Article

Games and Culture

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ª The Author(s) 2014
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Beyond Persuasion: DOI: 10.1177/1555412014565642
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First Strike and the

Compulsion to Repeat

Calum Matheson1

Abstract
Over the past several years, video game studies have benefited from attention to
important tools in the discipline of rhetoric. Most notably, Ian Bogost has introduced
the concept of procedural rhetoric. Although Bogost defined rhetoric primarily as
persuasion, there is no such definitional harmony among rhetoricians. In this article, I
explore possibilities for a rhetorical understanding of video games beyond persua-
sion. The 2014 iOS and Android game First Strike is an example of the repetition
compulsion as a means of compensating for the perceived traumatic Real. In
examining this game, I hope to show that the intersection of psychoanalysis and
rhetoric allows a productive account of simulation and suggests a way forward
beyond the impasse of contingency and structure, attending the formal aspects of
trope that make certain procedures durable sites of affective investment and
enjoyment.

Keywords
video games, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, simulation, nuclear war

1
The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Corresponding Author:
Calum Matheson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB# 3285, 115 Bingham Hall, University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
Email: calum@live.unc.edu
2 Games and Culture

Cynthia Haynes (2006, p. 91) wrote that ‘‘the study of games in academic con-
texts . . . must be augmented by rhetorical criticism.’’ Over the past several years,
video game studies have benefited from attention to critical tools in the discipline
of rhetoric. Perhaps most notably, Ian Bogost has introduced the concept of proce-
dural rhetoric, which encourages critics to analyze the persuasive aspects of rules
and procedures beyond the familiar framework of ludological and narratological
approaches (Bogost, 2006a, 2007). But while Bogost gives pride of place to an Aris-
totelian understanding of rhetoric as essentially defined by persuasion, there is no
such definitional harmony among rhetoricians. Indeed, as Pat Gehrke (2009) wrote,
the discipline has encountered difficulty even establishing central precepts, and ‘‘the
desire for definition has been constant and insatiable’’ (p. 151). In this article, I
explore the possibilities for a rhetorical criticism of video games that moves beyond
an understanding of rhetoric as persuasion. Specifically, I ask how a Lacanian under-
standing of rhetoric as the ‘‘science’’ of the formal qualities of language in trope
might help us understand the cultural work done by some video games. Among
many competing approaches, the intersection of psychoanalysis and rhetoric is par-
ticularly interesting because it allows for an exploration that avoids both the
excesses of structuralism that Bogost identifies in Lacan and the limitations of rheto-
ric posed as a question of persuasion without an account of the affective economy
that makes some tropes loci of investment and others not. I will focus on the
2014 Blindflug Studios game First Strike as an example of the repetition compulsion
as a means of compensating for the perceived traumatic Real of nuclear warfare. In
examining this game, I hope to show that the intersection of psychoanalysis and
rhetoric allows a productive account of simulation more generally and suggests a
way forward beyond the impasse of contingency and structure.

Procedural Rhetoric
Ian Bogost (2007, p. 3) defined procedural rhetoric as ‘‘the practice of persuading
through processes in general and computational processes in particular . . . a tech-
nique for making arguments with computational systems and for unpacking compu-
tational arguments others have created.’’ This vocabulary is consistent with Bogost’s
(2006a) call to avoid an ‘‘isolationist’’ trend in video game studies by incorporating
traditions from the broader field of the humanities (p. 45). But whereas oral rhetoric
attempts to persuade an audience to adopt a particular viewpoint through speech and
written rhetoric does the same through writing, procedural rhetoric has its own
unique goals and characteristics suited to the medium of video games. Video games
create a digital process that simulates a real-world process, allowing the player to
model something extant in the world of flesh, blood, steel, and glass that exists out-
side the game. Procedural rhetoric is the persuasive aspect of simulation.
A game makes claims about the system that it simulates by simulating it in a par-
ticular fashion. As a nuclear war simulator, First Strike allows the player to plan and
execute a missile strike as one of the world’s superpowers (Blindflug Studios, 2014).
Matheson 3

Every successful nuclear attack obliterates a large region of the Earth, and if a major
city is destroyed, casualties in the tens of millions will be displayed on-screen. Auto-
mated antimissile systems frequently fail. In a large-scale attack, it is possible for a
player to destroy some of his or her own territory. All of these aspects of a simulated
nuclear war make arguments about the ‘‘real thing:’’ Nuclear conflict is indiscrimi-
nate, hideously destructive, and dangerous for all sides.
Bogost (2007, p. 3) argued that rhetoric is defined by persuasion: It refers to ‘‘effec-
tive and persuasive expression,’’ as indicated by the title Persuasive Games. He traced
an intellectual genealogy back to Plato and Aristotle, citing the latter’s famous defini-
tion of rhetoric as ‘‘the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of
persuasion’’ (2007, p. 18). This understanding of rhetoric allows for strong claims
about the purpose of simulation—linked in the same passages cited here to Aristotle’s
concept of a final cause—as a potential commentary on the simulated system, and
therefore as a means of persuading players to understand the world differently. Bogost
(2007) wrote eloquently about the implications of procedural rhetoric and the persua-
sive claims that games might make through simulation rather than narrative:

