Procedural Rhetoric - What The Hell Does That Mean?

Today William and I spent our time researching the book,  "An Architectural Apporach To Level Design" by Christopher W. Totten. I have just starting reading this book and found it is full of great insights for Level Design.

Using my notes, we whent over varoius parts of the chapter 1 and 2 and had a discution on "Procedural Rhetoric". It's an interesting topic and has a lot to do with ludonarration of the story. The definition of Procedural Rhetoric is:

Wiki: Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric[1] is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. 

From the book:

While it can mean any idea transfered during gameplay, I think it is best used to describe how some strong story element is given to the player.  Based on some insights on this, we decided that both Procedural and Visual Rhetoric would greatly enhance the current level we are working on. We decided to do deeper planning of the level and sort of nuke what we have so far. Going through the script we locked onto the six narrative elements that will be verbalized to players:

1. Expo on Enemy: Now let me tell you about the Kasago, the putrid fish-like enemy of this mission. Their home planet was nearby, and they claimed squatter's rights on 364.
2. Joke: Squatter's rights are a fancy way of saying, "I got here when you wasn't looking and now I ain't going."  
3. Joke: I for one would have let them keep 364, but my government claimed it based on Eminent Domain. That's a fancy term for "I recognize your ownership, but I don't give a crap." 
4. Joke: Worse, though, is the need for close engagement with the Kasago. Normally, it's not a big deal, but these overgrown bipedal sardines are useful only for testing weapons of mass destruction. 
5. Expo and Joke: That's not a personal insult, mind you. You'd come to the same conclusion, and you know why? 'Cause they stink to high heaven, that's why! 
6. Joke: One snoot full is all anyone needs before an overwhelming urge to sanitize them with bullets kicks in. 

Using the first 3  (one Exposition, and two Jokes) we mapped out the beginning of the level. William drew a high level diagram:

Notice the detail.  The "V" marks show where we will place the verbal narration that the player will hear. Also, we want to include more jumping gameplay after a verabal narration to improve pacing. Having to fight the enemy while listening to the narration was a bad experience and going forward we want to avoid this,. Also note tht on the right, we will now have art that demonstrates how Merlot jokes about the Earth Gov does not give a "crap" about the enemy's claim to Tsukijiji-364. Here we use inspiration from "Multiple Warheads". It's an amazing SF comic by Brandon Graham. Check it out if you don't know this. Incredible comic book that I highly recomend.

In any event, the new plan is much better than the first plan that really only showed the basic topography:

Crude, yes, but it was enough to get started. Keep in mind, we had nice design art too:

We will now spend more time fleshing out the beginning of the level given the new pacing. While the above new design for Level 2 may look simple. I really think we have come up with something very good. We now are planning the level to take into account more forms of ludo narration. By incoporating Visual and Procedural rhetoric that ties in with the verbal narrartion, we hope to achieve a more emersive experience in the story.