Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
Meaning What?
When we play computer games we do so because they're fun. But they are only fun
because we can make sense of them: they mean something to us. We recognize the
worlds they depict, what we are expected to do in those worlds, and how we can
make progress and in general play the game. There appear to be two types of mean-
ings to be found in computer games. As we found out on a number of occasions
throughout this topic, very often the meanings we fi nd in games relate not just to
games but to what we know about the real world or fi ctitious worlds we know from
other media, such as fi lms. We know about crime and criminals, about civilizations
in the distant future, about the aftermath of nuclear war, and so on. There are other
meanings we fi nd playing games that are specifi c to games: these kinds of meanings
have to do with agency; fi nding things out by doing, by intervening, by affecting
change. Much of what we have discussed so far in this topic has to do with this
second type of meaning. We make use of both types in fi nding overall meaning and
thus fi nding pleasure in computer games.
In the next two chapters of this topic we are going to study a general theory
concerned with the way human beings fi nd meaning in just about anything: in any
situation they might fi nd themselves, in any communications media they might fi nd
themselves using, in even mundane situations such as walking down the street or
sitting on a train or bus. Human beings survive by fi nding meanings in the world
around them. All sorts of theorists have attempted to fi nd out how and why the
making of meaning works for us. We can attempt to answer such as question in
many differing ways. We could use neuropsychology and look at the way the brain
functions in terms of cerebral structures. We could consider behavioral psychology
and do experiments to see how people react individually to particular situations. We
could consider social science and see how people in general react to specifi c situa-
tions. We could consider anthropology and observe how people behave in the real
world and attempt to build a theory of what, in their makeup, determines these
behaviors. XEODesign's work, as discussed in Chapter 6, is an example of this.
We are going to use semiotics. This is a theory that attempts to relate the way
signs, things, in the world around us are perceived and the kinds of meanings we
associate with them. Semiotics is the study of the nature of signs and groupings of
 
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