Abstract
This chapter presents a semiotic analysis of the video game Assassin’s Creed 2, based on the analytical method developed by Roland Barthes. The game is analyzed according to the series of actions, enigmas, semes, symbols, and cultural references found in it. In particular, from a symbolic perspective, the game is seen as a meta-game, representing in itself the experience of gaming, and as a psychoanalytic session, guiding the main character (and the player with him) in a journey in his unconscious.
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Notes
- 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.
- 2.
Albert Michotte (1946) experiments proved that we humans attribute agency even to the movement of abstract geometric figures.
- 3.
Rhetoric figures may give the impression of altering this linear evolution (for example by preponing or postponing an event in a flashback or premonition), but readers should not be fooled by figures, and most stories and games are linear and complete in the end.
- 4.
For example, to differentiate a ketch from a sloop, we should point out that the first is two-masted while the second is not. The difference between a ketch and a yawl is instead that in the first the mizzenmast if forward of the rudder post while in the second it is not.
- 5.
- 6.
The similarities between Desmond and the real player are discussed further in § 3.5.1.
- 7.
We see Altaïr retrieving information from the Apple at the very end of the first episode of Assassin’s Creed.
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Compagno, D. (2015). Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Semiotic Analysis of Assassin’s Creed 2. In: Trifonas, P. (eds) International Handbook of Semiotics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_45
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