Procedural Rhetoric: Opinions as Algorithms (entropicthoughts.com)

The piece uses The Oregon Trail as a concrete entry point to remind readers that games — and by extension any simulation or algorithmic system — don’t just model the world, they argue for a version of it. Early technical limits shaped what stories could be told, erasing entire peoples and perspectives; this is an instance of "procedural rhetoric," the idea that processes and rules themselves make persuasive claims. Procedural rhetoric is defined as authoring arguments through processes: the construction of rules and dynamic models that embody a theory of how things work. The author argues for richer, more ambiguous systems that allow play from multiple perspectives (e.g., Shawnee, Pawnee, Sioux) rather than a single, sanitized narrative. For the AI/ML community this is a caution and a challenge: simulations, environments, reward functions, and generative models encode assumptions and can concretize dangerous misconceptions or omissions. Technical implications include the need for higher-fidelity system models (not just prettier graphics), multi-agent and multi-perspective modeling, richer state and dynamics to capture sociocultural complexity, careful dataset selection, and transparency about what a model does and omits. Practically, that means designing environments and objectives that surface ambiguity, test counterfactuals, and make embedded value judgments explicit so models and users can reason about their limits and biases.