A Voice of Gaming

For my semiotic analysis paper I chose to analyse a PlayStation 3 commercial. Like all commercials, it looked totally normal on the surface. When I viewed it more in depth though I found things that I never would have seen otherwise. It showed me that more youths are beginning to play more and more video games while losing ties with what's truly important in their lives.

This is an excerpt from my essay:

"There is another very relevant connection to McCloud’s book. He tells the reader that when we’re kids we use mainly visual images to express our ideas until we learn to talk. Then as we get older we begin to use less visuals and we express ourselves more orally. We used words and images interchangeably. It didn’t really matter which we used, so long as it worked. Words and pictures together are considered, at best, a diversion for the masses, at worst a product of crass commercialism (McCloud, 140). In the commercial no words are spoken at all and the commercial is targeted for a younger audience. The viewer realizes this because the main boy in the commercial looks no older than 14 years old. All the boys standing on the rooftops don’t seem to be older than 17 years old. Only visuals are used, no words even need to be spoken because the commercial is worth literally 2000 words. The clues that allow the viewer to realize what the commercial is for are even just visuals, not spoken."

I actually enjoyed this assignment a lot. It was really interesting and I learned so much. The way I look at media is totally different now. Before this assignment I never would have thought to look that in depth at the media. I never realized how many hidden messages are in the media as well. When you search for hidden messages in the media on http://www.youtube.com/ you get hundreds of results. Movies that I have seen in the past, even Disney movies, almost all have hidden messages or images. This Coke ad has a hidden image of a female giving a blow job

There are lots of videos and pictures like this one in the media.

I feel I did well on this paper. I tried as hard as I could to do what was expected of me, which I was pretty unclear on. I took my time and made sure to edit the final paper a few times.

Overall Mark should keep this project because I learned a lot and really enjoyed doing it.

(http://killermookie.org/images/coke_blow.jpg)

(http://img.alibaba.com/photo/11081295/Sony_Playstation_3_60gb_Game_Console__Brand_New.jpg)