Delightful identification & persuasion: towards an analytical and applied rhetoric of digital games

Why and how do digital games make us play with them? What are their argumentative strategies of make-believe like, shaped as they are by possibilities and necessities? How do games induce constant cooperation and persuade us to play, and keep playing1? Finally, what signifies the relationship between game design(er), gameplay, and player? Let us sidestep typical answers to these questions and interogate the fundamental reason for playing human-computer based games. Game designers Greg Costikyan and Chris Crawford cite learning; Malone and Malone/Lepper mention motivational captivation through aspects of intrinsic motivation such as confidence, control, challenge, fantasy, or curiosity. But perhaps it would be better for us to combine our introductory queries by asking more precisely: What is the empirically approximated and social-, media-, and neuro-psychologically rooted rhetoric of digital games? Granted: comprehensively responding to this last matter would likely take much longer than one essay. But the attempt is worthwhile, and overdue to commence with: when designing digital games requires thinking about digital games, and thinking about these games requires designing–or at least prototyping–them in the first place, a rhetoric of digital games can ultimately serve the purpose of bridging the worlds of creating games (that is, applying such a rhetoric) and thinking about games (that is, analyzing games along such a rhetoric). This paper shall provide a first attempt to offer such an anastomosis. General rhetoric–as the mother of all media theory–has provided specific rhetoricae with this same goal for other forms of symbolic action, strategic communication, and effective expression. Think of the speeches and public performances analysed and described