New Media is a field of constant evolution and change. The opportunities for argument creation and advancement shift and flow with the advent of new mediums of media and communication. Modern day mediums constantly advance in vie for their legitimacy. In 2011, the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosted the exhibit The Art of Videogames providing insight to the public of the expressive power intrinsic to the field . Videogames are said to make arguments, and allow unique forms of communication, yet most studies apply dated descriptive processes to this study. As Edwin Black explains in Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method, applying historical models to artifacts indigenous to the times will always forgo and ignore unique rhetorical opportunities …show more content…
Constructing the procedures around an experience, event, or subject allows the exploration of the matter through play by the audience5. Ultimately this leaves three possible areas of argumentation from Procedural Rhetoric: political, educational, and advertisement5. The framing of procedures may be determined to force perspective, allowing an understanding of political ideologies and the experiences that propagate them. It might be used to display how and why certain systems function, in order to provide understanding. And it might also be used to display a certain group, organization, or individual as a positive force. An evaluation of one of these areas, education, will be examined as the model is applied to the artifact of Civilization V.
With the three tenants delineated, and the focus area of education determined, an application of the Procedural Rhetoric model to the communicational artifact is the final step necessary in order to compose an answer to the research question. The artifact, Civilization V, will be viewed through each of the three tenants, in order to see if the tenant is present, and if so, how it functions within the context of the game’s