Abstract
User interfaces are a very important part of game aesthetics, but their impact on the semiotic processes and user experiences in different games and genres is still underestimated within current game studies. This chapter argues that interface analysis can contribute to the methods of game analysis, especially with regard to a future methodology of digital hermeneutics. With the term “digital hermeneutics,” I want to stress the necessity for new methodological approaches when we want to analyze digital media products, their “content,” and their semiotic mechanisms of meaning production. One key characteristic of computer games is how they change the role of the recipients by demanding a specific “activity” from their users. We need to pay attention to the players’ actions in order to understand the semiosis of games. In this context, interface analysis can be a good starting point to analyze by which means player actions are structured in the gaming situation. In order to explore the approach of interface analysis more closely, this chapter will discuss the common interface and “ergodicity” of real-time strategy games (RTS), a popular subgenre of strategy games. I will focus on some of the visual concepts that are used as key elements of the user interface of RTS.
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Notes
- 1.
For a design-oriented approach to the problem of meaning making in relation to game design, see Friess, Chap. 16.
- 2.
There are only a few approaches to game analysis that attempt to include the study of interfaces within their methodological framework. One noteworthy exception can be found in Consalvo and Dutton (2006). Mia Consalvo and Nathan Dutton describe a general framework for qualitative game analysis, offering a “toolkit” for the study of video games. “Interface Study” is one of the main, but still underdeveloped, categories within the “toolkit” of Consalvo and Dutton. The approach developed in this chapter can be read as a contribution to this toolkit and as a specific elaboration on the category of “Interface Study.”
- 3.
More about the project can be found online: http://www.strategiespielen.de. Accessed 23 Feb 2011.
- 4.
- 5.
A technical concept that dates back to the work Sketchpad (1963) by Ivan Sutherland.
- 6.
Despite this theoretical assumption, the scope of this chapter is, however, more or less limited to the side of on-screen structures, the images, and the graphical user interface. To analyze the side of player actions demands a different set of methodological approaches, which is beyond the reach of this chapter.
- 7.
For a more detailed discussion on “ergodicity” with regard to its relevance for the concept of genre in video game analysis, see Apperly (2006).
- 8.
The terms micromanagement and macromanagement are used to describe certain tactical and strategic actions in RTS. The terms are derived from economic theory. A detailed description is provided by Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Micromanagement_(gameplay)&oldid=318927077. Accessed 9 Oct 2009; http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Macromanagement&oldid%20=%20300439780. Accessed 9 Oct 2009.
- 9.
This interface structure is found consistently in numerous games of the genre and can already be found fully implemented in Dune II (1992), which is widely considered one of the most influential ancestors of contemporary RTS.
- 10.
Martin Jay used this term to discuss the historical and cultural variation of visual regimes. In his famous essay Scopic Regimes of Modernity (1988), he discusses the specific dominance of the visual as characteristic of western modernity. The starting point is the question of western ocularcentrism and linear perspective as a cultural perspectivation of the world with numerous philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural implications (in art history, Erwin Panofsky investigated some of them in his famous essay on Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927); in philosophy, they are associated with the ideas of Descartes, query, etc.). Jay contributed to the ongoing discussions about the concepts of a dominant visual paradigm and a specific “order of vision” in modernity by arguing for a pluralist point of view; he argued against the idea of a solitary regime and pointed toward the variety of numerous modes of perspectives and perspectivation, constituting a “contested terrain”; modernity could thus be characterized by “a differentiation of visual subcultures” (Jay 1988, 4). But Jay is not the inventor of the term “scopic regime”; he borrows it from French film theorist and semiotician Christian Metz, who studied cinema as a specific “scopic regime.” According to Metz, cinema can be characterized by the fact that it gives us “a primordial elsewhere, infinitely desirable (= never possessible) on another scene” (Metz 2000, 59). In psychoanalytic film theory, which was deeply influenced by Metz’ work, the idea of “scopic regime” is associated with the voyeurism of cinema, curiosity, and the Lacanian concept of “lack.”
- 11.
Ideologems are modular building blocks of ideologies.
- 12.
Taken as a formal setting, a preset of any individual player action, interfaces can be analyzed as a force of structuring the preconditions of any actualization or instantiation of individual game sessions. One could say that interfaces define the possible ranges of “empirical” player subjects by structuring their “ideal” positioning. Therefore – at this stage of game theory – interface analysis as an approach to game analysis is not a tool for the examination of socioempirical player behavior but for the analysis of computer games as complex media forms, their specific way of reproducing and transforming sociohistorically and culturally defined player positions.
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Wiemer, S. (2012). Interface Analysis: Notes on the “Scopic Regime” of Strategic Action in Real-Time Strategy Games. In: Fromme, J., Unger, A. (eds) Computer Games and New Media Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2777-9_5
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