Delightful Identification & Persuasion: Towards an Analytical and Applied Rhetoric of Digital Games

This document develops a theoretical rhetoric of digital games, arguing that gameplay constitutes a symbolic performance among designer, game, and player in which players are persuaded and come to identify with a game's design. Drawing on Aristotle's rhetorical triad, reframed as designer, game, and player, and on Burke's concept of identification, it proposes that persuasion in games becomes visible in behavioral change: the shift from not playing to playing, and from playing to continuing. The work is conceptual and offered as a draft model, with its empirical details deferred to forthcoming publication.

At the core of the model are three interrelated couplings between designer and player. The systemic coupling concerns an experiential "eigenworld" of reciprocal control, mastery, and empowerment; the symbolic coupling rests on performance loops grounded in Burkean identification; and the structural coupling aligns the game's motivational offers and demands with player expectations. These couplings are operationalized through "link joints" and five functional circles, including sensumotorical synchronisation, self-reference, transferral of meaning, rule competence, and self-appealing offers such as order and closure. Drawing on mental-model theory and the design frameworks of Laurel and Crawford, the author argues that players interpret game systems idiosyncratically, so designers must anticipate diverse experiences rather than a single intended reading.

The paper's applied contribution is its framing of game design as the practical arm of this rhetoric, aimed at "psychagogical" persuasion. The author suggests that layered short-, medium-, and long-term goals, combined with tension between storyline and freedom, produce a sense of free will within bounded options, and proposes building a library of rhetorical game design figures. The scope is deliberately broad, spanning classical rhetoric, game studies, and media psychology, but no empirical data are presented, and testing the proposed model is left to future research.