In the spring of 2014 before GamerGate, when I was an undergrad in college for communications, I took a class titled 'Rhetoric' at around the entry to mid level for the comms courses, to fulfill a requirement for my degree.
I did not know much about rhetoric at the time, and I fear I still don't, but my assumption was that we would, at the very least, be given be given an overview of what was considered to be cannon in western rhetoric. I had expected to learn something about Plato, and perhaps go over common rhetorical devices, techniques, etc and the like.
What I was not expecting, was on the very first day, for the professor to show us the first 25 minutes of Far Cry 3, and proceed to tell us how exceptional it was because it 'subverts the expectations of games' because you would assume that the player would be playing someone competent like the main character's brother, someone with military training and an understanding of what to do when terrorists take over your vacation spot. But, oh no!, he gets killed in the beginning of the game and you play his incompetent brother! How novel!
Granted this was the very first class, and it was meant to intrigue students and offer a pitch on why you should be coming to class or why you should be invested in this course. And it worked! I definitely wanted to know why I was being shown a video game on the first day instead of just going over the syllabus. I should also mention that I have never played Far Cry 3 and had to look up the synopses to make sure it was even the right game. We never returned to the game after the first day, but given the rest of the course I doubt the prof would have gone into the white savior complex underpinnings of the game, but this was also a rhetoric class, not a class on how to critique media, so who knows if it would have been appropriate. This is merely a setting the stage for what comes next.
Over the course, we explored a lot of new media, some of which I found really interesting. We covered a couple of Hollywood movies and explored how characters were portrayed and their agency. I need to admit that I haven't followed up on any of the professor's claims but the ones that stuck out to me the most that I can remember is how he spoke about the roles of women in two films.
This was before I transitioned and was a little budding baby feminist, just learning about feminism through tumblr and The Mary Sue. Remember, this was at a time when people, mainly women were quick to say, "...but I'm not a feminist" because it was still a dirty word that evoked the caricatures drawn up in the 90s.
The one of two main films I remember were The Best Years of Our Lives which is a movie about 3 servicemen coming home from WWII to their families. One scene in the beginning featured Harold Russell an actor and disability activist who had lost both of his hands in WWII, coming home to his fiance. The scene features him standing still with his duffel bag and her seeing him then running over to greet him.
According to my professor, this was something of note at the time because it featured a woman taking action where as in films before the man would have gone to greet her. I have not followed up to see if any of this is remotely true but I remember the point of the lesson being even small things like this can have greater meaning.
The second film I remember was Rear Window, in which we talked about the contrasting roles of Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly. We talked about how Stewart was confined to the home the movie, and mostly in one outfit, while Kelly would walk around the scene in a new outfit each time, and how this showed that she had more agency than him. She had a life and freedom in the outside world and he was confined to the home and how this was contrast to the traditional views of a relationship where the wife stays at home and the man is out in the world.
We also covered newer media such as the citizen journalism in the Arab Springs, and at one point he showed us a music video from India, explaining that with just a glance people who were from India would understand that the man and the woman were in love and when she showed up later with a child that they would know it was his. (He was a white man and he said said partner at the time was Indian, and that she had confirmed this.)
And we also covered a lot of even newer media... such as when he showed us an episode of Freeman's Mind. Which is an old ... Lets Play(?) of Half-Life with an MST3K like voice over of by a man named Ross Scott who is voicing the main character's inner thoughts. The point of showing us this was to tell us 'Scott had to think of what kind of person would survive the events of the game and build a character and personality around that" ???? I guess...?
He also showed us The Angry Video Game Nerd, sort of... He introduced the concept of AVGN, but I don't remember him showing us any episodes, instead he showed us the "Contra Memories" video, which is an out of character video where Rolfe talks about his first time beating Contra. Now, it's also important to remember that this was slightly before the rise of long form video essays on YouTube which made people care about topics they would never have thought of.
Despite using this particular video, this is probably one of the most straightforward lessons. The professor walked us through it explaining how Rolfe used personal experiences and relatable situations to get the audience to care about a game most people probably wouldn't have cared about. And the idea of using a modern video on a (relatively) new platform like YouTube instead of an old text book to walk students through this process is not a bad one I think.
However.
Towards the end of the semester, one day we walked into class and the professor had a PS2 hooked up to the projector. We were going to be playing a video game. A game he thought was perfect at on boarding people who had never played a video game in their life. A game he thought was subversive and employed a variety of different techniques to explore a rich world and add depths to characters. One of his favorite games. This was what we were learning for the next 3 weeks.
Final Fantasy XII.
