THE ROLE OF VISUAL GRAMMAR AND PLAYER PERCEPTION IN AN ONLINE GAME

This study investigates the relationship between the visual design and player experience in the online game. This study focuses on the role of visual grammar in relation to player perception in World of Warcraft. The phrase ‘visual grammar’ in this study is a metaphor representing to ‘the principles and rules of a visual game landscape (the game territory and environment) for composing the forms of visual elements and structuring the meaning of perceptual experience. It creates the system of visual communication in a particular context’. This study employs two approaches which combine analytical methods from different disciplines; they are visual approaches: visual semiotics and art theories to analyse the game, and multimodal discourse analysis to investigate the player experience and interaction. The units of this study emphasize on three area of investigation which are the site of game images, the site of player and interaction. This study carries on two main data which are the author gameplay experience and the gameplay workshop. The final results of this study are used to propose the fundamental visual grammar for analyzing three-dimensional online games. This fundamental structure of visual grammar consists of the initial units named visual elements which are regulated by the visual operators under the visual syntactic rules; the player experience is count as part of these rules.