Procedural Rhetoric of Restorative Justice in Video Games: Punishment, Forgiveness, Reparation, and Reintegration as Game Systems

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility that video games, through rules, decision-making systems, and
interaction mechanics, can procedurally model a restorative logic of justice rather than a recurring penal
logic organized around punishment, elimination, and victory through the defeat of an opponent. Drawing
on Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric, the paper examines how video games convey meaning
not only through narrative, imagery, or dialogue, but also through the structure of rules that determines
what is possible, desirable, punishable, or morally relevant to the player. Within this framework, restorative
justice is understood as an approach that shifts attention from wrongdoing understood primarily as a
violation of law toward the harm caused to people, relationships, and communities, together with the
responsibilities arising from that harm. The central question is whether video games can procedurally
organize forms of justice based on recognition of harm, assumption of responsibility, empathic
understanding, reparation, and reintegration. Through a qualitative comparative analysis of Undertale,
Disco Elysium, This War of Mine, and Papers, Please, the paper examines how these dimensions become,
or fail to become, part of the rules, mechanics, consequence systems, and possibilities for player action.
The analysis distinguishes narrative restorativeness, in which restorative themes are represented at the
level of story and characterization, from procedural restorativeness, in which restorative principles become
relevant to actual gameplay decisions and their consequences. The paper argues that video games can
model restorative justice procedurally when recognition of harm, responsibility, empathic understanding,
reparation, and reintegration are incorporated into the designed possibility space rather than remaining
solely narrative themes. The analysis does not establish psychological or moral effects on players; rather,
it identifies a medium-specific capacity to organize justice as a system of relationships, consequences,
responsibilities, and possible restoration.