Meaning What? - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 155

sense

B

SIGN

A C

sign vehicle referent

Figure 10.4 Peirce 's characterization of the sign. (Courtesy of Daniel Chandler, Aberystwyth
University. ) (See color insert.)

In winding up this chapter we want to say a few things about the way we have
developed semiotics. In order to make the introduction of the subject easier to
understand we have simplifi ed and generalized somewhat; so before we point you
in the direction of further readings we are going to add a little complexity and
specifi city. Semiotics was invented separately by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced “ purse ” )
and gave rise to two distinct schools of semiotics which have then gone on to be
further developed into more branches and so on. Much of what we have called
“semiotics” in this chapter belongs to the Saussurian school, but not all of it. The
model of the sign we have adopted, for instance, is Saussurian. The three modes of
the sign, symbol, index, and icon, originate from Peirce, who also had a different
characterization of the sign itself, as shown in Figure 10.4 .
The “ sign vehicle ” is essentially the signifi er of Saussure. The “ sense ” is very
close to Saussure' s “ signifi ed” although Peirce saw it much more as a mental process
than a mental image. The “ referent ” has no analogue in Saussure' s characterization
and refers to something in the real world—which could be a fi ctitious object or
person—that anchors the sign to a certain extent. There are situations in which
Peirce's characterization is more appropriate than Saussure's; the design of aircraft
cockpits and ships' bridges are examples where the real world, in the form of a whole
set of referents, directly affects the controls and displays.
The whole philosophy as to what semiotics can and should be has changed over
the years. For instance, the approach to semiotic analysis we have adopted here
belongs very much to the structuralist tradition in the sense we have taken for granted
the idea that we only need to analyze the text, the game in our case, in order to arrive
at its meaning. Poststructuralism takes the view that in order to fi nd the meaning of
a text we have to consider the people who made and coded it and why they did what
they did, as well as considering the people who interpret and decode it—play it, in
other words. In this case semiotics can appear to be analogous to anthropology, the
study of the behavior of people in the real world. A mix of both approaches would
seem to be advantageous but is outside the scope of this topic.