John Unger, Porter Lee Troutman, Jr., and Victoria "Tori" Hamilton, "Signs, Symbols and Pereceptions in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Poor critical reception of Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2
- Theoretical approach to sign/symbol in GTA: Vice City, study of 11 players' use of these signs and symbols
- Signification as both individual and social (in and out of the game)
- A mediated activity
- Avatar as symbolic text "read" by other symbolic texts in the game, informed by real-world player's subjectivity (unorthodox account of what goes on in a digital game)
- Interdiscursive, intrapersonal "planes of development"
- Burke's Pentad: Act/Scene/Agents/Agency/Purpose
- Why do Unger and co. use "agents" and not "actors?"
- Signs become symbols when they are habitual
- Positioning - different ways of being that people appropriate as individuals and members of groups
- How are signs/symbols internalized over short periods of time (microgenetic); how they constitute individual agency (ontological); sharing of strategies, discussion, interaction (sociocultural/historical); large-scale cultural and/or biological changes (phylogenetic)
- All of the above are mutually constitutive, linked through social activity, which is mediated through symbolic means
- Unger and co. overemphasize the interface elements of GTA:VC as if they are the only symbolic elements at play, and treat the actual game-world/space uncritically as if it is more or less equivalent to reality
- Arbitrary condition changes during empirical study? (Why do they choose to use cheat codes to change Tommy Vercetti into a female porn star? No theoretical explanation is given.)
- Wanting your avatar to run in the game as a consequence of knowing that you can run in the game (this is reductive - the desire to run in the game could also come from experiences with other games, or the existence of a running button could be inferred by a novice player based on how slowly the avatar moves without it)
- Knowledge about digital games is distributed (Gee)
- How to use the findings of this study to create games for learning? (What findings?)
- "moments of tension between players (agents) and mediational means (language, symbols)"
- An ongoing process of signification (and of changing conventional systems signification) unfolding in the GTA series and in digital games generally