Satire at Play A Game Studies Approach to Satire STEFANO CASELLI, Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, Malta KRISTA BONELLO RUTTER GIAPPONE, Department of English, University of MaltaMsida , Malta JASPER SCHELLEKENS, Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, Malta STEFANO GUALENI, Institute of Digital Games, University of MaltaMsida , Malta The persuasive potential of games and their use in political propaganda and raising social awareness are well-established components of the game studies discourse, and the literature around persuasive games highlights satire among the expressive tones of several games. Despite this, what persuasive games’ literature still lacks is a complete and stand-alone defning account of satire in games, which could be useful in analyzing both analog and digital games used for satirical purposes. Our intention with this paper is to frame satire within the feld of game studies through notions and perspectives borrowed from other media studies and narratology. In that pursuit, we initially give an operational defnition of satire focusing on concepts such as entertainment, critique, and rhetoric. Subsequently, we explore how this defnition relates to, and interacts with, key concepts in game studies, such as procedural rhetoric, and the implied designer. Additional Key Words and Phrases: Satire, Procedural rhetoric, Persuasive games, Implied designer This is a pre-print draft of: Caselli, S., Bonello Rutter Giappone, K., Schellekens J. and Gualeni, S. 2020. łSatire at play. A game studies approach to satirež. Proceedings of 15th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. DOI:10.1145/3402942.3403007 1 INTRODUCTION The persuasive potential of games has become a well-established component of the game studies discourse. Examples of the scholarly interest in games’ persuasiveness include Ian Bogost’s work on procedural rhetoric [4], the evaluation and analysis of newsgames [6, 28], games with political intents, and the debate around the propagandistic use or subtle propagandist elements of games [34]. Despite this, very little has been said of the ways in which interactive media in general, and games in particular, can be expressly satirical (with a few exceptions ś see, for example, [17, 21, 25, 33]. To tackle this academic gap, the frst necessary step is to articulate what we mean by satire, and to understand how satire can be framed in a way that is useful for game studies. As novel ways to express satire, games help us frame it beyond the scholarly felds in which it has been predominantly studied so far. 1 1 Satire has of course been a topic for literary scholars [22], but also for scholars researching caricature (e.g. Chen K.W., Phiddian R., Stewart R. 2017 [11], Bonello Rutter Giappone et al. 2013 [1] ), drama (e.g. Yearling 2016 [35]), TV (e.g. Carpenter 2000 [10]), and journalism (e.g. Lockyer 2006 [24]). However, it has so far received little attention in relation to games, and this is what this paper seeks to address. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. Manuscript submitted to ACM 1