Team Fortress 2 (Valve, 2007) is a team based action game played from a first person view. The game contains cartoon like visuals and animations. It is played on a Personal Computer. The issue that I intend to investigate is how videogames balance the relationship between physical realism and gameplay. 'Physical realism' is a game environment and its entities (characters, movable objects etc) being, reacting and changing together in a realistic manner. Gameplay is the interactivity given to the player within the game and the rules associated with this. I will use a semiotic analysis to discover how the game creates different messages to be used by the player. The aim is to see how the game was designed so that connotations and denotations are created that tell the player both what the physical world is like in the game and how to play it. I will need to find out how the properties of entities (such as how characters move and what certain weapons capabilities are), the objectives and other players thoughts are explained.