We must recognize the persuasive and expressive power of procedurality. Processes

influence us. They seed changes in our attitudes, which in turn, and over time, change
our culture. As players of videogames . . . we should recognize procedural rhetoric as a
new way to interrogate our world, to comment on it, to disrupt and challenge it . . . the
logics that drive our games make claims about who we are, how our world functions,
and what we want it to become. (p. 340)

Bogost does this to good effect with games such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
and The McDonalds Videogame.
Others have introduced more vocabulary and concepts into procedural rhetoric
(e.g., Harper, 2011) and nothing about the concept inherently precludes more expan-
sive interpretations of rhetoric, but the focus on persuasion still remains largely
unchallenged. Although Bogost clearly defined rhetoric as persuasion, his concep-
tion of rhetoric did move past Aristotle. For example, he saw Kenneth Burke as
an early foundation for the expansion of rhetoric into nonverbal domains, although
he still accentuated the connections between Burke’s notion of identification and
rhetoric as persuasion, arguing that Burke’s innovation is to globalize persuasion
in particular, not just a literary understanding of nonverbal texts (Bogost, 2007, p.
21). The work of this article is to expand the focus on persuasion to include an
account of rhetoric that might help to explain the prerequisites necessary for persua-
sion to function, the conditions of possibility for persuasive expressions. Persuasion
is important, and given its sway over the history of rhetoric, it would be wrong to
discount it. Instead, a conception of rhetoric as a tool in game studies should seek
to explain both the persuasive operations of game procedure and the structural
aspects of language that create the conditions necessary for persuasion to function
as it does in a particular case. Procedural rhetoric does not preclude concepts of
4 Games and Culture

rhetoric that extend beyond persuasion—several paths are opened, but one of them is
perhaps more heavily trod than others. The point here is to build on Bogost’s foun-
dation to develop a theory of the interaction between particular acts of persuasion
(contingency) and the conditions that make them possible (structure) and therefore
extend the analysis of persuasive games.
What opportunities might be missed in video game criticism by confining rheto-
ric to persuasion? A vision of rhetoric as persuasion exercised within a specific con-
text ultimately describes operations in what Jacques Lacan called the Imaginary
order (Lundberg, 2012). Criticism in this vein focuses on the content of specific
rhetorical expressions and effects at the cost of a more fundamental explanation
of the underlying logic of the Symbolic which makes specific rhetorical expressions
meaningful in the first place. In Lundberg’s (2012, p. 184) words, ‘‘fetishizing per-
suasion as the primary means of rhetoric’s effectivity draws rhetoric’s attention
away from the functions of trope and investment that constitute the subject and its
discourses.’’. It is as if, given an equation with a variable X, we focus all of our atten-
tion debating over what value we should assign to the variable at the expense of
examining the equation itself. Persuasion is enabled by an economy of affect that
provides the resources and structure for meaning to be expressed in any given act.
Signification must confront its limit in the Real, and thus must inevitably fail
sometimes. The Lacanian Real is—perhaps fittingly—a slippery and opaque con-
cept with a wide range of interpretations. Its least common denominator is that there
is a mind-independent world that language fails to capture and that it is made appar-
ent in our failures to signify it. As Lacan (2013, p. 61) puts it, the Real ‘‘is the dif-
ference between what works and what doesn’t work. What works is the world. The
real is what doesn’t work,’’ or in other words, what fails to be assimilated into lan-
guage. What is significant here is not that the nonhuman world exists, but that it can
escape assimilation into the Symbolic order, revealing that the social world is not a
unified and accurate representation of all that is or might be.
The social world that we construct is thus a failed unicity, a fantasy of order that
can never be complete. The place of rhetoric in the face of such failure is partly to
feign unicity, to attempt to suture the trauma of the Real’s intrusion so that the Sym-
bolic order might continue as we imagine it (Lundberg, 2012, pp. 2–3). These
sutures are tropes that become durable due to our repeated investment in them. This
dynamic is the repetition compulsion. Confronted with what is believed to be beyond
mediation, we compulsively attempt to signify anyway. This rhetorical process helps
us feign the unicity of both our social world and ourselves as subjects. The specific
objects of rhetoric that we examine—in this case, game designers, game procedures,
and their audience—are meaningful only within a larger economy of metonymy
(proliferating meaning) and metaphor (condensing meaning), connections held
together by our repeated investments in them. The Symbolic is the ‘‘context for the
context,’’ the formal connections that are the condition of possibility for the specific
instantiations of the Imaginary (Lundberg, 2012, p. 39). One task for rhetorical crit-
icism therefore ought to be an investigation of the iterated investments that feign
Matheson 5

unicity in the face of the disruptive Real, making possible the specific instantiations
of these tropes as persuasive elements in the Imaginary. This should supplement,
rather than replace the important question of persuasion in a given object of study.
Just as a good theater critic would pay attention to the script, background, and inter-
textual connections of a play rather than just the success of a particular performance
of it, rhetorical critics should look beyond persuasive artifacts to the organizing con-
ditions that make them meaningful. The advantage of this mission for rhetoric is par-
ticularly apparent when we encounter seeming contradictions between the
procedures of a video game, its stated purposes, and the ‘‘rhetorical situation’’ of its
context (Bitzer, 1968). To explore this idea more fully, I will discuss the role of repe-
tition, enjoyment, and political activism in First Strike.

