The New York TImes' Rob Walker put together a very interesting story that looks at subversive, anti-advergames. Yes, I know, that doesn't sound like that could be interesting, but Walker found a law professor who is writing a paper about people who subvert the messages of advertising to make them into negative messages. Fordham University law professor Sonia Katyal calls it semiotic disobedience.

As a term and a concept, semiotic disobedience is a riff on two earlier ideas. One, of course, is civil disobedience. The other is "semiotic democracy," a coinage of John Fiske, a media scholar whose 1987 book "Television Culture" described the ways in which audiences create their own interpretations of mass entertainment. Katyal's combination, then, refers to the reinvention or subversion of logos and other symbols of commercial persuasion as part of a battle to redefine their meaning in ways that are frankly oppositional. Her research, she told me, evolved out of her interest in the way certain artists alter billboards with antibrand or anticapitalist messages. While this practice (variously referred to as brandalism, subvertising, culture jamming, adbusting, etc.) has gone on for years, it's often dismissed as a nuisance, agitprop or, of course, a crime.

While Katyal's upcoming paper doesn't address video games, Walker does a good job of putting her ideas to work in explaining games like Ian Bogost's Disaffected. Brian Crecente

Gaming the System [NYT]