A Closed World Analysis, or: Procedural Rhetoric

(This entry was written for SNHU's GAM-205 class in the Fall 2017 semester.)

    For this week, I want to talk about 'Procedural Rhetoric' and how it's used in the game A Closed World.

    A Closed World has you playing a young adult of indeterminate gender (the game asks your gender, but it changes a few minor details) who is in a deep relationship with someone else in the village in which they both live. However, the player's beloved becomes tired of the oppressive attitude the other villagers have toward their relationship and goes into the forest. According to the other villagers, it's a place of no return filled with demons and a beast that would destroy the village. Unsurprisingly, your character goes into the forest as well, seeking to find their beloved and reach the other side.

    In the forest, it turns out the demons and the beast are basically symbolic representations of people in the protagonist's life. The demons, luckily, are much less interested in attacking the protagonist by throwing hellfire and slicing them to ribbons. If they did, this game would be even shorter. Instead, when you get into RPG-style fights with them, you and the demon fight via argument by using logic, passion, or ethics in a rock-paper-scissors style to empty the other's composure bar. You also get a self-healing move with infinite uses, and later opponents can temporarily disable one of your attack options.

A Closed Word has an odd battle system, but OFF taught me that words can really hurt.

    A Closed World uses a form of rhetoric known as procedural rhetoric, which is a kind of rhetoric based off of computational processes. Procedural rhetoric functions as a subdivision of procedural authorship, where arguments are made through the creation of rules of behavior and dynamic models. In video games, this is done through the coding that sets up how the game plays. A good example how this works can be seen in the McDonalds Video Game by Molleindustria, a game made to criticize the fast food business model. The game has you focusing on making money by managing four different sections of the McDonalds industry: some fields in a developing country, a slaughterhouse, a McDonalds restaurant, and the McDonalds corporate offices. In order to make enough money to stay in the black, you'll have to engage in some unethical practices, such as tearing down rain forests or bribing the local mayor for more land, putting growth hormones and animal byproducts into the cattle feed, and firing chronically grumpy employees. Doing these sorts of things can get various groups on your case to censure or sue you, but that's why you bribe some experts and do some marketing campaigns to claim "No, really. We love the environment! We would never dismantle a village of indigenous people so we can grow more cow food!" The game as a whole criticizes the fast food industry's current necessity to cross environmental and health-related boundaries in order to meet demand.
    Procedural rhetoric can be a very useful tool for creating powerful arguments when carefully constructed. A Closed World uses its mechanics in order to make an argument on being true to yourself and that no road will be painless. Procedural rhetoric is what allows video games to give messages like other media, yet do so in a way that involves the player.