First Strike
Modern war simulations have a long history, dating back at least to the Prussian
Kriegsspiel of the 19th century (Allen, 1987, p. 19). During the Cold War, the
RAND Corporation and others adapted classic war games to the radically new con-
ditions of strategic nuclear warfare (Abella, 2008, p. 35) and large-scale simulations
of this kind continue in the American military establishment today (Raatz, 2013).1
These simulations are themselves models used to develop and test the American
nuclear war plan, once called the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) and now
named OPLAN. RAND won a contract in the 1980s for a fully computerized simu-
lation that would test SIOP against the Red Strategic Offensive Plan (RSIOP),2 a
hypothetical nuclear strategy for the Soviet Union. In this game, ‘‘Sam’’ lost to
‘‘Ivan’’ with disturbing frequency, although the values assigned for various compo-
nents of in the game were mostly hypothetical (Allen, 1987, pp. 329–332). Indeed,
nuclear simulations have always been largely guesswork because there is little
empirical basis for predictions about the outbreak, conduct, or aftermath of a nuclear
war. In a heated 1960s discussion of nuclear strategy, one civilian shouted at an Air
Force officer ‘‘General, I have fought as many nuclear wars as you have’’ (Abella,
2008, p. 138). This outburst finds a strange echo decades later in Jacques Derrida’s
(1984) claim that nuclear war is ‘‘fabulously textual,’’ an event extant only in lan-
guage because its real occurrence would destroy the archive of civilization itself
(p. 23). Despite this lack of empirical grounding, nuclear war simulations have been
repeated again and again over the decades while nuclear doctrine has remained fun-
damentally the same (McKinzie, Cochran, Norris, & Arkin, 2001, pp. ix–xi).
Alongside these simulations designed to hone America’s nuclear warfighting
skills, others were developed to build resistance to aggressive nuclear war plans.
Balance of Power was described by its creator Chris Crawford in the early 1980s
as ‘‘a grand, idealistic, make-my-contribution-for-peace crusade,’’ intended to show
the irrationality and danger of nuclear war (Aaron, 1985, p. 2). Players who started a
nuclear war were shown only a black screen admonishing them, refusing to display
images of nuclear war, and stating ‘‘we don’t reward failure’’ (Aaron, 1985). After the
6 Games and Culture

Cold War ended, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) created its own
simulation of nuclear targeting. Despite the demise of the Soviet Union, SIOP remains
a closely guarded secret. NRDC hoped to create a rough picture of current U.S. nuclear
war plans based on the theory that exposing the ‘‘grotesque results’’ of nuclear war
would turn the public against it (McKinzie et al., 2001, p. xi). Lack of access to the
tools of simulation undermines democratic debate, which the NRDC simulation set
out to change (McKinzie et al., 2001, p. 1). The assumption shared by both Crawford
and the NRDC is that nuclear war plans survive only due to secrecy and therefore that
exposing the way things ‘‘really are’’ is an effective project for antinuclear politics.
First Strike espouses a similar view. The game itself is deceptively simple. Play-
ers are given control over one or several territories on a pristine globe where they can
research, build weapons, defend, or attack, but may only take one action at a time.
There are no limitations on the player’s choices regarding money, personnel, or raw
materials—only time. Gameplay involves research, defense, and offensive nuclear
attacks. There is no peaceful resolution or element of diplomacy, despite some early
misleading third-party statements (Lund, 2014). Victory occurs when one has
entirely destroyed all enemies. Along the way, millions of people will die.
Prior to its release, developers argued in a number of fora that First Strike was
intended to have a political message. In an interview with Harry Slater, game
designer Moritz Gerber claimed that this antinuclear sentiment was present ‘‘[f]rom
the beginning.’’ His argument for the video game medium is essentially in line with
previous activist nuclear simulations:

We’re definitely of the opinion that the video game is a very strong medium for [anti-
nuclear politics]. Blindflug wants to combine the big issues of the world with gaming,
so people can participate in, and not just talk about, nuclear war.

