Retorica dello sforzo e ideologia nei giochi digitali

This paper faces the issue of the substantial absence of a semiotic study of ideology in digital games. It reconstructs this deficiency on a theoretical level by highlighting how semioticians have disregarded the concrete embodied activity of the player involving an actual effort. In response to this, the paper claims that such an experiential dimension of the player’s required effort can be studied by semiotics as a form of rhetoric which is used by videogames to convey potentially ideological content. To defend this idea, the paper is divided in four parts. The first part makes a distinction between actively and passively ideologic texts, identifying videogames as mass-culture product belonging mainly to the second category. In the second part, we deal with the problem of the semiotic study of ideology in games by distinguishing the study of their ideological content from the study of their specific forms. The third part of the paper presents three main theories of game studies concerning such specific forms, as related to three important schools of thought: a narratologist approach (represented by Aarseth), a proceduralist approach (represented by Bogost) and a cognitivist approach (represented by Grodal). Finally, in the last part we refer to the theories of both the textual legacy (Greimas, Fontanille) and the pragmatic legacy (Eco, Peirce, Rossi-Landi and Bankov) of semiotics to explain, in semiotic terms, the causes and effects of such a rhetoric of experience.