I plan to make a storyline game called “the night in the forest” I am still working on the title so the video game name might change in newer drafts.

Ideal consumer-
age range =16
gender= girl
hobbies=storyline video games/animals/music/cartoons/adventure story games
clothing=indie/retro t-shirt, vans shoes, mom jeans

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1. Roland Barthes – was a french theorist, semiotician, philosopher and critic who wrote a book on mythologies. Which was a collection of essays taken from Les Lettres nouvelles, examining the tendency of contemporary social value systems to create modern myths.
2. C. S. Peirce – Charles was an American philosopher, mathematician, and a scientist who was also known as “the father of pragmatism”. He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for thirty years. Pierce’s theory of signs is known to be one of the most complex semiotic theories due to its extensive claim. Anything is a sign—not absolutely as itself, but instead in some relation or other. It defines three roles encompassing (1) the sign, (2) the sign’s subject matter, and (3) the sign’s meaning or consequence as formed into a kind of effect called its interpretant.
3. Ferdinand de Saussure – Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotician. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics, and semiology in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics/semiology.
4. Semiotics – The study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.
5. Sign – A gesture, an object, quality, or event whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else .
6. Signifier –  A sign’s physical form (such as a sound, printed word, or image) as distinct from its meaning.
7. Signified – The meaning or idea expressed by a sign, as distinct from the physical form in which it is expressed.
8. an iconic sign –  Is a direct connection to an object e.g. it looks or sounds like the object.
9. an indexical sign –  Is which has an indirect link to its’ object e.g. the word “rose” makes you think of flowers.
10. a symbolic sign –  Is which has a random link based on a shared knowledge or an agreement, e.g. letters, shapes, colours, sound effects, facial expressions.
11. Code – A system of words, letters, figures, or symbols used to represent another meaning.
12. Dominant Signifier – The main sign
13. Anchorage – Anchorage is when a piece of media uses another piece of media to reduce the amount of connotations in the first, therefore allowing the audience to interpret it much more easily. for instance, in a newspaper, pictures are accompanied by a caption that allows us to understand what the picture is showing us
14. Paradigm –  a collection of signs/ things
15. Syntagm –  A sign within a sequence, changing it’s meaning
16. Signifcation – The representation of a meaning.
17. Denotation –  The primary meaning of a word, in contrast to the feelings or ideas that the word suggests. (Bathes)
18. Connotation – A certain meaning of a sign.
19. Myth – A story that is believed but had no evidence of truthDominant Ideology, 
20. Radical text – texts which challenge the dominant ideology or myths which can be referred to as ‘radical’.
21. Dominant Ideology – An ideology is a world view, a system of values, attitudes and beliefs which an individual, group or society holds to be true or important; these are shared by a culture or society about how that society should function. Dominant ideologies.
22. A reactionary text – the opposite of radical text supports Dominant ideas

• iconic signs;
• city background
• suits
• jackets
• hair
• light in heading of Detroit
• Sony logo
• RP logo
• red bar
• white underline
• blurred crowd background
• Indexical signs;
• blurred crowd background(bottom right corner)
• “heavy rain”
• “two souls”
• “night in the woods
• “dawn”
• “o” in Detroit- LED light
• “human”
• “worried facial expression”-(Kara Left Middle)
• round LED Light on the side on the peoples heads-not human or super human
• the text style for the heading-futuristic
• blue clouds/mists-imply futuristic
• symbolic sign:
• determined facial expression(Markus right side)
• “worried facial expression”-(Kara Left Middle)
• headings
• subheadings
• small text
• orange text
• red bar
• the dominant blue colours in the magazine

For this summer project of designing a video game magazine cover I started off listing my top favourite games I’ve either played or watched playthroughs of. My list contained; “Detroit Becomes Human”, which is my most favourite game I’ve ever played that is filled with diversity,amazing graphics, great story lines and more. “Night In The Woods” is a story line game with cute graphics and lovable characters. “Little Nightmares” a horror adventure game that explores this odd world filled with suspense and mystery. And the final game on my list was “Man Of Medan’ it’s a sequel to the classic horror decision game “Until Dawn”.

So after listing my favourite games I started to look at different professional video game magazine covers, and I noted the similar things the covers had in common. Most would showcase one game as the main interest of the cover, and put smaller titles for other games. To catch the interest of the audience, if the first game wasn’t as appealing.

When creating my magazine cover I used a gaming cover about the  ‘Last Of Us’ as a reference. I did this because it could help me create a more realistic and professional gaming cover, almost like a template.

To follow the plan of having one main game to present I decided to go with “Detroit Becomes Human’ because It firstly was my number one game on my top 5, and It had the most usable material for a gaming cover.I started the process of making this cover by finding a collaging software, were I could add text, and photos together to create my cover.

 I ended up finding this software called, lucid press which was free, and easy to use. When I loaded up lucid press I started playing around with the order and arrangement of screenshots to see what would look the best, whilst leaving room for subheadings. 

After I chose the correct order of the pictures I looked back at my reference to see how its subheadings where placed and with what colours,language, and font they used to intrigue their audience. With the cover I was referencing from they would put their subheadings in bold, to make the audience enticed to read it. They also changed the fonts; size, colours or shape to make the names of the games stand out more.

To make the cover stand out more, they chose a dramatic photos. Which would intrigue the audience to want to know more about what the game is about. Also when choosing a photo for a magazine cover usually they place the main character for the big heading since more people will recognise it and want to read it. I took this into account and put the main 3 characters of the game on the magazine cover.

With designing a magazine cover, colours matter a lot. The colour palette of a magazine cover, can contribute to if the magazine gets sold or not. So it’s very important to not over power the colours or leave them to bland.

 When creating my cover I tried to make it look dramatic whilst not over filling the page with titles. I think it turned out well, and im really pleased with the outcome. I think my magazine cover is more aimed at the audience of ages late teens to early twenties.

Whats media studies?

It studies the forms of media and what they do. Learning how the distribution them, and use them to your advantage.

What’s media ?

Different forms of entertainment. And can be a platform for important information either from news or corporations.

What will media studies help you to do?

It will help me learn the best way to target a certain Audience and age groups.  How big companies use media to make themselves popular, like forms of media do the use the most?what works the best? And how do they get the public to like/ get hooked on what they are showing/selling?

What’s the point of media?

The point is to learn about the how to sell and how to know what the public likes, because there isn’t much point trying to give out information, or products if no one wants it.