Games let you see what happens if you launch a nuclear missile or what happens
when you hit London, for example. And that should bring people closer to these
issues.(Slater, 2014b, n.p.)
Executive producer Moritz Zumbühl argues that Barack Obama and Vladimir
Putin ‘‘should play more games [like] First Strike,’’ repeating his belief that games
are ‘‘powerful tools’’ to oppose nuclear proliferation (First Strike, 2013, n.p.). The
game’s release in March 2014 coincided with escalating tensions between the United
States and Russia over Ukraine, an important part of the game’s context. First
Strike’s official blog intersperses advertising materials, some of which mentioned
the conflict in Ukraine, as well as informative clips on various real Cold War nuclear
incidents, media treatments of nuclear war, and information about disarmament
advocacy, and nuclear tests beginning with Trinity in 1945 (First Strike, 2014).
Advertising materials, reviews, and interviews all compose a ‘‘paratextual van-
guard’’ for the game, priming players to interpret the diegetic elements of First
Strike in a particular way, as does the political situation in which the game is released
(Payne, 2012, p. 305–311). In-game text reinforces this message. Successful players
Matheson 7

are rewarded with ‘‘You Win?’’ and a stark estimate of casualties, often in the bil-
lions. Repeated play unlocks a message from the 1983 movie War Games: ‘‘A
strange game. The only winning move is not to play’’ (Blindflug Studios,
2014).Game site IGN notes that a portion of the game’s profits go to nonproliferation
efforts and claims that First Strike ‘‘just may save the world’’ (IGN, 2014, n.p.).
The narrative elements of First Strike and its political paratext thus contain a con-
sistently antinuclear message. The procedural elements of the game could support
the idea that nuclear war plans, if implemented, would result in unmitigated suffer-
ing. The message of First Strike’s procedures, however, could also be read as the
exact opposite. Nuclear powers are the only ones with agency in the game. Nonnuc-
lear territories are simply empty space for the player or nuclear enemies to capture
and control. Imperialism pays: not only are more territories available for the games
core actions, but conquests of some places by some countries (e.g., annexation of
Africa by the European Union) yield special rewards. Although the victory screen
contains a question mark (‘‘You win?), success and failure are clearly different states
and winning is rewarded. The procedural message of this supposedly antinuclear
game can therefore be read as an argument for speed, resourcefulness, aggression,
and amoral planning as keys for success in a nuclear war. There is no human extinc-
tion in First Strike. No war of any scale can produce a nuclear winter. Victory and
survival are both possible. This ambiguity has been noted by reviewer Carter Dot-
son, who wrote that ‘‘most of the social commentary [in First Strike] seems to come
from the way that players interpret the situation, rather than any conscious message
that the game gives. There’s no reward for not striking first, or any punishment for
being the aggressor’’ (2014, n.p.).
Developers frequently said that this game about nuclear war had to be ‘‘fun,’’ and
this is reflected in its gameplay and aesthetics (First Strike, 2013). The game’s crisp
graphical model of the Earth is reminiscent but richer than the similar Introversion
game DEFCON, and it is accompanied by ethereal, cerebral music. The aesthetic of
the game is almost clinical. Although casualty numbers are sometimes displayed,
these transmissions are matter of fact, even soothing when they reflect a successful
attack by the player. It is possible to argue that this sanitization is intended to pro-
duce an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance, akin to what Bogost (2006b) calls
‘‘simulation fever,’’ the ‘‘the nervous discomfort caused by the interaction of the
game’s unit-operational representations of a segment of the real world and the play-
er’s subjective understanding of that representation’’ (p. 136). Some of this discom-
fort is apparent in player reviews, but it seems subdued, the minor embarrassment of
a guilty pleasure. One reviewer called it ‘‘worryingly fun’’ (Priestman, 2014, n.p.).
Another reviewer acknowledged the game’s stated message while recognizing the
thrill of simulating destruction:

There’s a maudlin, desperate undercurrent to First Strike. It tells a tale of the inevitabil-
ity of destruction. Rockets miss their targets, cities are laid waste, and millions fall
under the push of a finger on the screen.
8 Games and Culture

A percentage of each sale goes to antinuclear proliferation charities, and while

you’re always disconnected from the barbarity of your actions, by ticking numbers
and less-than-real graphics, there’s a constant reminder that you’re doing something
wrong and a bit silly.

The fact that that message is wrapped around a fantastic strategy game makes it even
stronger.
First Strike has worthy and important things to say, but while it’s saying them, you
get to blow up Greenland (Slater, 2014a, n.p.).

The accompanying photo caption (Suck it, Greenland) is reminiscent of a meeting

between General Thomas White and Robert McNamara where White described the
likelihood that noncombatant nations would be destroyed by the United States in a
nuclear war. ‘‘Well, Mr. Secretary,’’ he said, ‘‘I hope you don’t have any friends or
relations in Albania, because we’re just going to have to wipe it out’’ (Abella, 2008,
p. 159).
One can therefore identify discontinuity between the game’s purported anti-
nuclear justification and the enjoyment that comes from simulating nuclear war.
In Owen Faraday’s (2014c) comparison of the game to Call of Duty, which also
combines the horrors of war with the fun of simulation, he wrote that:

First Strike is doing its utmost to both eat and have that particular cake. The game
aspires to be a stern lecturer, opening and closing with dark admonitions about man-
kind’s suicidally large stockpiles of horrific nuclear weapons. And we need to be
reminded, especially now that the Cold War is remote, unlived history to an entire gen-
eration of adults.

