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This paper suggests an approach to studying the rhetoric of persuasive computer games through comparative analysis. A comparison of the military propaganda game AMERICA’S ARMY to similar shooter games reveals an emphasis on discipline and constraints in all main aspects of the games, demonstrating a preoccupation with ethos more than pathos. Generalizing from this, a model for understanding game rhetoric through balances of freedom and constraints is proposed.

To an ever larger degree, computer games are being used as means for strategic communication: In advertising, education, and political communication. Above all, the use of computer games for plain military propaganda brings urgency to a question which have occupied humanist researchers in game studies for some time: Can computer games be analyzed as works of rhetoric–and if so, how? Because if Aristotle was right in defining rhetoric as “an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion”(Aristotle 1991: 36), and if computer games can be used effectively as a means for persuasion, then such analysis should not only be possible, but a high priority. The popular US Army recruitment and propaganda game AMERICA’S ARMY (2002) is one of the army’s most important strategic communication efforts during the last years, and is judged by the army itself as well as by independent observers as a highly successful project (Halter 2006, Nieborg 2005 and 2006, Callaham 2006, Li 2004).