ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some of the chief culprits that make interpreting games particularly messy and then offers some ideas as to how principles of multimodality might help us address the challenges. Videogames, regardless of genre, length, or platform, are complex artifacts that are inevitably imbued with meaning potentials from seemingly countless sources both within and outside of the text. The problem encountered when approaching meaning in videogames is that it is difficult to identify a satisfactory definition of play. Videogames are a particular form of play that rely on computational authorship and conveyance. Any videogame is a highly complex, multimodal artifact capable of communicating multiple genres of information simultaneously. The chapter demonstrates that the principle of multimodality provides a useful and refining conceptual framework for understanding how the medium's many component parts and interactions with each other come together to form meaning potentials.
