Christian Shaw: 1696. The 11 year old girl was supposedly possessed by witches. She would shake uncontrollably, her body contorting to impossible angles. Her body was covered in bruises, supposedly inflicted upon he by an invisible witch. She pulled bones, straw, hair, coal, and other weird shit out of her mouth, supposedly put there by, again, an invisible witch. Also supposedly reported: she appeared deaf, blind, or dead for periods of time, her eyes sunk into her head, she could fly. Got it.<\/p>\n
In Ian Bogost\u2019s \u201cHow to Do Things with Videogames,\u201d he claims that the gaming world\u00a0 needs to further develop a genre he calls \u201cprocedural rhetoric\u201d in order to be considered \u201cart.\u201d According to Bogost, procedural rhetoric is a way of expression through a medium which adheres to a set of rules, which the player must follow. Braid, Passage<\/i>, and The Marriage<\/i>, are three proceduralist games, according to Bogost. Proceduralist games, instead of telling a story through narrative, they tell it through relationships between characters. Deviant<\/i>, is a good example of proceduralist rhetoric, but it tells a story through the relationship between the player and the game itself. The player is a curious onlooker of the past, in this case, a mysterious witch trial. The game is the past, leaving ambiguous breadcrumbs of primary, secondary, tertiary, ad infinitum, evidence. Deviant<\/i>, is about you (curious, internet exploring, you) and your relationship with the past \u2014 that is the perspective, and like all art, it attempts to flesh out this perspective and make it compelling, interesting, and unique, while illuminating some kind of idea, or truth.<\/p>\n
However, Deviant\u2019s <\/i>merits stop there, because Donna Leishman has drilled in her own theory of Christian Shaw and the Paisley witches. Shaw bored and naive, accepted some kind of proposition made by the minister and his doctor brother. She\u2019s outlined their motives and she\u2019s outlined the result. Unfortunately, there is no ambiguity, the game only has one destination, and it becomes little more than another theory. It doesn\u2019t arrive at any sort of compelling perspective. However, it does fit Bogost\u2019s criteria for procedural rhetoric, in that it mimics the experience of learning about the past, but the player can only arrive at the creator\u2019s pre-destined result.<\/p>\n
I think it would be much better if the game was more open ended, or even inconclusive.\u00a0 The past becomes so muddled by a) unreliable documentation, and b) cultural interpretation, it becomes almost impossible to make any coherent sense. Despite Deviant\u2019s <\/i>potential, it becomes just more speculation of the events surrounding the Paisley witches \u2014 little more than a confirmation of humanities storytelling tendencies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Christian Shaw: 1696. The 11 year old girl was supposedly possessed by witches. She would shake uncontrollably, her body contorting to impossible angles. Her body was covered in bruises, supposedly inflicted upon he by an invisible witch. She pulled bones, straw, hair, coal, and other weird shit out of her mouth, supposedly put there by, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":209,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_links_to":"","_links_to_type":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-course-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gantercourses.net\/fall13engl214\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gantercourses.net\/fall13engl214\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gantercourses.net\/fall13engl214\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gantercourses.net\/fall13engl214\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gantercourses.net\/fall13engl214\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/gantercourses.net\/fall13engl214\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":370,"href":"http:\/\/gantercourses.net\/fall13engl214\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368\/revisions\/370"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gantercourses.net\/fall13engl214\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gantercourses.net\/fall13engl214\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gantercourses.net\/fall13engl214\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gantercourses.net\/fall13engl214\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}