Meaning What? - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 156

FURTHER READING AND TASKS
For further reading to support the ideas introduced in this chapter the best starting
place is Chandler (1994) whose approach I have adopted, in a greatly simplifi ed
form. The same document gives an excellent introduction to the history of semiotics
and its diverse schools of thought. For a more basic but very readable introduction
to the subject you could read chapter 9, “Signs of Life,” in Poole (2004). Two classic
but highly readable introductions to semiotics by two of the founders of modern
semiotics are Roland Barthes' Mythologies (Barthes, 1987) and Umberto Eco's A
Theory of Semiotics (Eco, 1979 ).
This has been quite a long and demanding chapter and you need a task to help
you build up your semiotic skills. But you already know what it is, don't you? Of
course, you have to do a semiotic analysis of OpenCity. Despite being a lot simpler
than the later versions it's still packed with signs and meanings of all sorts. Attempt
the kind of analysis for OpenCity that we did for Pac-Man. Of course you won' t be
able to do a complete analysis of all the signs in the game but see how far you get.
One of the reasons for choosing this game is that it is a very measured game in terms
of activity. Don't forget to follow the whole process from this chapter through. By
which we mean, don't just make a list of individual signs and leave it at that. Think
about the types of signs, denotation and connotation, syntagmatic and paradigmatic
analyses, codes, intertextual analysis, and so on.
When you're done with all this go back to your analyses from Chapters 8 and
9 and see what the big picture looks like; how does it all fi t together? Overall, you
should remember that the idea at this stage is to use semiotics to “fi ll in the gaps”
left by our other theories.