Video games as new tools for political persuasion : web games of the Estonian Centre Party

This thesis studies four web games that have been released in Estonia in 2004-2011 and have been sponsored by the Estonian Centre Party. Using video games in political campaigning is a recent and not very widely spread trend. Therefore, these web games provided an opportunity to examine the ways how political messages can be inserted into video games and how the qualities that are unique to video games can form political arguments and persuade the players. The main objective of this thesis was to identify the persuasive components of Centre Party's web games and to compare the persuasive arguments that were found from the games' representative layer to those that were formed on the games' procedural layer. In order to do that, the Centre Party's web games were placed in the wider context of political videogames and analyzed with semiotics, gameplay rhetoric and procedural rhetoric. Ultimately, the goal of the thesis is to emphasize the uniqueness of video game representative qualities which seem to be superseded by the studies of rhetorical potential of game rules