Extra Lives
The Rhetoric of Tom Bissell’s
“Extra lives: Why Video Games Matter” Tom Bissell’s, a teacher at Portland State University, main idea was to indicate to his audience why video games matter to him by using various argumentative appeals. One must ask themselves, can this author be worthy of respect? Can he give his readers enough facts to get his argument across? Will he try to give us a soft story to buy his way into in his argument? Throughout most of Bissell’s book, he uses the logical appeal by describing, in great detail, Fallout 3. Sadly he lacks the Emotional appeal to complete this argument and he loses my credibility throughout the article. In Bissell’s argument, he cites “Fallout 3 was going to be fucking awesome” (354). Throughout his article he goes in depth about this game and visually takes you through it while you are reading. This strikes the logical appeal by persuading his readers to play Fallout 3 and stating facts about the game. He indicates that this game becomes sort of like a religion, an aspartame form. Bissell describes the game as though it’s the best game in the world that everyone needs to play with the details about the tutorial play, open world play, range of narrative variability, customization within your character, art work poured into the game, and I could go on. The tutorial play is different among other role-playing video games, as Bissell indicated. The player begins as a baby, learning how to walk. While the baby is walking, the player is actually controlling the character. Quickly the character gets older and learns about new abilities, signifying that you learn more as you get older. Bissell promulgate that the open world play, customization within your character, and the range of narrative variability gives the player much freedom. The art work that he describes sounds tremendous which makes you want to play the game even more. In shooting games, you can’t get better art work then skulls exploding into the distinct
“Extra lives: Why Video Games Matter” Tom Bissell’s, a teacher at Portland State University, main idea was to indicate to his audience why video games matter to him by using various argumentative appeals. One must ask themselves, can this author be worthy of respect? Can he give his readers enough facts to get his argument across? Will he try to give us a soft story to buy his way into in his argument? Throughout most of Bissell’s book, he uses the logical appeal by describing, in great detail, Fallout 3. Sadly he lacks the Emotional appeal to complete this argument and he loses my credibility throughout the article. In Bissell’s argument, he cites “Fallout 3 was going to be fucking awesome” (354). Throughout his article he goes in depth about this game and visually takes you through it while you are reading. This strikes the logical appeal by persuading his readers to play Fallout 3 and stating facts about the game. He indicates that this game becomes sort of like a religion, an aspartame form. Bissell describes the game as though it’s the best game in the world that everyone needs to play with the details about the tutorial play, open world play, range of narrative variability, customization within your character, art work poured into the game, and I could go on. The tutorial play is different among other role-playing video games, as Bissell indicated. The player begins as a baby, learning how to walk. While the baby is walking, the player is actually controlling the character. Quickly the character gets older and learns about new abilities, signifying that you learn more as you get older. Bissell promulgate that the open world play, customization within your character, and the range of narrative variability gives the player much freedom. The art work that he describes sounds tremendous which makes you want to play the game even more. In shooting games, you can’t get better art work then skulls exploding into the distinct