How to Say Things with Actions I: a Theory of Discourse for Video Games for Change (original) (raw)
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How to say things with actions : a theory of discourse for video games for change, DIGRA 2011
Think Design Play: The fifth international conference of the Digital Research Association (DIGRA), 2011
This paper proposes the interpretation of video games as discourse (in the explanation of discourse commonly used in linguistics and studies of natural language, not as understood in semiotics or cultural studies) to explore further the dynamics through which video games can propose structured meaning and articulate an argument. Such topic is especially relevant for video games with an agenda, whose goal is not just to produce an engaging game experience, but also to convey a message and have some control over the desired outcome (persuasion, information, expression, aesthetic experience). The notion of discourse can help classify serious games according to their specific aim, and can help understand how meaning production in procedural rhetoric takes place.
Encyclopedia entry on the discourse of games, discussing videogames' textuality, narrativity, word formation, slang and metaphor, multimodality, metaludic communication and rhetorics. Citation: The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, Edited by Karen Tracy, Cornelia Ilie, Todd Sandel, 05/2015: chapter Discourse of Games: pages 406-411; Wiley., ISBN: 9781118611463
Critical Discourse Analysis, Rules and Persuasion in Video Games
Jezik, književnost, teorija (ed. Biljana Mišić Ilić and Vesna Lopičić), 2019
Following Fairclough’s (1995) observation that texts in contemporary society are multi-semiotic and Lemke’s (2005) call for extending the scope of critical discourse analysis to new communications media, including websites, blogs, discussion groups, and video games, the present study aims at contributing to the incorporation of video games as multi-semiotic phenomena into discourse studies. The main purpose of our study is to select several aspects of Bogost’s views on video games’ persuasiveness (2007) and combine them with Fairclough’s (1995, 2003) theoretical positions. Our attempt to create links between two different, but seemingly related theoretical frameworks was prompted by Bogost’s (2007: 3) claim that computational processes themselves can be persuasive. In the course of connecting the two, we are paying attention to the concepts of the rule-based discourse, genre-embedded rules, remediation and invisibilization. We hope that such approach might initiate further links between the two frameworks, both of which might benefit from such cooperation.
Discourse, Context & Media, 2017
The paper is aimed at proving the hypothesis that multimodal construction in video games can follow specific discursive aims in the process of persuading game players. In order to prove this, we have performed a multifaceted analysis which elaborated the ways in which different modalities in a representative video game combine so as to convince the player to act, play, and perhaps think accordingly. The multimodal approach employed in the paper combines the notion of discourse aims and the rhetorical and argumentative structure of Metal Gear Solid, and analyses different narrative strategies and verbal cues, as well as the overall interface, control, and gameplay. The results suggest that verbal and textual cues combine with audio-visual elements and highly specific gameplay strategies in order to refrain the player from killing enemies. This might indicate that video games are likely to possess a great persuasive power, as they are both multimodal and highly interactive.
The Discourse Structure of Video Games: A Multimodal Discourse Semantics Approach to Game Tutorials
Language & Communication, 2022
The article proposes a multimodal discourse semantics approach to the analysis of video game tutorials that provides a discourse pragmatic analysis of the game canvases in these tutorials. The study mainly builds on linguistic approaches to formal dynamic discourse semantics that have already been successfully applied to other multimodal artefacts. The article will showcase the application of the resulting ‘logic of multimodal discourse interpretation’ to two specific cases of video game tutorials. This will outline particular discourse relations holding between events and segments in the tutorials as distinctive features of this video game genre and show the discursive patterns of these instructions.
This innovative text examines videogames and gaming from the point of view of discourse analysis. In particular, it studies two major aspects of videogame-related communication: the ways in which videogames and their makers convey meanings to their audiences, and the ways in which gamers, industry professionals, journalists and other stakeholders talk about games. In doing so, the book offers systematic analyses of games as artefacts and activities, and the discourses surrounding them. Focal areas explored in this book include: • aspects of videogame textuality and how games relate to other texts • the formation of lexical terms and use of metaphor in the language of gaming • gamer slang and 'buddylects' • the construction of game worlds and their rules, of gamer identities and communities • dominant discourse patterns among gamers and how they relate to the nature of gaming • the multimodal language of games and gaming • the ways in which ideologies of race, gender, media effects and language are constructed. Informed by the very latest scholarship and illustrated with topical examples throughout, The Language of Gaming is ideal for students of applied linguistics, videogame studies and media studies who are seeking a wide-ranging introduction to the field.
