Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Semiotic Analysis of Assassin’s Creed 2

Compagno, Dario

doi:10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_45

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Some techniques permitting distant viewing 16 are thus necessary to move on a larger scale. Instrumentalizing the analysis of visual documents, the project thus implemented a quantitative semiotics approach 17 .…”

Section: G H O S T D a T Amentioning

confidence: 99%

From Stock Shots to Ghost Data: Tracking Audiovisual Archives about the European Union

Shen,

Treleani,

Compagno

et al. 2023

VIEW Journal

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This paper deals with a major challenge linked to the collection of audiovisual documents within television and web archives. Looking for repeated sequences within a corpus of thousands of videos, we faced the fact that the footage we were looking for reveals itself to be reachable only as ghost data. In fact, any audiovisual sequence reused within different contexts exists conceptually as the repetition of one single visual unit, but from the point of view of the metadata tagging its occurrences, each item is a distinct document. Like a ghost, the shot is there, scattered among different places, but the metadata cannot point us to the visual form repeated, despite its evidence to the human viewer. When facing large amounts of data, to relate a visual unit to its occurrences, data analysis techniques are needed. We describe our procedures of collection and annotation, and the solutions combining qualitive work and a computer-aided approach to face this main challenge, within the research project Crossing Borders Archives (CROBORA).

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Section: G H O S T D a T Amentioning

confidence: 99%

From Stock Shots to Ghost Data: Tracking Audiovisual Archives about the European Union

Shen,

Treleani,

Compagno

et al. 2023

VIEW Journal

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“…Dans un premier temps, soulignons que l'avatar incarné par le joueur dans les jeux n'a qu'un pouvoir d'agent relativement faible. Il n'est, bien souvent, qu'une marionnette au service des Assassins ou des Templiers (Compagno, 2015 ;Rodriguez, 2014). À cet égard, Gilbert (2016) et d'autres (Lundedal Hammar, 2016Shaw, 2015) affirmaient que AC ne permet pas au joueur de créer une narration historique contrefactuelle.…”

Section: Agentivité Historiqueunclassified

“…Ainsi, l'interprétation proposée, par les concepteurs, des différentes villes dépeintes par la série peut être considérée comme polychronique, car elle mélange différentes époques, qui demeurent toutefois appuyées sur une recherche rigoureuse (Westin et Hedlund, 2016). Selon Compagno (2015), cette polychronie existerait, car l'Animus (la machine par laquelle l'avatar « voyage » dans le passé) projette au joueur une vision du passé réelle, mais compréhensible pour lui et donc teintée par différents anachronismes.…”

Section: Représentation Du Passéunclassified

Assassin’s Creed : synthèse des écrits et implications pour l’enseignement de l’histoire

Joly-Lavoie

2018

mje

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Assassin’s Creed est très populaire auprès des joueurs, mais retient peu l’attention des didacticiens. Pour nous éclairer sur le potentiel didactique de cette série, nous avons recensé des écrits en anglais et en français. Cela a permis d’identifier 22 articles. L’analyse des textes révèle que Assassin’s Creed présente le changement historique comme le fait de grands hommes. De plus, la représentation du passé, bien qu’appuyée sur une recherche documentaire rigoureuse, se conforme aux attentes des joueurs et aux besoins en termes de jouabilité. Ces résultats nous amènent à repenser la manière d’intégrer Assassin’s Creed dans un cadre scolaire.

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“…However, most of these studies try to define what digital games are from a semiotic perspective (Maietti 2004;Myers 2003), or how the interaction between games and players works (D'Armenio 2014). Other scholars focus on the narrative aspect of the game (Compagno 2013;Trabattoni 2014), whereas Upton uses semiotics as a tool for game design (2018). This dissertation aims instead to investigate how the architecture portrayed in digital games works as a system of signs that communicates with players, and for this purpose I resort to Umberto Eco's semiotic theory of architecture ([1968] 2016) to explain how real architecture communicates, combined with Brian Upton's concept of "anticipatory play " (2015; 2018), to explain how this communication is effected in digital games.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Virtual Capriccio: The Semiotics of Architecture in Digital Games

Aroni¹

2023

Preprint

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Digital games are among the most popular media on the planet, and billions of people inhabit such virtual worlds daily. Most of these worlds are made of virtual buildings, roads, and cities that players travel through. This dissertation aims to fill a gap in the game studies literature regarding the architecture of digital games, in terms of both its aesthetic aspect and its symbolic role as they relate to gameplay. It strives to answer the following questions: how does the design of virtual architecture influence gameplay and storytelling through its communicative aspect? How does digital architecture relate to real architecture? Where does the inspiration for digital games architecture come from? In order to answer these questions, this dissertation examines how architecture is used in digital games, how players interact with it, and what it communicates. The dissertation thus analyses the architecture of digital games through the lenses of semiotics and architecture theory, mainly the research pursued by Umberto Eco as regards the semiotics of architecture and by Brian Upton with his theory of “anticipatory play.” It presents case studies of digital games grouped in three categories: reconstructive, fantastic, and visionary. Reconstructive virtual architecture, as evidenced in Assassin’s Creed II (2009), aims to recreate existing locales, be they from the present or the past, with the intent to immerse the player in a simulated environment that is as close as possible to reality. Fantastic virtual architecture, represented by the Japanese game Final Fantasy XV (2016), is the category that arguably encompasses the vastest number of digital games, as it comprises the type of architecture designed to appear, if not realistic, at least plausible, and bears resemblance to real-world architecture. Finally, the category of visionary virtual architecture, as found in the independent game NaissanceE (2014), while still representing plausible and not completely abstract features, is meant to be perceived as an “impossible” construct. Through these case studies, the dissertation outlines how architecture plays a central role in digital games design, and proposes a semiotic framework for the analysis of virtual architecture that can be applied to the vast majority of digital games.

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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Semiotic Analysis of Assassin’s Creed 2

Cited by 4 publications

References 2 publications

From Stock Shots to Ghost Data: Tracking Audiovisual Archives about the European Union

From Stock Shots to Ghost Data: Tracking Audiovisual Archives about the European Union

Assassin’s Creed : synthèse des écrits et implications pour l’enseignement de l’histoire

The Virtual Capriccio: The Semiotics of Architecture in Digital Games

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