Procedural Rhetoric: Ideology & The Political Video Game

As Ian Bogost points out in the chapter entitled “Political Processes” in his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, ideology in politics has evolved over time. According to Bogost, “hidden procedural systems that drive social, political, or cultural behavior are often called ideology” (p. 115). From from Antoine Destutt de Tracy’s concept of how we as humans amass the ideal from the real, to Napoleon’s ideologues, in which people utilize abstractions for what is real in politics, to Karl Marx’s belief that ideologies themselves are the material (Bogost, p. 116), we see many different interpretations of ideology. 

Other concepts of ideology, such as Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and Louis Althusser’s process of interpellation, wherein the material subject is created through ideology, led to Michel Foucault’s theory that the real world actually structures ideology through discourse (p. 117).  More recent theorists such as Slavoj Žižek, see this material reality as “distorted”, leading us to become victims of Max Weber’s concept of the iron cage (p. 118). From this, Alain Badiou’s concept of the state of a situation, which can only be changed through an event, is also founded upon subjectivity (p. 118).
 
From these ideological concepts, Bogost posits, “Videogames are particularly useful tools for visualizing the logics that make up a worldview (following Gramsci), the ideological distortions in political situations (following Žižek), or the state of such situations (following Badiou)” (p. 119). Thus, “Political videogames use procedural rhetorics to expose how political structures operate, or how they fail to operate, or how they could or should operate” (p. 119).


The Political Machine, which is an election simulator game, focuses on winning through electioneering and political strategy rather than politics and public policy. The premise is that you create your own candidate, assemble your campaign, choose your policies [not the ideology surrounding the policies, just the policies themselves (e.g. pro-universal health care or anti-immigration, etc.)], gather your staffers and lobby your supporters, attack your opponents, and run your race. The following video, The Political Machine 2008 - Official Trailer, demonstrates how the game is played:

Here, the ideology is that the best electioneering strategy will win the race. Bogost himself said it best: “If election games make any political statement, it is one about the utter divestiture of politics from elections, such that electioneering’s replacement of policy has become ideology” (p. 143).