The article, Semiotic domain: Is playing video games a waste of time, helped open my eyes to a new ideology of what video games are truly about. Literacy- in the academic sense is the knowledge and application of the written and spoken word. This however, in my mind, does not apply to video games. There are marginal words involved, there are mainly actions being pursued within a video game. There are pictures and images upon images of fast-acting actions and figures, with no written word in sight. Sure the article talks about “Multimodal texts” which incorporate to mediums of communication- the written word and visual imagery. But my question is this, where are the words in video games? All of the ones that I have seen or played have no literacy involved. And the actions are relatively violent in nature.
Please do not take semiotics out of context, and try to apply it to video games. Semiotics is the study of the written word and the English language, plain and simple. There may be different dimensions within the broad range of semiotics in which we can place “multimodal” underneath of the umbrella term of “semiotics”. We should not change the definition just to try and fit in another means of inter-personal communication, the video games.
