Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Ramblings: Media tracks - Games vs Film.

In this "article" summarizing the book "New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics", I came across an interesting view on film as a media. According to the author, film has five tracks that can be used to convey meaning to the viewer:

1. Moving images
2. Dialogue
3. Noise (environmental sounds)
4. Music
5. Text

All these tracks are shared with Games as a medium. However, games have at least 3 more tracks at its disposal, that I can think of:

6. Responsive behavior (the game world responds to your actions and you are forced to respond in return),
7. Haptic feedback (Rumble)
8. Non-diegetic elements (the HUD and menus).

This might be something worth looking further into IMO....

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