Week #3 Discussion Questions

The first part of the chapter discusses how first responders respond to catastrophes. Bogost begins by using a hypothetical bioterrorist event at UC Berkeley seen in the game BioChemFX. It really hit home with me when he asked "...whom do they save? the freshmen or the Noble laureates? The homeless or the convenience store clerks?" He went on to talk about Hurricane Katrina. I found how he went about disucssing the project very interesting. While the catastrophic damage occurred in a physical sense, "physical faults" as Bogost call them, but more importantly catastrophic events occurred on the social side of the storm. Bogost says he "no longer needed a hypothetical example of how the perceived value of specific human lives might lead to impasse in a crisis." (p. 67) In my History and Theory of Architecture and Health class, we discussed this same topic. From the standpoint of health and health care, obviously a very different aspect of the storm than Bogost is addressing, the US government, FEMA, local government, etc ultimately failed all, but specifically the poor residents of of New Orleans and other low-lying areas of the gulf coast. It was good to see that in recent events of Hurricane Gustav, many of the issues with refusal to help the poor and unable were fixed by helping them get out of town and out of harms way by evacuating them to other places. After discussing congress' report of Kartrina and the 9/11 commission report, Bogost goes on to say that "the solution to the next Katrina is assumed to be inside the real of current procedure. The government is just using those procedures inneffectively." (p. 69) I think the preparedness and pre-storm plan for Gustav prove just that fact, even though Gustav was not the storm they thought it might be.

Later in the chapter Bogost talks about the U.S. Army's America's Army: Operations game. Given we are at war, and have been for a long time, it made for a unique marketing method. From a gaming aspect, it seemed like it would give the player a fairly realistic experience of what the Army is like, but does have some short comings. The process of gaining skills and rank in a way that mimics its real life counter-part as well as the game's methods of punishing the player for things they do wrong is a form of procedural rhetoric. The game, which was designed to be used as a marketing tool to increase the number of people enlisting in the Army as well as to raise the level of respect by general members of the US, uses the processes of the game (learning rifle/shooting skills, completing specific tasks and missions, rules of behavior, etc) to author the argument that the Army is a good organization worth enlisting in and supporting, changing the opinion of many. The game is an "authorship of rules of behavior." (p. 29)

Finally, Bogost's discussion of political games provided a new side of the political process I had not considered before. Given that we are leading up to a historical election, no matter what what side wins-- it will be historical, the idea that games can simulate the election process is mind boggling to me. I had no idea such games as President Elect or The Doonesbury Election Game: Campaign '96 even existed. I wonder if there are games out about our current election and how they work. When Bogost says "all of the games follow a common procedural rhetoric: elections are won by electioneering, not politics," (p. 91) I have to tend to agree. One example that comes to mind is the pregnancy of conservative VP candidate Sarah Palin's daughter. The liberals are trying to use that as a electioneering negativity that she cant be a good VP because she has a unmarried, 17 year old daughter who is pregnant. Ultimately, that will have nothing to do with her as VP candidate. While I am not saying that she is qualified to be the VP or president and not saying that I am her supporter of her, but this is a recent example of electioneering that many are familiar with.