week3

Rhetoric
Rhetoric as (Dixon, 1971:p3) says is “the art of speaking well, of using words to their best advantage”. Rhetoric can also be understood as (retrieved from the World Wide Web from the site mentioned below) “a technique of persuasion through the use of oral or written language”. In simple words rhetoric is a tool to persuade people. It can be through speech (written or oral) or various other sorts of non verbal communications.
I will be taking the example of the game Mafia and will apply the concept of rhetoric to it as in: how it was marketed? And what are its values and rhetoric.
In Mafia one plays a character (Tommy) who is a cab driver who joins the mafia in order to save his life from the hands of rival gangs. Then the player has to complete a series of missions which involve stealing cars, shooting people and a host of other crimes. It was marketed as an action/gangster game with serious music in the background and different characters holding weapons appearing, dressed as suave early 19th century gangsters. The representation itself persuades us to believe that the game is one filled with violence crime and gangsters. I find the name itself has an element of rhetoric which tries to persuade us into believing what the game is about.
The objective of this game is to complete a series of missions by accomplishing crimes like murder, bootlegging and destroying things etc. or a player can also take no mission and go around killing people when he likes to. The emphasis of this game is on combat, aggression, crime and general chaos.
The values of this game I think are kill people and commit crime to get ahead and if someone tries to come in the way kill them. When I was playing Mafia and broke a traffic signal I was amused to find that I didn't get arrested in the game rather the police man just gave me a ticket and let me go. It is mentioned in the game that the police is on the payroll of the mafia. I thought that this particular feature indicates a value that killing and getting away with it is not that difficult. I think the rhetoric in this game are that killing and stealing is okay


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Bibliography:
Dixon,P. (1971) RHETORIC
Retrieved from the world wide web on 8 march: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric