Corporeal Capture: The Rhetoric of Boundaries in Procedurality

The paper introduces "corporeal capture," a concept describing how software boundary-drawing localizes relational, socially produced qualities within a single bounded entity, such as a character, a die, or a state. Its central thesis is that computation is never a neutral medium: the object-oriented decisions that define attributes like fairness or ugliness carry ideological assumptions about bodies, genetics, and political authority, and these assumptions operate rhetorically at a foundational level. Drawing on post-structuralist and agential realist theory, the authors argue that such procedural choices naturalize social inequalities by presenting them as inherent properties rather than as products of history and culture.

The analysis centers on two strategy games. In Crusader Kings III, traits such as shyness, disability, or unattractiveness are coded as intrinsic to individual characters, producing mechanical penalties and encouraging selective breeding, which together normalize biased views of the body. The authors further observe that this encoding is difficult to revise: altering what a trait means requires system-level redesign, while altering its consequences requires only data edits, so the rhetorical framing becomes entrenched. In Civilization VI, ownership and "significant causality" make the state or despot the sole author of production, subordinating land, resources, and people to it. Great People, science, and resources are treated as belonging to the player's state body, and civilizations appear as timeless entities whose character flows from innate traits rather than historical process. The paper reports no quantitative data; its evidence is interpretive and based on close readings of game systems.

Taken together, the authors argue that the competitive, state-centered mechanics of these games are naturalized within the strategy genre, allowing the series' public celebration of human ingenuity to coexist with an authoritarian ludic logic. They conclude that rigorous analysis of procedural rhetoric must extend beyond individual game content to the underlying software paradigms, such as object orientation, and the cultural conventions that make such rhetoric possible in the first place.