Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames
Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames

Author: Jason Hawreliak

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-09-14

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1351659715

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This book merges recent trends in game studies and multimodal studies to explore the relationship between the interaction between videogames’ different modes and the ways in which they inform meaning for both players and designers. The volume begins by laying the foundation for integrating the two disciplines, drawing upon social semiotic and discourse analytic traditions to examine their relationship with meaning in videogames. The book uses a wide range of games as examples to demonstrate the medium’s various forms of expression at work, including audio, visual, textual, haptic, and procedural modes, with a particular focus on the procedural form, which emphasizes processes and causal relationships, to better showcase its link with meaning-making. The second half of the book engages in a discussion of different multimodal configurations and user generated content to show how they contribute to the negotiation of meaning in the player experience, including their role in constructing and perpetuating persuasive messages and in driving interesting and unique player decisions in gameplay. Making the case for the benefits of multimodal approaches to game studies, this volume is key reading for students and researchers in multimodal studies, game studies, rhetoric, semiotics, and discourse analysis.

Approaches to Videogame Discourse
Approaches to Videogame Discourse

Author: Astrid Ensslin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-05-02

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1501338471

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The first significant collection of research in videogame linguistics, Approaches to Videogame Discourse features an international array of scholars in linguistics and communication studies exploring lexis, interaction and textuality in digital games. In the first section, “Lexicology, Localisation and Variation,” chapters cover productive processes surrounding gamer slang (ludolects), creativity and borrowing across languages, as well as industry-, genre-, game- and player-specific issues relating to localization, legal jargon and slang. “Player Interactions” moves on to examine communicative patterns between videogame players, focusing in particular on (un)collaborative language, functions and negotiations of impoliteness and issues of power in player discourse. In the final section, “Beyond the 'Text',” scholars grapple with issues of multimodality, paratextuality and transmediality in videogames in order to develop and enrich multimodal theory, drawing on key concepts from ludonarratology, language ideology, immersion and transmedia studies. With implications for meaningful game design and communication theory, Approaches to Videogame Discourse examines in detail how video games function as means and objects of communication; how they give rise to new vocabularies, textual genres and discourse practices; and how they serve as rich vehicles of ideological signification and social engagement.

Literature, Videogames and Learning
Literature, Videogames and Learning

Author: Andrew Burn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-29

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1000404064

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This innovative book explores links between literature and videogames, and how designing and playing games can transform our understanding of literature. It shows how studying literature through the lens of videogames can provide new insights into narrative and creative engagement with the text. The book sets out theories of narrative aesthetics and multimodality in literature and videogames, alongside models of literacy needed for such cultural and creative engagement. It goes on to examine game adaptations of children’s literature; and a series of videogames made by students based on Beowulf and Macbeth. In each case, the book considers ways in which the original text has been transformed by the process of game design, and what fresh light this casts on the literary narrative. It also considers what kind of learning, creative production, and cultural engagement is apparent in the game designs and emphasises the importance of treating games as a narrative medium in their own right. With a unique approach to the aesthetics of narrative in literature and videogames, the book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students in the fields of literature, pedagogy, and game studies.

A Multimodal Approach to Video Games and the Player Experience
A Multimodal Approach to Video Games and the Player Experience

Author: Weimin Toh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-10

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 135118475X

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This volume puts forth an original theoretical framework, the ludonarrative model, for studying video games which foregrounds the empirical study of the player experience. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to and description of the model, which draws on theoretical frameworks from multimodal discourse analysis, game studies, and social semiotics, and its development out of participant observation and qualitative interviews from the empirical study of a group of players. The volume then applies this approach to shed light on how players’ experiences in a game influence how they understand and make use of game components in order to progress its narrative. The book concludes with a frame by frame analysis of a popular game to demonstrate the model’s principles in action and its subsequent broader applicability to analyzing video game interaction and design. Offering a new way forward for video game research, this volume is key reading for students and scholars in multimodality, discourse analysis, game studies, interactive storytelling, and new media.

Empirical Multimodality Research
Empirical Multimodality Research

Author: Jana Pflaeging

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-11-08

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 3110725002

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This volume advances the data-based study of multimodal artefacts and performances by showcasing methods and results from the latest endeavors in empirical multimodal research, representing a vibrant international and interdisciplinary research community. The collated chapters identify and seek to inspire novel, mixed-method approaches to investigate meaning-making mechanisms in current communicative artifacts, designs, and contexts; while attending to their immersive, aesthetic, and ideological dimensions. Each contribution details innovative aspects of empirical multimodality research, offering insights into challenges evolving from quantitative approaches, particular corpus work, results from eye-tracking and psychological experiments, and analyses of dynamic interactive experiences. The approaches and results presented foreground the inherent multidisciplinary nature and implications of multimodality, renegotiating concepts across linguistics, media studies, (social) semiotics, game studies, and design. With this, the volume will inform both current and future developments in theory, methods, and transdisciplinary contexts and become a landmark reference for anyone interested in the empirical study of multimodality.

What Is a Game?
What Is a Game?

