Modal Rhetoric
Multimodal Metonymy in Videogames
Before our August hiatus, I wrote that game critics and theorists need to be timely and accessible if we’re going to influence the games industry and gaming culture in general. I believe in that approach very much, but our persuasive goals needn’t always be so pragmatic. It’s nice to exercise different intellectual muscles from time to time, and that’s what I’m doing here. In this essay, I’m interested in a very basic but difficult question: How do we extract meaning from a videogame? How does it signify to us, the players? Continue Reading