This week we explore more about the structure of games and their procedural rhetoric through reading Fullerton’s book and playing games in class. In her book, The Structure of Games, Tracy Fullerton describes about the underlying structure that all games usually have. In her book, she lists all the elements that games usually have which include players, objectives, procedures, rules, resources, conflict, boundaries, and outcome (Fullerton, 32-38). In this blog, I want to focus mostly on players, procedures and rules. What distinguish between games and other forms of media is player. Players are required in games and due to this, users of games are more active compare to users of other media. Procedures and rules are also important because all other elements of games rely on them. Without procedures and rules, the game can’t have a good outcome, game play, and become meaningless in a sense.

We also talk about procedural rhetoric, how rules and procedures can have meanings and lessons behind them. On Tuesday, I was playing Secret Hitler. This game is similar to Werewolf in which deception and persuasion are key to winning the game. Secret Hitler can teach people that persuasive speaking or speech can convince someone to believe something that wasn’t convincing in the first place. It also have some aspect of luck in it, for example, each player will either be a liberal or a fascist and in each turn a player will have to draw 3 cards and choose 2 cards out of the 3 for another player to choose from. Those cards can be either liberal or fascist. In short, a liberal would want to choose a liberal card out of the 2 cards given to him/her, thus it would be unlucky for a liberal player to draw 3 fascist cards. The procedural rhetoric of the games shows that there are aspects that we cannot control. Sometimes, we already know who the Hitler is and know how to win the match, but we simply can’t win due to these unlucky draws. This is also true in our daily life too. We can make wise decisions but essentially these aspects are out of our control.

I guess all of these above allow me to have a better grasp of the structure of games and use that understanding for the solo project. The most important questions to ask are: how do players engage in the games? what are the rules? are they balanced and making sense? Is the procedural rhetoric relevant to certain audience?