Tro, hopp & påverkan : En semiotisk analys av Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

Videogames have in recent times become an extremely large entertainment business, where specific games can have millions of players and spectators. Usually when people are consuming entertainment, our critical thinking is ignored and we’re just enjoying the show, which leaves us more susceptible. With a fourth of all adolescents in USA consuming as much e-sports as traditional sport, a major part of the spectators is of young age. DICE is a Swedish game-development studio who has created major successes in their line of business. This combined with the political setting that exists in the world at the moment is what made this analysis interesting. We wanted to analyze how the ideologies capitalism and socialism is expressed in DICE’s game Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, and if there is something that indicates an attempt of persuasion. To get a suitable result of the game we chose to do a semiotic analysis created by Roland Barthes, where we interpret and analyzed dialogues, signs and narrative elements. We selected a few scenes, missions and signs along the game that with the help of our denotations and connotations gave us the opportunity to break down the events and analyze it. The fact that we, the authors have the same cultural background as the developers from DICE, gives us a slightly better chance to interpret the events and understand the codes. The study´s result was unexpected. As we started this essay with a prior knowledge about the conglomerate and Faith as the protagonist, we had some thoughts that capitalism would be expressed negatively and socialism positively. The result shows us that capitalism is in fact expressed negatively, while socialism doesn’t have distinct expressions. The result shows a possible attempt at persuasion, however our theory is that the persuasion has no effect. The persuasion never reaches a level which influence the player to become political active or change their original election vote