Meaning What? - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 154

language and conversation, facial expressions, body language, and so on. Some of
these are social codes most people would be familiar with but others are more spe-
cifi cally Japanese. We only know them through intertextual references to other media
which have connoted a mythical Japanese culture that we draw on to make sense of
the game world of Shenmue. The graphical layout of the city is relatively simple
compared with that of Driver but the social space connoted is a highly complex web
of groups of people: shopkeepers, neighbors, bartenders and bar customers, sailors,
Chinese people, Japanese people, and of course the various criminal underworlds.
Shenmue is predominantly iconic-indexic with the symbolic largely hidden. The
result of this is that social and interpretive codes appear to dominate over textual
codes although the roles of the latter are very important and will be studied in
Chapter 11 .
The role of codes of narrative—so important to Shenmue—has become a fi eld
of study, virtual or interactive digital storytelling, in its own right; but there is one
point to do with fi lmic codes that we will make now. When discussing Shenmue we
suggested that we needed to add an extra generic activity, movie , to the others that
we had already been working with because of the importance of prescripted action
sequences (PSASs) and prerendered cut scenes integrated into the gameplay itself.
Making use of fi lm codes in this way is not intertextual in the manner of the exotic
fruits in Pac-Man or the style of Blade Runner. In Shenmue we do watch bits of
movies almost all the time as part of the gameplay. Shenmue adopts a multitextual
approach in addition to its intertextual approach to other aspects of the game. In
fact, this is what genre switching is; each of the game genres Shenmue switches
between: adventure , beat -' em - up , driver , and puzzle —in addition to movie —
represent related but distinct texts with their own media codes. Shenmue is a fi ne
example of a multitextual game. It seems highly likely that as computer games
develop and become more sophisticated—particularly with respect to more advanced
storytelling—they will come to rely on the multitextual approach more and more.
Later episodes of Resident Evil are further examples.
SUMMARY
In this chapter we have introduced some of the main concepts of semiotics and
applied them in some detail to Pac-Man as well as to a range of other games that
have also been the object of our analyses. Essentially we have been fi lling in the
gaps that our other analyses were not designed for. Of course not all games have
gaps to fi ll. Tetris for one being a game of agency and presence has no need of social
codes, for instance. But it being a digital game, does the player make use of appro-
priate media codes in order to play it successfully? We are not fi nished with semiotics
yet. In the next chapter we will study interaction from the standpoint of semiotics
and show how this incorporates activity profi ling, aesthetic theory, and POs and
allows us to more completely build a model of what a game is. Essentially we will
study media codes appropriate for video games.