Analysis of Rhetorical Means in Serious Video Games: Case Study of " McDonald's videogame"

Serious games are a kind of video games that employ the potential of entertaining in this new medium in order to fulfill certain functions in the fields of education, training, promotional, ideological and other social interests. These Games manipulate a form of "rhetoric" that exclusively concerned to medium’s technical and communicational requirements.
The aim of this study is providing a critical taught on how cross-function of structural elements of serious games as a kind of media texts create a form of rhetorical means to fulfill the main function of the text. Rhetorical means are emerged “structures” from the companion of elements of video games as media text. In this article, after reviewing the available literature, by combining harmonious methodological and theoretical approaches in media studies – rhetoric and ludology- a method was proposed to analyze rhetoric in computer. Then by using this proposed method, “McDonald's videogame” as a case study was analyzed.
Results showed that in devising McDonald's video game, through combination of aesthetic elements in three layers of the text -signal layer, narrative layer, and procedural layer- a variety of measures are taken to create rhetorical means. Some of these measures are include: Use of some names, logos and acknowledged legal identities in the real and historical world of in the world of the text. Restricting world of the game, presenting some information about historical world and playing with them in the world of the text, induction of some kind of logic and thinking manner about a specific thing that is common between text world and real and historical world.