Playing through metaphors: an analysis of metaphor use in life simulation games.

From consistent narratives to cutting-edge graphic design, designers have been investing heavily in making their items competitive in the market. Given the high level of interaction between the players and the games they play, it is to be expected that much of how real-life representations are built in our minds will, in one way or another, influence how we interact with virtual reality, impacting on the playability of a game. Studies on the role of metaphors in (video)games are rather recent and much is yet to be investigated. Through simulations of family life and school routine, for example, these games imply human behavior as systematic and goal-oriented. For this study, we selected popular free life simulation games available at a popular App Store for smartphones. When listing the existing metaphors, we noticed a systematic difference: while conceptual metaphors were multimodal, consisting of a combination of verbal and visual information, primary metaphors showed to be intrinsically monomodal, consisting of visual information. In this study, we argue that metaphors in life simulation games start off as text-dominant, but become image-dominant after some time. That is, players rely on both images and verbal cues while learning how to play the games, but after some time they can just look at the symbolic cues for information. We therefore propose that the classification for metaphors in games should be continuous and as dynamic as the game itself, since there seems to be a movement from text-dominant to visual-dominant metaphors throughout the games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]