Posts Tagged ‘The Semiotics of Video Games’

• Videogames open a new domain for persuasion: procedural rhetoric, “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions”.
• “When we create videogames, we are making claims about processes in the human experience, which ones we celebrate, which ones we ignore, which ones we want to question.”
• “Videogame players develop procedural literacy though interacting with the abstract models of specific real or imagined processes presented in the games they play. Videogames teach biased perspectives about how things work. And the way they teach such perspectives is through procedural rhetorics, which players ‘read’ though direct engagement and criticism.”
• “Serious games are videogames created to support the existing and established interests of political, corporate, and social institutions. Seriousness helps create an opposition to triviality, positioning the goals of government, business, and educational institutions against those of entertainment. ”

Read more in the book: Persuasive Games by Ian Bogost

The world as a gamespace:

• “There is no idle time in The Sims”.
• “Work becomes a gamespace, but no games are freely chosen anymore. Play becomes everything to which it was opposed. It is work, serious, morality, necessity”.
• “The utopian dream of liberating play from the game, of a pure play beyond the game, merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life”.

Algorithms:

• “What is distinctive about games is that they produce for the gamer an intuitive relation to the algorithm”.
• “The game is true in that its algorithm is consistent, but this very consistency negates a world that is not”.
• “Gamespace turns descriptions into a database and storyline into navigation”.

Boredom:

• “Boredom is something a body does when space will not let the body enter it in a way that transforms the body into something else, so that the body can forget itself”.
• “The time and space of the topological world [gamespace] is organized around the maintenance of boredom, nurturing it yet distracting it just enough to prevent its implosion, from which alone might arise the counter power to the game”.

Read more in the book: Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark

• Five conceptual planes for the analysis of game spaces:
  • Rule-based (algorithm, hardware)
  • Mediated (what appears on the screen)
  • Fictional (what is in the head of the player)
  • Play (where the player is)
  • Social (other players).
• On narratives:
  • “A fundamental function of narrative is that of providing a way of comprehending space, time, and causality”.
  • “Narrative can be thought as systems of verbal or visual cues prompting their readers to spatialize storyworlds into evolving configurations of participants, objects and places”.
  • “Games position their evocative elements to make sure that a location is not only a visual cue or a point in coordinate system, but also can be a feared obstacle, a safe home base, or a crowning achievement”.
• Examples of spatial structures:
  • Tracks: capture, intensify, and lengthen key racing moments.
  • Labyrinths: monotonous repetition without significant differentiation.
  • Arenas: open structures with one dominating demarcation line, the surrounding enclosement. In contrast to the labyrinth, they feature few visual clues that draw attention to the place as such; they provide the canvas for a performance. They are more social than labyrinths (the labyrinth is usually the one to fight against).
  • Bridges: enablers, channels for interaction.

Read more in the book: Video Game Spaces by Michael Nitsche