But First Strike the game—the thing you’re actually playing in-between those dire
bookended warnings—loves nuclear war. It makes the prospect of intercontinental
ballistic missiles hurtling through space to targets on the far side of the globe look
downright lovely. First Strike is a reasonably clever (though flawed) game—but as
pure spectacle it’s second to nothing on mobile (n.p).
Players enjoy the game in the simple sense that it can be fun to play, but they
enjoy it in the Lacanian sense as well. Lacan’s enjoyment, or jouissance, is the affec-
tive investment in an object even when it surpasses the point of pleasure and
becomes painful. Intentions, procedures, and player reactions to First Strike are ana-
logous to the rhetor, speech, and audience in more traditional rhetoric. The game’s
paratextual context and narrative content contradict its procedural argument. To
account for players’ investment in the repetitious play of simulation requires atten-
tion not just to the context and content of the game itself, but to the relations of
enjoyment and repetition in which players invest. That the game can be ‘‘worryingly
fun’’ (Priestman, 2014), ‘‘equal parts beautiful and gut-wrenching’’ (Faraday,
2014a), a ‘‘frenetic, stressful, and awesome scramble’’ (Jones, 2014) suggests that
Matheson 9

simulation fever does not repel players. Instead, they become feverish for simulation
as such. Reviews suggest that players invest not in one side or the other of the
nuclear fascination/horror discrepancy, but in the discrepancy itself. This affective
reaction to simulated nuclear war requires a conception of rhetoric beyond procedure
or the content of the game.

Repetition and the Real

A number of war games, both military and civilian, have attempted to create the
experience of nuclear war and give participants some control over the results of the
model. This is ultimately what differentiates simulation from representation: Games
such as First Strike do not attempt to show players one vision of a nuclear war as a
novel, television show, or film would do. As simulations, they create the conditions
for players to participate in a model of war, ‘‘playing’’ between structure (the rules
and procedures of the game) and contingency (the decisions and actions of the
player), rather than consume a representation of the conflict’s course. The enjoyment
of First Strike comes from this perceived aspect of control in simulation. Although
its procedures suggest that nuclear war is winnable and exciting and its paratextual
diegetic suggests that such a war ought to be abhorred, the enjoyment of First Strike
is perhaps best explained as an effect of the relationship between mediation and the
desire for experiences beyond it, in excess of persuasion or the fun of play.
Many works on nuclear war describe it as a possibility that frustrates the repre-
sentational capabilities of language. Long before Derrida announced its fabulous
textuality, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell reported this account of the Trinity test:

Thirty seconds after the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the peo-
ple and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome
roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphe-
mous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty. Words are
inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental
and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized. (As cited in Groves,
1962, pp. 437–438)

The theme of nuclear war as ‘‘unthinkable’’ or ‘‘unspeakable’’ has continued ever

since. The kind of full-scale global nuclear war modeled by First Strike is often
treated in almost mystical terms as an experience simply beyond human ken (Cher-
nus, 1986). This is a magnification of Freud’s (2011c/1915) argument, made in
‘‘Thoughts For The Times On War and Death,’’ that we cannot imagine our own
demise. Nuclear war presents the possibility of total human extinction in which even
the compensatory promise of immortality in the continuity of future generations or
the species overall is eliminated (Lifton, 1996). That said, we have always tried to
grasp the enormity of a nuclear war and communicate it anyway. Herman Kahn, a
prominent nuclear strategist, argued for ‘‘thinking about the unthinkable,’’ in both
10 Games and Culture

the book by that name and in his more famous work On Thermonuclear War because
possible ‘‘postwar states’’ could be more or less desirable (Kahn, 2007/1960, pp. 19–
21). First Strike avoids a confrontation with the discontinuity of nuclear extinction
by simply making it impossible within the rules of the game.
The Real is encountered where speaking subjects are pushed up against the limits
of language. The importance of the Real is not so much that a nonhuman world of
mind-independent objects exists, but rather the effect that our sudden confrontation
with the failure of language to mediate has on the subject. Language mediates the
world and makes possible a subject in relation to others. When we are aware that the
world exceeds our grasp, we confront a ‘‘failed unicity’’ that dislocates our sense of
united subject in a comprehensible world. In response, we feign unicity by retroac-
tively creating meaning for these tears in mediated social reality, by repetitively
attempting to symbolize what exceeds symbolization (Lundberg, 2012, p. 2). This
process should be a concern for rhetoric because the symbolic economy in which
we invest ourselves is an operation of metonymy and metaphor, a movement of
tropes that form a mediated world. Thus, as Lundberg (2012, p. 38) argues, rhetoric
and psychoanalysis require one another.
Contemplating the possibility of human extinction—or at least the end of civili-
zation—makes plain our precarious balance at the edge of an abyss and brings to
mind fundamental questions about the meaning and direction of human existence.
Our appointment with the Real is perpetually missed because it cannot be rendered
in language. Efforts to do so anyway are a means of shoring up reality (the socially
constructed world in which we live, as opposed to the Real) and also individual sub-
jects, trying to fix the plot holes in the story of coherence that we tell ourselves.
Because the Real cannot, by definition, be communicated, stories fall short and are
repeated again and again, chasing an adequation with reality that can never be
achieved.
The details of these stories are less important than the sense that the speaking sub-
ject is exercising genuine agency. In this regard, First Strike bears a strong similarity
to Freud’s fort-da game. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud (2011a/1920)
recounts a game played by a young boy of his acquaintance. The boy had a wooden
reel attached to a string which he would throw over his curtained cot, making it
‘‘gone’’ (fort). Then he would pull the spool back into view, rejoicing that it was
‘‘there’’ (da). He would repeat these actions again and again. The game can be read
as the child inuring himself against the potential absence of his mother, but a more
productive reading would locate enjoyment not in the conditions of ‘‘gone’’ or
‘‘here’’ but in the exercise of control over the conditions of presence and absence,
essentially a simulation that permits agency over a situation in which the child must
be passive (Freud, 2011a/1920, pp. 3721–3722). Games are a particularly powerful
media for this control if they differ from representation based on the player’s ability
to affect the outcome of each repetition within the procedures created by the game.
This sense of control, that the outcome is dependent on the player’s actions, is a key
feature that distinguishes video games (and, in principle, other simulations) from
Matheson 11

