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Two Examples
The challenge of recognizing cultural rhetoric is that ideologies often pass unnoticed in our own actions and behaviors. Luckily, because of their intrinsically playful and artificial nature, games present particularly ripe contexts for highlighting the operation of cultural rhetoric at work. Following are two detailed examples to help us better understand how games can embody rhetoric through design.
The Landlord's Game
The Landlord's Game, designed by Lizzie Magie in 1904, is the precursor to the popular contemporary board game Monopoly, and was designed with very clear rhetorical intentions in mind. The Landlord's Game was created as a fun-filled vehicle for teaching the evils of land monopoly. Magie was a young Quaker woman living in Virginia, and an ardent follower of economist Henry George. George was the originator of the single tax movement, which held that the economic rent of land and the unearned increase in land values profited a few individuals rather than the majority of the people, whose very existence produced the land values. He therefore advocated a single tax on land alone to meet all the costs of government, a policy that would erode the power of monopolies to suppress competition, and therefore equalize opportunity.[7] Magie designed The Landlord's Game for educational play: as a way to explain George's political theories in terms that the average citizen could understand.
In the decades that followed the release of The Landlord's Game, Parker Brothers released a series of titles that were clearly derivative, including Easy Money and, of course, Monopoly. The formal structures of the games bear a striking resemblance. Magie's game board included rental properties such as "Poverty Place" (land rent $50), "Easy Street" (land rent $100) and "Lord Blueblood's Estate" ("no trespassing: go to jail"); there are banks, a poorhouse, and railroads and utilities such as the "Soakum Lighting System"($50 fine) and the "PDQ Railroad" (fare $100); there is also, of course, the well-known "Jail" space. Unlike Monopoly, however, properties in The Landlord's Game were for rent only, and could not be purchased and released.
Despite the strong similarity between The Landlord's Game and Monopoly, there are distinct (and wonderfully incongruous) differences in the rhetorics each evokes. While the play rhetorics of progress and power apply to both games, The Landlord's Game was distinctly anti-capitalist in its conception. The game's conflict was not premised on property acquisition and the accumulation of monopolies, but instead on an unraveling of the prevailing land system. Because properties in the game could only be rented, there was no opportunity for domination by a greedy land baron or developer. Monopoly, on the other hand, championed the rise of the land baron and the art of speculation. Players were encouraged to exploit the financial weaknesses of other players to become the wealthiest monopolist, a conception of power in direct opposition to that explored within Magie's original design.
This difference in ideology is clearly evident in the way each game describes itself. The rules for Lizzie Magie's game read:
The object of this game is not only to afford amusement to players, but to illustrate to them how, under the present or prevailing system to land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprisers, and also how the single tax would discourage speculation.
The introduction to Parker Brothers' Monopoly reads:
The idea of the game is to buy and rent or sell property so profitably that one becomes the wealthiest player and eventually monopolist…. The game is one of shrewd and amusing trading and excitement.
The Landlord'sGame
As the direct progenitor of Monopoly, it is ironic that Magie's game became a parody of exactly what it intended to critique. What began as an earnest attempt to educate the masses about the ills of land monopoly was transformed by Parker Brothers into a rhetorical tool for capitalism itself. Thus, although the two games share many formal elements, their designs embody radically different ideologies. These cultural rhetorics are expressed through the language of the written rules, naming conventions of game properties, and the rules and victory conditions. Through the experience of their play and the distribution of the games in culture, their opposing rhetorics were propagated in competition with each other. (For better or worse, we know who won that game!)
Vampire: The Masquerade
Vampire: The Masquerade illustrates another instance of game design and cultural rhetoric. Unlike The Landlord's Game, Vampire: The Masquerade was not designed with political, pedagogical intentions. Nevertheless, cultural rhetoric was an important part of the thinking behind the game.
The design of Vampire: The Masquerade draws directly on existing subcultures to create meaningful play. As opposed to the swords-and-sorcery or science fiction narratives of most popular role-playing games, Vampire: The Masquerade is designed to appeal to a Goth sensibility. Its vampiric political storylines resemble Anne Rice novels, and game play emphasizes atmosphere and mood rather than combat. Compared to the typical role-playing game, its rules are approachably minimal. As a result of these features, when the game was first introduced it found an audience not merely among existing gamers, but among people who had never role-played before.[8] Players of the game, in many cases already immersed in the Goth subculture, brought their own systems of meaning to the game as they entered the space of play. At the same time, the game itself became a way to propagate Goth subculture and extend it to an audience of game players that might not normally have an affinity for black clothing, heavy eyeliner, and the occult. Cultural rhetorics entered into the game from the outside > in, even as the game itself became a bastion of Goth/gamer culture, extending its hybrid rhetorics from the inside > out.
Vampire: The Masquerade exhibits the cultural rhetoric of play as identity: the play of the game separates its players from the rest of society, creating a space that catalyzes their unique sense of community identity. The game embodies other cultural rhetorics as well, such as the alter-ego role-playing that implicitly advocates play as the imaginary—or even play as frivolous, since the underground, subcultural status of Goth celebrates a visible opposition to more dominant cultures and styles. Although Vampire: The Masquerade was in part a product of an existing ideology and culture, it is important to note that the designers of the game recognized the untapped Goth gaming audience by designing the game to directly incorporate the subculture. The simplicity of the formal system made the game inviting to novice gamers, while the overall design encouraged role-playing, storytelling, and knowledge of vampire lore over strategic deployment of rules. This design approach effectively allowed the already existing attitudes and ideologies of players to shine through and contribute to the play and culture of the game.
The success of Vampire: The Masquerade has changed the culture of gaming. Admittedly, there was already some overlap between role-playing subcultures and Goth subcultures, but Vampire: The Masquerade managed to mix these two audiences in the context of actual game play. The game made role-playing "cool" (at least in some circles), highlighting the fact that cultural rhetorics themselves are often a form of currency in culture at large. The transition from geek to Goth stretched the frame of role-playing across the space of the hip and cool, broadening the game genre's reach and establishing a new approach to role-playing game design.
In each of the two examples—The Landlord's Game and Vampire: The Masquerade—games act as social contexts that allow exploration of certain values and attitudes. Furthermore, in both cases the cultural rhetoric of the game was something consciously incorporated by the designers. There is a long-standing lament among digital game designers that the general public does not consider games an important form of media culture. One answer to this complaint is that game designers need to be more rigorous in how they conceive of their games as culture. Recognizing that all games contain and endorse particular cultural rhetorics is a good first step. But if we want to stretch people's conceptions of games into spaces beyond gaming subcultures, into spaces occupied by art, literature and film—or politics, punk rock, and the academy—then designers need to be much smarter in how they incorporate cultural rhetorics in the actual design of their games.
[7]Burton H. Wolfe, "The Monopolization of Monopoly: The Story of Lizzie Magie," The San Francisco Bay Guardian, 1976.
[8]Greg Costikyan, RE:PLAY: Game Design + Game Culture. Online conference, <2000.www.eyebeam.org.replay>.
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