Page 171 - Literacy in the New Media Age

160 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

school-science now. The fact that that readership is one of all children and young
people who go to school, which now encompasses very nearly all young people
up to late teenage, of both genders, would very likely have influenced their
design decisions. The question of ‘appeal’ would have been strongly felt, and
indeed the understanding that the young look at the screen, rather than read the
book, would have been present. So in a sense, the rules, conventions and logic of
the image-space, which are nowadays predominantly the arrangements of the
screen, would apply to their design even if in this roundabout way.

Reading as establishing and imposing criteria of relevance

To conclude this part of my discussion I wish to look very briefly at a page
which is influenced by the screen in every way: it reports, so to speak, the
screen, and its layout, its organisation is very much that of the screen
(Figure 9.9).
The screens of computer (or video) games are multimodal – there is music,
soundtrack, writing at times – yet overwhelmingly these screens are dominated
by the mode of image. As the graphics become ever more sophisticated, the forms
of reading necessary to play at least some of the games successfully become
more subtle and demanding. (I am not here talking of the many other conceptual/
cognitive demands to do with plot, for instance, or sense of character, or
strategies of various kinds.) Here I wish to focus on that aspect of ‘reading’ alone
which has to do with making sense of the organisation of the visual space –
visual analysis which rests both on visual acuity and on a highly developed sense
of the visual organisation of specific kinds of screen. Linearity is certainly not a
useful approach to the reading of these screens – it is visual clues such as
salience, colour, texturings, spatial configurations of various kinds, the meanings
of specific kinds of element either natural or human-made, which allow the
player to construct a reading path, which tracks the path of the narrative. The
strategies for successful reading are every bit as complex as those of the written
page – one might be tempted to say, more complex, given the pre-established
reading path of the page – but in any case, and certainly, different. It is not that
there isn’t a reading path, though many games of the ‘role-play’ variety (say, a
game such as Final Fantasy), or even action adventure games such as the famous
Lara Croft, offer alternative reading paths, something not encountered on
traditional pages. Readers of such screens are used to a different strategy. To call
it a freedom might be mistaken in that these games do have their rules, their
conventions, and at the moment at any rate, the reader’s real ability to be
genuinely ‘active’ in constructing reading paths that are actually new is not
existent.
The point, however, is that readers who come from such screens to pages
are used to reading differently. Many pages now are constructed to meet the
different strategies and expectations of these readers, and this example is one. It
is the second page of a review of a game, R-Type Delta. As with the school