This is a fascinating application of Bitzer through Roundtree's expansion. The campaign understood the ways that successful interactions don't exist waiting to be discovered, they must be engineered by situational awareness, finding a relative understanding between the two who conversed, regardless of their relative positions. That's the strength of a volunteer on the ground.

The Redistricting Game is a particular case, but there's a whole other discipline of (what mass comm. students generally refer to as) news games that do precisely this.

Minnesota Public Radio and Marketplace built such a game a few years back called Budget Hero (since removed).

As Roundtree (previously described) stated, we can't use the data output from the simulation to forecast or reflect the validity of those procedures in the real world -- the simplifying assumptions made are large and numerous -- the game itself is made to convey the complexity of making political decisions. If it succeeds in that way, I'd say it's hardly a "gimmick."

This brings to mind Burke (referencing Malinowski, p. 65 of "A Rhetoric of Motives"), and the idea of a bureaucratic rhetoric.

This author's reading of Galloway seems to indicate that a protocol (or, perhaps, more broadly, a bureaucracy) sets some immobile boundaries on the kind of communication that can take place in a space.

It seems like this is distinct from what was previously described as procedural rhetoric, in that protocol pre-exists procedure.

This is very similar to the way Roundtree's understanding of a simulation's message works (particularly as outlined on page 11). The way a process is described prescribes the sorts of things one can do with that process. Clearly, this builds on the way a process was originally discovered, defined, and passed on to others.