traditional linear texts in which the reader’s choice is more limited, as is exposure to
‘‘risk’’ (Aarseth, 1997, p. 4).
In First Strike, players are compelled to repeat by the incentive structure of the
game, which rewards repeated plays with new countries to fight as or against. But
even without this procedural reward, the game encourages repetition. It is almost
impossible to play a ‘‘perfect’’ game, and the outcome could always be changed
somewhat, and as no two sessions are identical, repetition is always repetition with
a difference. In the words of one reviewer, ‘‘The replay value is through the roof,
since every experience is different. Even without multiplayer, you will come back
over and over again’’ (Gil, 2014, n.p.). In the words of another, the game is a
‘‘replayable single-player strategy game that I kept coming back to long after I had
enough material for my review’’ (Faraday, 2014b, n.p.). First Strike’s repetition
allows players to enjoy useless subjectivity (Lacan, 1998, p. 3) or the enjoyment
of the subject as subject—the enjoyment of the capacity for choice primarily rather
than the results of specific choices.
In his article ‘‘Tether and Accretions: Fantasy as Form in Videogames,’’ Chris-
topher Goetz (2012) describes one mode of producing pleasure in video games as
the ‘‘tether’’ fantasy. Players enjoy exposing themselves to risk, ‘‘expanding’’ out
into the world, and then withdrawing into a safer space, repeating the process again
and again. Being caught in a vulnerable state can be a ‘‘playful act’’ even when this
play is ‘‘repetitious of an originally horrifying event’’ (p. 423). The ‘‘worrying’’ fun
of First Strike is understandable as the uncanny effect of repetition and simulation
fever. Recall that for Bogost, simulation fever is the gap between the performance
of a simulated system and the player’s concept of that system’s operation ‘‘in real
life.’’ This fits well with Freud’s understanding of the uncanny, where ‘‘an uncanny
effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and
reality is effaced, as when . . . a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing
it symbolizes’’ (2011b/1919, p. 3964). Players of First Strike are made uncomforta-
ble by the juxtaposition of fun and war, but the illusion of control, the ability to exit
the game and continue their lives, creates a tether like that attached to the young
boy’s reel, permitting them to control the conditions by which the simulated world
is made present and absent. Perhaps the enjoyment of this control explains why so
many reviewers requested a pause feature, originally absent but added in an update
by Blindflug (TouchArcade, 2014).
That discomfort persists can be understood as the game’s incomplete move to
conceal the more horrifying associations of nuclear war. First Strike might
strengthen certain metaphorical connections, for example, those between nuclear
war and victory, at the expense of other metonymic ones, such as the direct bodily
horror of radiation burns and screaming victims. These elided connections that pro-
liferate meaning may be concealed, but they persist in the unconscious. Discussing
Lacan’s take on Freudian repression, Lundberg (2012) explains that raising one
‘‘insular metonymic connection to the status of a metaphor conceals or renders latent
the other metonymic connections that also inhere in the accreted history of a sign.
12 Games and Culture

But the condition of this concealment is the whole field of latent connections that are
both accreted and expressed in the social use of signs’’ (p. 52). This reading dovetails
with Longinus’s interpretation of metaphor. A classic problem with rhetorical arti-
fice is that ‘‘the best use of a figure is when the very fact that it is a figure goes unno-
ticed.’’ For Longinus, an orator uses sublime metaphor to conceal artifice ‘‘by its
very brilliance. Just as dimmer lights are lost in the surrounding sunshine, so pervad-
ing grandeur all around obscures the presence of the rhetorical devices.’’ The eleva-
tion of one metonymic connection to the status of metaphor therefore conceals both
the labor that produces it and the persistence of other metonymic connections. Thus,
the stark beauty of simulated nuclear war might ‘‘burn brighter’’ than the implied
human horror, but both are still present, returning like the sense of unease in Freud’s
uncanny. This can be seen in Jason Ruddy’s (2014) review of the game, which he
calls ‘‘wickedly fun,’’ although its ‘‘hope’’ is ‘‘not quite enough to shake off the
uneasiness you’ll feel every time you read the stats at the end of a game.’’ His dis-
comfort is palpable near the end of his review:

I had a lot of fun playing it and feel as though the only negative bits in my experience
were tied to . . . the bad taste it left in my mouth after each game was complete. Every
10 minutes met with the same result, billions dead and a ‘‘You Win?’’ stats screen. If
that sort of thing won’t stop you from having a good time, then I recommend giving this
one a go. (n.p.)

