Governmentality, Geopolitics and Procedural Rhetoric in Video Games: A Practice Based Methodological Toolkit

One of the significant turns of the recent scholarship in IR and in Critical Geopolitics has been towards the scrutinization of the everyday life, popular culture, and subject positions. However, despite the wide range use of Foucauldian literature and especially the concept of governmentality attributed to those recent scholarships, the absence of a clear methodological approach is becoming apparent. In order to fill this lacuna, the paper suggests the deployment of Ian Bogost`s concept of “procedural rhetoric” as a toolkit to devise “rhetorical analysis” as a methodological approach to elicit the traces of governmentality in popular culture. In this aim, first, the paper will show the ways in which those terms are engaged in recent scholarship merely as preliminary analyses to show popular cultural practices` relationship to governmentality. Second, through an FPS game play example, possibilities of a practice based, yet empirical methodological approach will be substantiated.