The Mechanic Is Not the (Whole) Message: Procedural Rhetoric Meets Framing in Train & Playing History 2

This paper compares two serious games that share a nearly identical procedural rhetoric yet drew sharply different public reactions: Brenda Brathwaite's Train (2009), which received largely critical acclaim, and Playing History 2: Slave Trade (2015), which provoked a public outcry that led developers to remove one of its sections. Its central thesis is that the game's mechanics do not fully determine how its message is received, and that audio-visual framing and the social frames surrounding a game's public circulation play a decisive role in shaping meaning-making. The analysis combines close formal examination of both games with discourse analysis of media coverage and audience responses from news and social media sites.

The study's key finding is that the two games' divergent receptions correlate with how each was presented to the public. Train circulated primarily through a carefully composed photograph of its board placed on a shattered glass window against a black background, a visual choice signaling seriousness and unease, and it was positioned as an art piece for adults, activating an art frame that licenses uncomfortable engagement. Playing History 2, by contrast, circulated largely through a single screenshot of its "Slave Tetris" level in a child-friendly cartoon style, stripped of the critical commentary that appears later in the game, and it was framed as children's entertainment, a frame that clashed with its subject matter.

The paper's scope centers on these two titles and their public reception around their release periods, with the analysis situated within procedural rhetoric theory and frame analysis drawn from Goffman and visual framing research. Its contribution lies in extending procedural rhetoric beyond the game system itself to include the meta-media and meta-discourses through which players encounter a work before and beyond their direct play.