The present study aims at evaluating the salience of images and text in document-like video game screens from three different periods. It will combine a previous attempt to multimodally analyse document-like video game screens (Stamenković & Jaćević, 2019) and recent diachronic approaches to multimodality that track changes in genre profiles, image types, and text-image relations (Pflaeging 2017; Stöckl 2017; Stamenković 2021) with specific eye-tracking procedures. In an eye-tracking study followed by a comprehension questionnaire and involving a student population, we will evaluate fixation maps, area-of-interest (AOI) data, and comprehension responses to see the reception pattern of a diachronic set of document-like screens from the corpus of screens from the Football Manager video game series (Sports Interactive 2006, 2012, 2018). With this, we hope to see the ways in which the multimodal design-shifts in document-like screen contents affect the reception and interpretation of such screens. In particular, we will be interested in how different areas of interest (e.g., image-dominant, text-dominant, graph-dominant, etc.) relate to participants’ attention and screen processing in the context of the entire screen. This could bring us one step closer to revealing the patterns of change in the communication with the user when employing the available repertoire of multimodal elements. This, in turn, might tell us something about how users navigate and understand document-like video game screens as related to their content type.

Pflaeging, Jana (2017): Communicative potentials and their use: The case of popular science journalism. in: Alexander Brock & Peter Schildhauer (eds.), Communication Forms and Communicative Practices: New Perspectives on Communication Forms, Affordances and what Users Make of them. Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 181-208.

Stamenković, Dušan (2021, forthcoming): The stylistic journey of a video game: A diachronic approach to multimodality in the 'Football Manager' series. in: Valentin Werner & Christoph Schubert (eds.), Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture. London: Routledge.

Stamenković, Dušan & Jaćević, Milan (2019): Video games and multimodality: Exploring interfaces and analyzing video game screens using the GeM model. in: Janina Wildfeuer, Jana Pflaeging, John Bateman, Ognyan Seizov and Chiao-I Tseng (eds.), Multimodality: Disciplinary Thoughts and the Challenge of Diversity. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 277-294.

Stöckl, Hartmut (2017): Multimodality in a diachronic light: Tracking changes in text-image relations within the genre profile of the MIT Technology Review. Discourse, Context and Media 20 (2017), 262-275.