Here is enjoyment, unease, an acknowledgment of the game’s contradictions, and a

decision to play this program ‘‘meant to be played . . . repeatedly’’ because it allows
players to practice and improve their decisions (Ruddy, 2014).

Procedural Rhetoric Beyond Persuasion

Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric is useful in analyzing a game like First
Strike, but the primary project of this essay has been to demonstrate that its expan-
sion beyond a focus on specific persuasive acts could also provide helpful tools for
rhetorically inflected criticism of video games. Rhetoric based on the classic tripar-
tite structure of audience, speech, and rhetor can help to understand specific expres-
sions of a rhetorical act, but they are incomplete without a broader discussion of the
conditions of possibility for meaning and the affective investments that sustain them.
There have been extensive debates over how critics should analyze the immediate
contexts of rhetorical artifacts. To split the difference between Lloyd Bitzer
(1968) and Richard Vatz (1973), First Strike’s paratextual elements—advertise-
ments, reviews, and interviews analyzed here—establish part of a context into which
the game’s procedural rhetoric intervenes. But without the operations of trope and
the investments of subjects that seek to paper over the excessive Real of nuclear
extinction, rhetoric as persuasion cannot tell the full story. The value of a psycho-
analytic theory of rhetoric in particular is that it provides the tools to show that the
Matheson 13

contradiction between the antinuclear language of First Strike’s paratext and the
‘‘love’’ of nuclear war evident in its procedures is not a failure to account for pro-
priety or persuade an audience (Lundberg, 2012, p. 23). Instead, a psychoanalytic
view of rhetoric would help explain the game’s movements in a symbolic economy
that must shore up with compensatory connections both the subject and the human
world threatened by the annihilating Real. Although the nuclear aspect of First
Strike may set it apart from many other games, the enjoyment of compensating for
an elusive Real is applicable to simulations more generally.
Psychoanalysis may initially seem like an unlikely avenue to supplement the the-
ory of procedural rhetoric. The Aristotelian definition of rhetoric casts the discipline
as one concerned with contingency (‘‘ . . . in any given case’’) to distinguish it from
the more deterministic Platonic dialectic. Many interpretations of Lacanian psycho-
analysis might be inimical to this understanding of contingency because they rely on
a deep structure of the Symbolic against which any specific rhetorical artifact is
merely epiphenomenal. It could be argued that a Lacanian reading forgoes one of
the most important qualities of procedural rhetoric—its focus on contingency.
Indeed, in Unit Operations, Bogost (2006a) avoids structural explanations that rely
too heavily on large deterministic systems. He calls these deterministic frames ‘‘sys-
tem operations,’’ which are ‘‘totalizing structures that seek to explicate a phenom-
enon, behavior, or state in its entirety. Unlike complex networks, which thrive
between order and chaos, systems seek to explain all things via an unalienable
order’’ (p. 6). Bogost argues that Freudian psychoanalysis and its Lacanian variant
tend to explain the world too much in terms of these system operations, and where
such work is helpful for him, it is because of a focus on smaller scale ‘‘unit opera-
tions’’ (pp. 32–35). These unit operations are ‘‘discrete, interlocking units of expres-
sive meaning’’ (p. ix).
Bogost’s reservations about Lacan constitute a strong argument for avoiding
overly deterministic theories of meaning that reduce specific artifacts of speech to
mere expressions of an all-pervasive underlying structure, like wax figurines cast
from an unchanging mold. This understanding of Lacan is a ‘‘structural poetics’’
approach to psychoanalysis that privileges the structural aspects of the Symbolic
(Lundberg, 2012). It is in response to such a reading that the intersection of psycho-
analysis and procedural rhetoric is helpful. A more rhetorically inflected reading of
Lacan focuses on the interplay between larger structures and particular expressions
in speech, closer to Bogost’s unit operations, but still attentive to the conditions that
make these operations possible. The insights of rhetoric might thus make psychoana-
lysis a more flexible and useful critical approach. Although the American rhetorical
tradition may focus too heavily on the immediate context of speech at the expense of
the larger economy of trope, structural readings of Lacan diminish the importance of
contingency and agency. To knit together rhetoric and psychoanalysis, however,
may allow us to craft an elegant solution to this impasse. Rhetorical expression does
indeed occur within a specific context, but repetition and subjects’ investment in
feigning unicity explains how contingent constellations of tropes become durable.
14 Games and Culture

