The video game Myst makes a bold promise to its players - that it will transport them to an alternate reality and set them loose to explore there. A player generally sits in isolation at a computer, mouse in hand, watching a kind of high-tech slide show set to music. But the game has found an eager audience, with millions of people clicking around in this fictional world painted in pixels. First, a quick orientation to the world of Myst and the language of semiotics. The game is in CD-ROM format, and it runs on either PC or Macintosh home computers.
Players assume the role of the main character, who, as the game begins, finds a strange book.
The goal of the game is to piece together the full story from clues planted around the virtual world, and to use this information to free the right man. Words, those clusters of letters, don't mean anything by themselves, Saussure said. Roland Barthes is among scholars who have used semiotic analysis to study other kinds of signs, such as visual images. In Mythologies, Barthes argues that many images have accumulated complex chains of signifieds over time, and yet many people assume that the images naturally possess the cluster of meanings. He argues that close readings of images can help shed light on how they take on meaning.