NMSU Game Labs Visit

Nov 13th, 2008
My visits to the games lab at New Mexico State University are always welcome. Because the evaluation of rhetoric is so often considered serious business, it is easy to forget that there is an entire branch of the communicative spectrum that is playful, joking, and capricious, which is also entirely necessary for our collective well-being.

My recent visit tot he NMSU Games Lab provided me with the opportunity to check out some of the games that are available for the Nintendo Wii gaming system. Admittedly, I find most Nintendo games cute, but hardly attention grabbing. I tried about five different games for the Wii, and the one that stood out for me was Raving Rabbids. It is a single-player game in which the main agent is a lunatic rabbit who has to complete a series of mindless tasks. Upon completion of each trial stage, additional stages open up for play. The game is exactly what one might expect. Two stages that stood out were the cow hammer toss and the disco bunny burn up, my names for the stages, by the way. Because the game is completely pointless, meaning it is not contextualized as some great quest, and I could not find a clear objective, it allows the user to play for the sake of playing. There is no pressure to keep playing, as in many other games. When the gamer has had his fill, he simply turns it off and walks away. One might even consider games of this type to posses some cathartic, escapist quality, which could be beneficial to many stressed out people.

If I were to place Raving Rabbids under one of Brian Sutton-Smith's "Seven Rhetorics of Play", it would definitely fit under Play as Frivolity. It does evoke some historical memory of the trickster. The characters are loony rabbits that the gamer has perform a variety of sardonic tasks, some might say sadistic. Additionally, Raving Rabbids is devoid of any "work ethic". It nonsensical nature is what makes it fun. Perhaps the cultural reflection to be found in Raving Rabbids is that its frivolous escapist element is necessitated in the hectic, western world.