First in addendum, since writing Part 1 I searched, found, and downloaded a course catalogue from my university for the year this took place, and I have found what I think this course was. It was not a straight class on rhetoric like I thought I remembered, but one called "Rhetorical Analysis in Media," which puts into perspective why we were watching movies and such, but I still think some of the media choices were buck wild.
Anyway, on to Final Fantasy XII.
I should point out that I have not played this game since around 2007, and I might look up some character names, but for the most part I'm just going off of my memory. I'm doing this because that's all I can do for the class; my memory of the lessons are intrinsically linked to how I remember the game.
So the thing about FFXII is that it is extremely mediocre. It was popular when it released in 2006, but other than being relevant to the Ivalice setting as also used by FFTactics, FFXIV, Vagrant Story, I really haven't heard as much about it since. FFVI is a classic, FFVII is the pillar of the franchise, 8 the weird cousin, 9 beloved or contested, 10 another classic, 11 was online and people hated it(?), 13 is loved by some but I believe it's largely disliked (I personally hate that game and it turned me off buying AAA games new from then on), but I don't really see people mentioning 12 when the series gets brought up. People are just lukewarm on it.
As with any piece of media, I'm sure there are people, aside from the prof, who love and defend and claim that it is one of the greatest games ever made. Excellent, please continue to love this game, I do not care. However, having played this game, I simply believe that most of the claims the prof made were... exaggerated because of his love for the game.
So, Final Fantasy XII starts with an opening cut scene depicting a royal wedding between a princess and a handsome noble prince in white armor, and then the subsequent death of said prince in a war.
Oh but this is so SUBVERSIVE, claimed the professor, because you would THINK that the player would be playing as the handsome prince-- someone competent and with military training and an understanding of what to do in the following situations of the game, but Oh no!, he dead. (Not to mention that the full opening cut scene was released as part of a trailer(?), so players went in knowing this character died.)
Granted, this would could been subversive if the princess was revealed to be the main character. But nope. The main character is some riffraff street rat instead. Which has never been done before. Ever. How novel!
But before we get to them, in the beginning of the game you play a little tutorial segment of as a character who then also gets killed before moving on to the real protagonist. For this segment the professor asked if anyone in the class had never played a video game aside from like solitaire or other very simple computer games.
Fortunately for him, there was an older woman, around her late 40s early 50s, who, I'm assuming, had just now been granted the opportunity to attend or re-attend college. She was the perfect example for what he was trying to explain.
He handed her the controller and asked her to play around with this beginning level. She, for her part, humored him, but it was obvious she thought the entire thing was a bit absurd. She had a little trouble, but I suspect it was mostly because the controller layout was completely new to her, but she was able to move the character around and open menus and explore with the camera as the game had instructed.
On boarding new players into video games is difficult and there is a massive discussion currently as to what is appropriate to include in a tutorial in a game. Games are made and written from the perspective that the players have some experience with games already, either through other media or from friends and family. This issues has only become exacerbated with the exclusion of guidebooks that used to come with games. The visual language of video games is something that needs to be taught in the game.
When FFXII came out, guidebooks were a little bit on the ways out, but still contained the necessary information about the controls, so at the time having the professor heap praises the game for having a character diegetically tell the player basic controls like 'use the L stick to move,' seemed a little absurd and silly to me. I now completely believe that games need an option to show players a very basic tutorial on controls.
But I'm extremely neutral about diegetic explanations on controls. I think that seeking complete """immersion""" in games is utter BS and hinders the medium significantly, and that choosing the method of explanation is purely an artistic decision as long as the controls are communicated effectively.
The prof heaped praises on this tutorial section for being in the story, saying how it emphasizes the player character's inexperience and sets up the other character, Basch, the one giving the instructions, as a leader and someone with experience who is to be respected. The prof wasn't wrong, this is what is being emphasized in the game, and this could have work pretty well... it's just that neither of these characters are that fucking important to the story. The player character dies soon after, and Basch disappears for a long stretch of the game and when he does reappear there isn't much for him to do.
FFXII isn't the only game to do this and I don't think it really deserves praises for it either. Tales of the Abyss, which also came out in 2006, has a similar situation of diegetic teaching in the beginning of the game. You are taught the combat mechanics of the game through a sword training session between the main character and his mentor. You see how they interact, how they speak to one another and how they view and respect one another, and most importantly shows how the mentor is the only one who takes the main character seriously. This scene features the main character who you will play as for the rest of the game, and the mentor, who ends up being the major villain of the story.