There is not some underlying deep structure that determines the outcome of specific
rhetorical acts, but there are ingrained connections between signifiers that channel
meaning in particular directions (Lundberg, 2012, pp. 4–5). The intrusion of the Real
(tuche´) is radically contingent because it is always unexpected and unassimilable,
but the repeated effort to retroactively suture the rift (automaton) is an attempt to
build structure or at least predictability (Lacan, 1978, pp. 53–56). Like the concept
of play as (contingent) movement within a (structural) set of procedural constraints,
a rhetorical understanding of psychoanalysis may help rescue rhetoric from hyper-
contextualism and Lacan from structural determinism at the same time. The intersec-
tion of these two fields is important because each corrects a shortcoming in the other.
To explain how the structural preconditions for meaning and affective investment
translate into any particular artifact such as a video game and how players ‘‘enjoy’’
some things and not others requires rhetoric’s attention to contingency, which is why
a psychoanalytic theory of video games is by itself insufficient.
A rhetorically psychoanalytic theory of games is a helpful approach to First
Strike because it helps to explain both the cultural work of the game as an itera-
tion of nuclear simulation and why system operations can be so appealing.
Along with other nuclear models, First Strike is constructed as a zero-sum
game. The player’s gain is a loss to the opponent, and conflict is always immi-
nent. In the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, a staple of RAND strategic thinking,
one party must choose to betray or cooperate with the other without knowing
what their competitor/accomplice will choose. The attempt to understand the
other side, to think as they do, was of capital importance because the stakes
of guessing were unimaginably high. In the traditional liberal critique of the
arms race, the resulting problem was one of ‘‘mirroring:’’ one assumed certain
hostility in the other, and therefore, one had to adopt that same hostility. The
two sides were compelled to become more similar and more aggressive over
time. Lacan’s (2006) discussion of repetition in his seminar on the ‘‘Purloined
Letter’’ provides a somewhat different perspective. Understood simply as mir-
roring, the problem of deterrence exists in the register of the Imaginary. One’s
intentions are defined by the perceived intentions of the adversary. But in a
competitive, zero-sum game, the player must assume that the enemy will know
that the player is guessing its intention and therefore adopt a different strategy.
But perhaps the enemy also knows that the player knows that it will make this
assumption, and so forth. The imaginary modeling of opponent behavior with
limited options is thus intractable. ‘‘Hence each player,’’ writes Lacan, ‘‘if he
[sic] reasons, can only resort to something beyond the dyadic relationship—in
other words, to some law which presides over the succession of the rounds of
the game’’ (2006, p. 44). Thrown into a chaotic world in which the other is inac-
cessible, players reach for some transcendent order to retain the coherence of
choice. The depiction of nuclear enemies as inherently aggressive due to objec-
tive principles of international order can thus be understood not (just) as a fail-
ure of imaginary identification, but as a necessary solution to the game within
Matheson 15

apparently inflexible rules. At the same time, when contingency and procedure
clash, players are driven to seek underlying deep structures to break the impasse
of choice.
Procedural rhetoric is a strong concept with the potential to explain not just video
games but the logic of simulation and modeling more generally. First Strike might
be a particularly stark example of these factors, but an expanded view of rhetoric
beyond persuasion, influenced by psychoanalysis, should illustrate the accreted
results of repetition and investment through game procedure. A great many games
require hours of repetitious activity (e.g., ‘‘farming,’’ of one kind, or another), given
value only by a player who invests in some final, meaningful outcome that is some-
times endlessly deferred. Others feature death and destruction that evoke the Real of
trauma but also allows players to enjoy the distance of simulation and the perceived
control over the presence and absence of violence. As the context/procedure contra-
dictions of First Strike and the attendant enjoyment of its repetitive simulations of
nuclear war show, the cultural logic of mediation in response to the intrusion of the
Real can crop up in many areas of social and political life. An account of enjoyment,
unicity, and the broader economy of trope supplements persuasion to enrich the suite
of analytical concepts available to critics of simulations and language. A rhetorical
concept of psychoanalysis provides better explanations of movement between struc-
ture and contingency, context and procedure, rules and agency in many games and in
many cultural practices of simulation.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

Notes
1. There has been some controversy over the use of ‘‘games’’ or ‘‘simulations’’ to describe
these hypothetical nuclear exercises (Allen, 1987, p. 7), but with either label they contain
repeatable procedures that constrain the actions of players and thus should be good targets
for Bogost’s procedural rhetoric, which indeed uses both words. Although ‘‘[d]efinitions
of simulation are legion,’’ they center on representations of a system that allow users to
model behavior (Berger, Boulay, & Zisk, 1970, p. 416), which squares nicely with
Bogost’s description of video games as an ‘‘expressive medium’’ representing ‘‘how real
and imagined systems work’’ (2007, p. vii).
2. The ‘‘Red’’ in this title is a reference to the ‘‘Red Team’’ that simulates an enemy in Pen-
tagon war games, not (directly) the Communist ideology of the Warsaw Pact. It is worth
noting the fact, however, that the ‘‘O’’ in the American SIOP stands for ‘‘Operational,’’
while the ‘‘O’’ in the simulated Russian plan stands for ‘‘Offensive’’ (Allen, 1987, p. 25).
16 Games and Culture

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Author Biography
Calum Matheson is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill focusing on rhetoric and media studies and a debate coach at Harvard
University. He is currently completing a dissertation on nuclear war simulations and the limits
of signification.