Abstract
This article investigates the relationship between young people’s game-making practices and meaning-making in videogames. By exploring two different games produced in a game-making club in London through a multimodal sociosemiotic approach, the author discusses how semiotic resources and modes were recruited by participants to realize different discourses. By employing concepts such as modality truth claims and grammar, he examines how these games help us reflect on the links between intertextuality, hegemonic gaming forms and sign-making through digital games. He also outlines how a broader approach to what has been recently defined as the ‘procedural’ mode by Hawreliak in Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames (2018) can be relevant for promoting different and more democratic forms of meaning-making through videogames.
Highlights
K e y w ord s digital games game-making grammar modality multimodality procedural mode social semiotics videogames
Throughout the last decades, we witnessed ‘the institutionalization of video game practices, experiences, and meanings in contemporary society, which places video games and video gaming as an important part of our social imaginary’ (Muriel and Crawford, 2018: 19). This process of institutionalization helps us explore the relationship between videogames and meaning-making through discourses, ‘socially constructed knowledges of reality . . . developed in specific social contexts, and in ways which are appropriate to the interests of social actors in these contexts’ (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001a: 5)
Discourses are limited to influencing the public imaginary about a specific context, but can mediate how meaning-making processes are carried out in a specific context: different authors (Bogost, 2006; Flanagan and Nissenbaum, 2014; Freedman, 2020) identify how certain values can find their ways into semiotic resources in gaming, for example
Summary
I rely on data from recently concluded research investigating expressive practices in game production, with attention to how platforms and game design conventions actualize discourses and influence young people’s game-making. This mixture, creative, culminates in a situation where the presentational modality claims (gaming and teen romance) can work against each other, since some discourses (e.g. romance) are not transduced from one domain (e.g. youth fantasy) to another (e.g. digital game), as noticed in the final example presented in the previous section (Excerpt 1) This is a different process from that followed by Yerry and Juan, who constructed a presentational modality that articulates scientific fiction (through the narrative of Experiment Z) and traditional gaming (through gaming conventions, such as the invisible barrier). This difference between Extrovertido and Experiment Z raises questions about the possibilities of meaning-making in videogames: are we fated to subject ourselves to existent ‘game grammars’ to have our messages becoming intelligible? This difference between Extrovertido and Experiment Z raises questions about the possibilities of meaning-making in videogames: are we fated to subject ourselves to existent ‘game grammars’ to have our messages becoming intelligible? Can we shift conventions to be more inclusive through game design? Can we actualize gaming discourses to encompass different positionings and voices?
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