Procedural rhetorical Academic Review of McDonald's Videogame
This article based on two articles that discussed the procedural-rhetorical games and the idea of proceduality, which can reveal the perspectives of the game designer. This paper uses McDonald's Video Game designed by Molleindustria as an example to reflect the idea in these two papers. In order to interpret the example, contextuality, textuality, image expression and my own reflection to the value expression of this game will also be mentioned. Key Words : procedural-rhetorical, proceduality, game value INTRODUCTION Generally, videogames are defined as the way of entertainment while the study of procedural-rhetoric gives us a new idea that games actually can be serious and involve in the value and meaning that the game designer would like to reveal through processes. Using procedural-rhetorical method, designers can easily insert the value into games. As Ian Bogost says, procedural-rhetoric allows video games to claim something valuable by imitating the real processes in the real world (Bogost,2008). Janet Murray furtherly introduces the idea of proceduality, which explains the use of rules in procedural-rhetorical games is to represent the regulation, culture, and even social value in the real world. Moreover, procedures in the game also can create more possibilities, which players may not have a chance to experience and even exaggerate the real condition the game imitates so that enhance the expression of the game's value (Murray, 1997). The study of procedural-rhetoric is significant because it establishes a form that numerous new games can be built on this foundation and it is effective in raising the discussion about the issues in the real world.
Film Discourse in Videogames - Summary (PhD Thesis)
This study examines the ways in which videogames communicate with players through film depiction strategies and how the filmic ways of communication function in cybertextual media context, especially on the syntagmatic, discursive level. Analysis shows how formative and aesthetic principles of film function when transferred to the new, interactive medium, and how they correspond with specific experiences that emerge from playing the game itself. The thesis that filmic and ludic modes of expression in videogames are typically and normatively coherent in delivering certain experiences to the players elucidates in an array of taxonomically arranged examples. They prove that videogames heavily rely on communicational models that were developed in film. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to explore the synergetic communicational impact of filmic and ludic modes of expression in videogames.
Game as text as game: the communicative experience of digital games
Comunicação e Sociedade, 2015
We propose to regard video game as text, but not by literally understanding it as a verbal expression, and instead recognizing that many assumptions of literary theory are relevant to its analysis. This option seems to put us in sync with the narratologists, who exalt games as new manifestations of narrative, but cling to a conception of text as world that values illusionist effects. Instead, we are interested in experiences that, against this perspective, recognize the possibility of regarding game as a text that is a game - an incomplete object that is to be updated by the reader in a self-reflective relationship with the signs that compose it, a central notion to theories such as Iser’s and Dewey’s. Then, instead of focusing on strategies of immersion on large virtual worlds, we favor small independent casual games (such as Small Worlds, Grey, The Beggar, and Dys4ia) analyzing how, in these, take place experiences that allow us to re-examine the aesthetic potential of the medium.
Action and Communication in the Virtual World of Video Games
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Ephemerides, 2017
The ambition of this paper is to discuss the possible ways of analysing one of the latest media of our times, the video games. By way of preliminary, we attempt to define the new media element that we call video game, followed by an investigation into the possibilities of narrative/discursive and medial analyses applied to video games. We deem our article necessary as video games define our present to a great extent, filling in a considerable amount of time in the life of young and middle-aged individuals alike-still, there are very few domestic analyses on the complex narrative structures, rhetorical practices, and intermedial relationships of computer games. News on the extreme 'overuse of computer games' take charge of public discourse, reportingotherwise rightly-on cases featuring computer game users for whom these media served as sources of inspiration for their engagement in violent acts. But, at the same time, we often tend to overlook the fact that this new medium offers excellent new possibilities for 'taking possession' of complex virtual worlds, establishing new types of communication media, and creating first-class narratives.