Narrating Machines and Interactive Matrices: A Semiotic Common Ground for Game Studies

Ferri's paper argues that video games should be understood as "interactive matrices" and "narrating machines" rather than as texts amenable to standard narratological analysis. Its central claim is that games such as Tetris and The Secret of Monkey Island resist the tools of Russian formalism and Propp, since their outputs vary across sessions and their meaning emerges from play. The author proposes adapting Hjelmslev's content/expression framework and Rastier's differential semantics so that gameplay, the game-text, and the player's engagement with the system are treated as mutually constitutive in the production of meaning. The work is conceptual and theoretical throughout, offering no empirical industry data or quantitative findings.

The core of the argument is a semiotic model built on Eco's "Model Reader" concept. Players actualize a game-text by interacting with the matrix, and victory and defeat conditions form the nucleus of the competitive dimension. Ferri contends that games are neither purely competitive nor purely cooperative; rather, they combine both, as the system instructs players through didactic strategies while simultaneously opposing them. The interpretative trajectory is shaped by semantic data, feedback, and the player's accumulated encyclopedia of prior experience. The model is grounded in Deleuze and Guattari's "striated space," Peirce's pragmaticism, and Fusaroli's diagrammatic approach, yielding a three-part account of meaning-making in games.

The paper's final formulation describes gameplay as movement through a "pinballspace," in which avatars negotiate striations, understood as constraints, and smooth areas, understood as possibilities. Crucially, the model neither requires nor excludes narrative structures: where narrative is present, it is folded into interpretation and described semiotically, and where it is absent, the pinballspace account still captures the interpretive trajectory. The author presents the framework as a common basis linking differential semantics, interaction semiotics, and game studies. Its scope is limited, however, as the author acknowledges that the model remains promising but underdeveloped, and that it does not yet adequately address multiplayer and socially shared gaming practices.