but through the construction of material objects and even computational processes, as argued by Bogost (2007). A common working definition of a serious game, as presented by Michael and Chen (2006), for instance, is a game that does not have entertainment as the abstRact