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Procedural rhetoric: History and Key Facts

Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes.

By the Pop Culture Files editorial team••2 min read•✓ Fact-checked
A fresco by Cesare Maccari (1840-1919) depicting Roman senator Cicero (106-43 BCE) denouncing Catiline's conspiracy to overthrow the Republic in the Roman senate. (Palazzo Madama, Rome).
Cesare Maccari · Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

Bogost argues that games make strong claims about how the world works by the processes they embody. Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology.

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Text excerpted from Procedural rhetoric by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.

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