‘Procedural logics’ are merely ‘procedural rhetorics.’ Ballot solves our offense---rejecting their research.
Alberti ’21 [John; January 28; Professor of English @ Northern Kentucky University; The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom, “Playing Games with Our Lives: What Critical Pedagogy Can Teach Us About the Ethics of Games in the Writing Classroom,” pp. 77-93]
In redefining “serious” games as “persuasive games,” Ian Bogost (2007) places the ethics of gaming front and center and questions the technocratic descriptors that find their way into game studies theory—such as the aforementioned “procedural logics.” Instead, he exposes the seemingly neutrality of “procedural logics” by recasting them as “procedural rhetorics.” As with Gee (2004), Bogost’s (2007) ultimate goals recall Freire (1990): “I argue that videogames’ usefulness comes not from a capacity to transfer social or workplace skills, but rather from their capacity to give consumers and workers a means to critique business, social, and moral principles” (p. x). Yannuzzi and Behrenshausen (2010) likewise see a Freirean potential for understanding the potential of gaming as radical critique
as “sites of fun,” video games present an opportunity for the playful negotiation of their logics. Here exists exploration, reiteration, arbitration, and deprecation as players probe rules, test boundaries. To play video games is to toy with codes, to structurate. (p. 88)
The phrase “to toy with codes” brings in the radical potential of fun and play in gaming theory as forms of ideological critique with what can seem the more austere approach of classical radical pedagogy in ways that recall Bakhtin’s (1984) idea of the “carnivalesque.” In less grand theoretical terms, “sites of fun” describes the anarchic impulse literally at play in our high school learning game. As we learned the “rules” of the stock market game, we simultaneously recognized them as just that: the rules of a game, contingent rather than absolute. In popular terms, this is the strategy of Bart Simpson, the class clown whose “misbehavior,” or refusal to play the game according to the rules, offers a radical challenge to the rules of the “serious game” of formal education. More theoretically, this liminal space defines what Mark Taylor (2001) calls “the edge of chaos,” or “the interplay between order and chaos at work in dissipative structures” (p. 121).