Since semiotics came to existence in Europe as a discipline, it has had a single aim, however variously defined that of understanding how meaning works, by studying how different combinations of words, images, and other expressive means make sense. Instead of focusing on cognitive and other biological processes that could play a role for meaning making, semiotics starts from the final product: a written text, a multimedia object, or an expressive artifact of other kind. The fundamental question addressed by semiotics is the following: for what reasons does this text or artifact have the sense that it has, and not another one?European semiotics was born from linguistics and literary criticism, and its first models derived from the analysis of written and oral texts, such as fairy tales and short novels. Is it possible to apply these analytical models to something that is not a text? For example, to a painting, a song, a movie, or a video game? Yes: expressive artifacts are comparable from a standpoint that sees them all as récits, narratives. This does not imply that a photograph makes sense in the same way a novel does. Most probably there are no expressive artifacts sharing fewer common traits: novels are temporal, "diegetic," based on language; photographic pictures are spatial, "mimetic," based on vision. And still, the main idea of European semiotics is that of finding in narratives, a common denominator for all forms of human expression (Barthes 1966). Common denominator permitting to compare radically different means of expression, and so to make traditional criticisms (of literature, art, music, games, etc.) and cultural analysis converge.Are video games different from any other form of cultural expression, and therefore special? Sure: in the sense that they have a proprium, a specific difference, some distinctive features making them capable of realizing unique meaning strategies and sense effects. But this is true also for every other form of expression: each one has 1 One of the most important features of the game Tetris is that the player does not know what pieces will fall after the next one.
