Wednesday, 8 October 2008

Semiotics: in and out of a game space

Thursday’s session will focus on structural linguistics, semiotics, semiotic structures and semiotic domains in video games, we will be looking at a couple of texts to help us understand what semiotics is and what it might offer you in terms of game analysis.

One of the main texts we will be using is “
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art” by Scott McCloud which we will be going through in the session. Hopefully it will help us crack the nut of what semiotics is and how it works.

One of the sections we will be looking at focuses on a piece of art by
René Magritte entitled Ceci n’est pas une pipe (trans. This is not a pipe)


You can view these pages online here

You might be interested in this page as well which is a very short piece by Michel Foucault about
Ceci n’est pas une pipe which might be useful in helping you further understand the picture.

McClouds book has become a seminal writing in the practice of sequential arts (comics) and looks at how we understand comics, investigating the structures and tools of the comic book to open up the realm of the sequential arts.


Some more of the book that we are using can be found here (which is a power point presentation on digital comics)

I have dug out some interesting links for you that you might like to look at for further understanding of the book

How comics can invigorate your storytelling

iFanboy – video review of the book Understanding Comics


Further Reading on Games and Semiotics

Chandler, D. - Semiotics for Beginners

Lindley, C. - The Semiotics of Time Structure in Ludic Space As a Foundation for Analysis and Design computer game research , Game Stdies, Volume 5 Issue 1, October 2005

Behrens, J. Frezzo, D. Mislevy, Kroopnick, M. and Wise, D.- Structural, Functional, and Semiotic Symmetries in Simulation-Based Games and Assessments

Friedman, T. – Semiotics of SimCity

Lemke, J.- MULTIMEDIA SEMIOTICS and DIGITAL GAMES

Neiva, E. and Romano, C. - The Semiotic Immersion of Video Games, Gaming Technology and Interactive Strategies, The Public Journal of Semiotics Volume I No. 2 July 2007

3 comments:

Christopher James Begley said...

Sound really interesting :) I'm looking forward to it in the morning

Stephen Rhodes said...

we had an amazingly cool debate during the lecture, i know Alan, that you wanted it a bit more structured but i liked the way it was a kind of "free for all" discussion.
After reading the rest of the hand out i became more intrigued about the whole subject and im looking forward to seeing what comes out of peoples thoughts for next week!

Alan Hook said...

Here is another link to a semiotic approach to game analysis that you might find interesting... it's a bit tricky though.

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1260000/1255097/p226-ferri.pdf?key1=1255097&key2=5215083221&coll=GUIDE&dl=&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618

"Structuralist semiotic notion of text [are] crit-
icized for being unable to account for the nonlinear and un-
stable nature of interactive ludic objects"