How the Promotional Art for Halo 4 and Mass Effect 2 Communicates Gameplay : An analysis of how the art style in promotional art for Halo 4 and Mass Effect 2 communicates the respective gameplay to the target audience

Abstract: The thesis presents an analytic work of the MDA-framework and the promotional art of Halo 4 and Mass Effect 2 and how the two areas correlate with each other. The aim for the thesis is to investigate how the art style of the promotional art uses the elements of art to communicate the different gameplay of Halo 4 and Mass Effect 2, both set in a science fiction world, to their respective audiences in order to find how the elements of art can help to emphasize communication of gameplay information to the audience. This is reached by analyzing the gameplay of both games with the help of the MDA-framework by Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek enabling the analyses to reach a more comprehensive breakdown of the games. The analyses of the promotional artwork for both games are weighed against categories in the elements of art, the reason to find a more comprehensive breakdown of the promotional art. The data from both analyses are later compared with each other to find how the elements of art communicate information of the gameplay to the audience. In addition, it presents what categories of the elements of art in this analysis seems to be the most common for communicating gameplay information of the chosen promotional artworks. The conclusion is that the use of elements of art in promotional art in Halo 4 and Mass Effect 2 seems to carry more information that communicates to the audience than what might be the first to meet the eye. This leads to an understanding that the analysis of a broader sample size of promotional art from the games can open an opportunity of a better understanding how the use of elements of art in promotional art can communicate gameplay to the audience. Additionally this could also be applied to a larger range of games in order to find how different genres use the elements of art to communicate to their respective audience.