Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Convincing people that a job in the video game industry isn’t that easy is not very easy. But there exists a thing that if used inconspicuously can help guide an audience towards your goals. These things are fallacies. In the book Paid to Play the authors do a good job of painting in words the life of a worker in the gaming industry. However this is not done without a healthy portion of fallacies.
One kind of fallacy that I have found quite often within the duration of my reading the book was the red herring fallacy. In fact, these red herrings are generally not even disguised into the flow of the book but are instead used in another form. This form being in the form of notes at the bottom of the page. These notes being in reference to something mentioned in the main text above. These notes also have nothing to do with the point the author is attempting to make; instead, they merely distract from it. Bingo, red herring.
Let’s take a look at some examples. For example, on page 97, the authors of Paid to Play are describing how influential audio is in the making of a game. They then mention a quote by Oscar Fischinger relating to this idea. From here they include a note which talks about how he also invented the lumigraph organ which has nothing to do with audio in video games. They even acknowledge this by saying in regards to this machine “as far as we know has never been used on a video game soundtrack” (97). So essentially they are committing a rhetorical foul in redirecting the argument but are also acknowledging it. This is to say the least very interesting.
However, in addition to the red herring, the authors also have another favourite fallacy: the straw man. In this fallacy the authors set up a hypothetical situation and proceed to attack it. These authors do this pretty often. I even mentioned in a previous blog entry. Here I was describing how I was how frustrating it was to have these authors assume that the books readers are not taking these jobs seriously and proceeding to attack them for that.
A good example of this is where the authors are pointing out that contrary to what they expected, you will have to spend a good amount of time writing if you want to be a good script writer. This is set up by the quote “You didn’t actually think that you would be just handed checks without having to earn them?” (150).
And examples of this are found in nearly every section. In regards to sound implementation, the authors go on to critique a situation they have made up in which the reader is going into this chapter thinking that sound production was actually all about creating music.
All in all these aren’t terrible uses of the straw man fallacy but they are using it which itself is a foul if not a major one.
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