Author: Gaines S. Hubbell

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2020-02-14

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1476639019

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What is a videogame? What makes a videogame "good"? If a game is supposed to be fun, can it be fun without a good story? If another is supposed to be an accurate simulation, does it still need to be entertaining? With the ever-expanding explosion of new videogames and new developments in the gaming world, questions about videogame criticism are becoming more complex. The differing definitions that players and critics use to decide what a game is and what makes a game successful, often lead to different ideas of how games succeed or fail. This collection of new essays puts on display the variety and ambiguity of videogames. Each essay is a work of game criticism that takes a different approach to defining the game and analyzing it. Through analysis and critical methods, these essays discuss whether a game is defined by its rules, its narrative, its technology, or by the activity of playing it, and the tensions between these definitions. With essays on Overwatch, Dark Souls 3, Far Cry 4, Farmville and more, this collection attempts to show the complex changes, challenges and advances to game criticism in the era of videogames.

Current Trends in EMI and Multimodality in Higher Education
Current Trends in EMI and Multimodality in Higher Education

Author: Vicent Beltrán-Palanques

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-08

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1003834337

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Looking at both English Medium Instruction (EMI) and multimodality in higher education, this edited volume bridges the gap between the two contexts by offering various new insights into fundamentals in multilingual education, EMI discourse and current teaching practices in internationalised contexts. Current demands in communication, especially in higher-education contexts, require examining EMI from a multimodal perspective with the aim of giving explicit attention to modern discourse practices. The contributors reflect on the principles guiding EMI and multimodality and their application in higher education using both practical examples and data-driven evidences. They discuss EMI multimodal discourse from an empirical perspective to unveil communicative practices in internationalised higher-education contexts; and exemplify classroom applications and ESP and EAP pedagogical practices that promote multimodal competence in higher education. The contributors provide solid theoretical foundations, key principles, research evidence and pedagogical implications that inform current methodologies and practices for EMI, ESP and EAP, as well as multimodality in higher education. This volume on EMI and multimodality in higher education will have broad appeal for researchers worldwide from various fields of expertise within education and applied linguistics.

Comics and Videogames
Comics and Videogames

Author: Andreas Rauscher

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-18

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 100022421X

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This book offers the first comprehensive study of the many interfaces shaping the relationship between comics and videogames. It combines in-depth conceptual reflection with a rich selection of paradigmatic case studies from contemporary media culture. The editors have gathered a distinguished group of international scholars working at the interstices of comics studies and game studies to explore two interrelated areas of inquiry: The first part of the book focuses on hybrid medialities and experimental aesthetics "between" comics and videogames; the second part zooms in on how comics and videogames function as transmedia expansions within an increasingly convergent and participatory media culture. The individual chapters address synergies and intersections between comics and videogames via a diverse set of case studies ranging from independent and experimental projects via popular franchises from the corporate worlds of DC and Marvel to the more playful forms of media mix prominent in Japan. Offering an innovative intervention into a number of salient issues in current media culture, Comics and Videogames will be of interest to scholars and students of comics studies, game studies, popular culture studies, transmedia studies, and visual culture studies.

Digital Literacies and Interactive Media
Digital Literacies and Interactive Media

Author: Earl Aguilera

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-08-19

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1000636348

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This text responds to changing literacy practices in the digital age by developing an interdisciplinary framework for analysis of digital content created by students. Drawing on scholarship that expands traditional understandings of literacy to account for new ways in which students engage with interactive text and media, Aguilera develops a methodological toolkit for formal analysis of multimodal representations. This book frames the central challenges faced by researchers entering the field of digital literacy studies, presents a nuanced discussion of digital mediation, and brings these topics to life in the case study of a Code Club, a library-based computer programming club for elementary, middle, and high school students. The three-dimensional framework, which offers a schema for analysis of multimodal content, computational procedures, and contextual factors involved in the creation and interpretation of digital content, serves as a much-needed framework for the critical analysis of digital multimodal composition. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators in the areas of language and literacy, multimodality, and technology and digital innovation in education.

Toward Critical Multimodality
Toward Critical Multimodality

Author: Katarina Silvestri

Publisher: IAP

Published: 2023-06-01

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13:

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This edited volume seeks to answer the question, “What does it mean to be a critical multimodal scholar in educational spaces?” Toward Critical Multimodality highlights how choices made throughout multimodal design and research processes are critically-oriented and inextricably linked to power. We show how social semiotics and multimodality inform engagement with criticality in educational spaces through questioning dominant narratives (e.g., white, cisheteropatriarchal, ableist, classist perspectives), exploring relationships between selves and space, problematizing and reimagining educational practices, and dreaming of educational futures that are just, anti-oppressive, and with room for all to thrive while learning. These chapters demonstrate how studying multiple modalities in interaction (e.g., image, writing, color, spatial layout, gaze, proxemics, gestures) can reveal how power operates, provide students with opportunities to explore themselves and their identities with respect to power, and provide a vehicle for scholars to disrupt and transform oppressive educational practices. Furthermore, multiple chapters show alternative ways to display, construct and share knowledge as transformative pedagogical practice in learning environments. We reframe social semiotics and multimodality as an integral part of decentering dominant ideas of power and what “counts” as purposeful meaning making by highlighting how criticality and multimodality integrate theoretically and methodologically.