Semiotics

So Thursday was lecture time again, this week on Semiotics. Frankly there was an entire room full of people who had no clue what this is/was about, but from what I could gather I think it was basically about communication, and the ways in which we can do this. The most interesting part of the lecture was a bit about iconic and arbitrary signifiers, which sort of described how easily we can take something and attach meaning to it. For instance, a picture of a cat is highly iconic, and anyone in the world attaches the same meaning to that picture (i.e. picture of cat = cat). Therefore its highly iconic. An arbitrary signifier might be the word "CAT" which is more random, as it has no relation to an actual cat other than the fact that it has been randomly chosen to be the sequence of letters in the English language to denote a cat.

I found myself linking this particular aspect back to last week's lecture on realism, because the ideas of semiotics seem to have ideas about realism tied in. I must admit though, I felt far more engaged last week compared to this week.

Art and Realism

Had an interesting lecture today about realism and its importance within art and media. I've always considered realism, personally, to be of huge importance in art. I like to see paintings which strive to be as realistic as possible in the way they portray their subjects. We were actually shown one today by an artist who attempts to make every painting look like a photograph, with some really spectacularly impressive results. But the lecture raised the question of what realism actually is. How do we define what is "real" or "realistic"? A case in point was a front cover of National Geographic that we saw, where the famous pyramids at Giza had been manipulated to look closer together. The image looked totally realistic, but still did not portray reality. So was this a realistic image, or not?

As a games artist, this idea of visual realism versus subject realism is something that I can draw parallels with; there are lots of games which attempt to make themselves visually realistic, but don't actually represent the reality of their subject. One of the most obvious examples is the shooter genre; take 2009's blockbuster Modern Warfare 2, which has good looking visuals, animations and effects. It is, by video game standards, quite a visually realistic game. But the gameplay itself plays out nothing like war. In a sense, it is very similar to the pyramid image; it looks realistic, but doesnt show reality.

In contrast, 2001's Operation Flashpoint was the most realistic warzone simulator ever created, and remains so, along with its sequels, even now. But this was down to the gameplay mechanics, which were actually designed for and ported from a genuine military program called Virtual Battle Space, created to train troops. The graphics were OK at the time, but by todays standards they are terrible.

This again raises the question, which is the more realistic game? Modern Warfare 2, or Operation Flashpoint? What actually defines realism? It was quite a thought provoking lecture, actually, and has left me some interesting things to think about in terms of gameplay and graphics design in gaming, and their relation to realism.