Media like videogames (and novels, film, music, etc.) play an important role in most people’s lives, and creation and comprehension of these works benefit from critical study. Scholarly analysis of media has been facilitated by information retrieval technology, which not only saves time, but also makes it possible to ask new kinds of questions. These benefits are relevant for any students or educators whose work includes the creation and interpretation of interactive media. However, current approaches treat games as monolithic artifacts because they are not capable of ingesting and crawling the content of games, and even modern search engines are better at capturing secondary text-based sources about games such as criticism, guides, and reviews. Moments that can take place within a game could instead be treated like pages in a book or like sites on the web. In this dissertation I describe research that identifies the needs of scholars and other experts for videogame moment retrieval, the development of two interactive systems that can meet a subset of those needs, and a publicly available corpus of student games that can enable artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and digital humanities research. My work contributes a new technical method to game studies, and a new domain of complex and culturally relevant data to information retrieval. Finally, my work contributes to game education with the design of search and visualization tools that could be used to analyze student game projects, to inspire future student work, and potentially to be incorporated directly into future student work processes.

Games are capable of conveying meaning via their mechanics. This is an information channel unique to games, which has been called procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007). What a player takes from a game depends on their personal reading (Summerville et al., 2018; Treanor, Schweizer, Bogost, & Mateas, 2011), but game creators and scholars can benefit from understanding a typical player’s experience and interpretation. Learning from analogy involves transferring insights from one system to another (Day & Goldstone, 2011; Hofstadter, 2001). This kind of transfer can be encouraged by metaphorical language, as demonstrated in an experiment examining the influence of the language used to describe crime in a newspaper article on reader’s crime-related policy preferences (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011). The contribution of the current study is a psychological experiment investigating the influence of a novel rhetorical game, replacing these differences in metaphorical language in the preceding experiment with differences in game mechanics. Additional interpretive context was gained from the inclusion of other rhetorical games. We found that players perceive rhetorical games to be making an argument, but player interpretations of these arguments and the games’ influence on their attitudes were not necessarily consistent with the games’ intended message.