ABSTRACT
In thinking about what kind of “grammar” games might use, I have found socialsemiotic theories of visual design useful. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) adopt three overarching functions of visual media which I will follow in this chapter.2 They call these representational, interactive and textual; though I will change the last category to compositional, which I find more transparent. So here, we can think about representation: how games represent aspects of the world, or construct fictional worlds, in ways that will seem familiar in many ways to the core business of English and of media education. We can look at how elements of narrative such as characters, events and locations are constructed, what kinds of meanings they convey, and why they are important to those who made the text or those who read, watch and play it. In the case of a trans-media text like Harry Potter, we can also consider how these aspects of narrative change across book, film and game.3 We can look at how games allow forms of interaction between participants: how the game addresses the player; how the designer addresses the player through the game; how the player engages with this address, and returns with particular responses, demands, actions. And finally we can look at how games are organised and composed: what design principles lie behind them; how they cohere, both as narratives and as games.
