Proceduralized Ideologies in Video Games and Playable Media

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how video games can be understood as spaces of transformative education, along with the ways that we, as critical scholars of multimodality, might productively situate ourselves in the study of games as a semiotically rich, constantly evolving, and value-laden media form. While recognizing that video games are multimodal artifacts that represent meaning through visual, textual, auditory, and other perceptual elements, this chapter emphasizes the procedural dimension of games—that is, the fact that games are fundamentally composed of, and express meaning through the enactment of processes. These processes include the fundamental rules and rule systems that players engage with, coupled with the meaning potentials that develop at the intersection of game systems, player interaction, and sensory modes of representation—all informed by broader contexts of production, distribution, and reception. Building on this idea of procedurality as a semiotic mode of meaning making, we then discuss the nature of video games as ideologically constructed and contested spaces. Just as in more traditional media forms (books, television, film), perspectives, worldviews, and assumptions can be represented, enacted, and circulated through video games as players engage with their procedural design in a variety of contexts. Bringing these concepts together, we offer the term proceduralized ideologies as a way to describe this phenomenon, drawing from and extending scholarship on critical theory, computational studies, and social semiotics. To illustrate this conceptualization, and to invite further analysis, we explore examples of proceduralized ideologies across a range of video games, game genres, and related cultural artifacts, such as physical board games. Ultimately, we seek to demonstrate how the analysis of proceduralized ideologies can be an important vehicle for doing the work of critical multimodality as interactive digital media technologies become more and more entangled with ideology, representation, power relations, and the material realities of our everyday lives.