Diegetic lessons for controls are not that special or unique in games, but hey the point is to learn a concept and we're learning via FFXII because it's ~great.~
The game moves on and you play as dead guy's brother, the aforementioned street rat named Vaan. We are introduced to him and his friend Panelo they putz around the city and eventually there is a cut scene where Vaan explains his dreams to Panelo and she doesn't interrupt him and lets him daydream.... The prof went all over this scene talking about how mature it was to just let the moment rest, to have Panelo just let Vaan live in the moment and bask in his dream and to not say anything about it.
He never went on to say anything about Panelo's dreams, because they were not mentioned. Because she only exists in relation to Vaan, she is in the narrative soley to support him and then later get rescued by him. But it's ~so mature~ for only the boys to have ambitions.
...Now is where I need to make a confession.
As someone who had played the game before taking the class, and as someone who had read articles and think-pieces about it, mainly on tumblr through a feminist lens, I could smell some of the BS that the prof wasn't teaching in the class. For example, FFXII is known for having issues with its female characters, mainly that they only exist in reference to male characters. Ashe is important because of her dead husband, Panelo is important because she is friends with Vaan, and Fran is important because she ditched the forest to be with Balthier.
None of this was mentioned either, in fact we only ever went over the positives of the game, never once mentioning its shortfalls, which in a class about learning Rhetoric in media, learning to spot the BS rhetoric as well is pretty damn important I'd say. This is also was in contrast to how he talked about the female characters from the two movies that I mentioned in Part 1. Why bring up how progressive those movies were for the time, when completely skipping over how female characters were treated in this game?
And so, unfortunately, I ended up skipping some of the classes, and since it was a MWF class, even though there were 3 weeks of it, there was only so much of the game we could cover. So, I only have some memories of the classes I did attend. ('I've played this game I don't need to go' was my justification for sleeping in.) We did not go though the full game, as we were actually playing with a physical PS2, there were certain save files that were loaded up for us to play along in class, so my memory of the next sections are a little spotty but I'll try to cover what I remember.
I'm sure he had something to say about the way that Balthier gets introduced and joins the party, but I cannot remember.
There is a scene in which Panelo gets captured for some reason and some kid, Lars(?), is talking to her, the professor had something to say about it but I can't remember because the girl in front of me, a vile and heinous person, the kind of girl you know will grow up into the stereotypical Karen, hijacked the class to complain about something or other. I think it was about women being bound and tied up in media? I can't really recall.
I think we went over the "I'm Bash fon Ronseburg from Dalmasca" bit but I can't remember what he had to say. I really wish I could considering how notorious this scene is.
There is a bit in the game where your party is chased out of a bunch of caves by some bounty hunters. I believe the prof went on how these types games typically don't have you fleeing from enemies, because you are supposed to be the all powerful good guys, so running away is ~subversive.~
The only other thing I really remember is how impressed he was with the VA for Fran. He went on to explain that the accent was completely fake, meaning not based on any real-world accents. I did actually do a little research for this when making this post and some sources say that it was based around an Icelandic accent, and their dream cast was Bjork, so they used her as a touch stone. This source also is from 2015 which was after the class so this wasn't common knowledge. Regardless, her having an accent different from the rest of the cast was important for world building and characterization, I guess? This was at an era where people were starting to genuinely care about voice acting in games, but John DiMaggio also did a (possibly racist? he said it was based on a Hawaiian accent and I don't have the wherewithal to unpack that) accent for Wakka in FFX in 2001, so I don't think there's anything special about having Fran impersonate Bjork.
Now, there is one thing I think most people who know anything about FFXII are aware of, and this is something that was never once brought up in class.
He never once mentioned Star Wars.
FFXII is just fucking Star Wars with a fantasy setting with some extra characters. Both are about a poor boy who is rescued by a mentor who then help a princess take down an evil empire. Star Wars is the typical piece of media brought up when discussing the Hero's Journey. I had other coms classes bring this up when talking about media and persuasion. (Don't @ me about the controversies about the hero's journey, i know)
It is wild to me that you wouldn't do a comparison to the two of them, talking about the strengths of this type of story in both pieces of media, and how FFXII takes this story and translates it into a video game and the techniques that used to make it work. Maybe he thought if he did then people would be less interested in the game? Who can say?
But all in all... I guess this class technically worked???? I still remember it! I don't remember half of the other classes I took but boy, oh boy does this one stick out.
Using new media to teach Rhetoric in Media is.... definitely an interesting choice and I would be very, very curious to know if the prof is still teaching and if he's updated what media he shows.
This is just a wild memory that I have and I'm not sure what to do with this story other than to tell people to continue to be little freaks about the media you love, because even if it's not special, you can always learn something from it.
