This essay is about the principles and rules that control persuasive computer games. The term persuasive games mean computer games, video games and other similar artifacts that are produced to shape opinion. The rhetorical scholar Ian Bogost at Georgia Tech claims that this kind of games mainly get their persuasive power by using procedural rhetoric and that games as a medium gives special conditions for procedurality.  By procedural rhetoric Bogost means an argumentation that is based on rules and choices, as opposed to texts, movies and images. (Bogost 2007). Bogost describes these procedures as quite specific for games and claims that they differ qualitatively from ?ordinary? rhetorical arguments even if they just as other arguments work by establishing enthymems.

This study investigates the potential of a rhetorical theory of knowledge to expand beyond its own domain and into political theory, specifically theories of deliberative democracy. Despite the increasing interest in communication in democratic theory in the last decades, the majority of theorists have not turned their interest towards rhetorical science. On the contrary, theorists often regard rhetoric as dangerous and incompatible with the deliberative ideal of reason. The aim of this study is therefore to defend rhetorical science by investigating how the rhetorical theory of knowledge ? as it is presented by Chaïm Perelman and Oldbrecht Tyteca, and further developed by Mats Rosengren and Maria Wolrath Söderberg ? can contribute to the understanding of deliberative democracy.