This immediately transported me to Michelle Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and his descriptions of punishment as public spectacle. Are these games attempting to generate an even greater degree of empathy for the victims? Or are they satisfying some strange curiosity about these events, and feeding our somewhat disturbing appetite for spectacle? Speaking of which…Bogost writes about the spectacularity of JFK’s death in JFK Reloaded. Although these games may create a type of “meaningful engagement with procedurality” (124), I’m still unsure of the purpose of this type of engagement.
So, during one session, a player might escape the World Trade Center, but on another they may be forced to jump to their death. These games require players to embody the roles of victim or assassin subjected to randomly-assigned circumstances. Looking for a form of effective expression and a “desirable possibility space for interpretation” (28), as described early in Bogost’s tome, I was intrigued by the macabre games simulating such events as JFK’s assassination, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and the Waco siege of 1993. Progressing beyond ELIZA and to the games themselves, I found Chapter 4: Digital Democracy, incredibly compelling. I had a few “conversations” with Eliza, and they all left me feeling frustrated and, in some way, inadequate.
Jfk reloaded type games code#
Of course, this type of therapy “logic” aligns well with the way subroutines in code are established, and the façade of language fluency quickly disappeared from this interaction. When Bogost described ELIZA, an early example of Natural Language Processing (I believe “her” program was written in 1973), I opted to try the Eliza Chat bot to get some sense of how these conversations ran on procedures (see image). My session with Eliza quickly revealed why she was/is called a “Rogerian psychotherapist,” as she expressed an unnerving degree of empathy and was constantly reaffirming my feelings by regurgitating phrases I’d previously entered. In addition to drawing these parallels, I attempted to embrace Bogost’s thesis of persuasion as accomplished through procedurality.
The Eliza Chat bot: a disappointing therapy session