Trigger Happy
308
It is one of the fascinations of videogames as a
form, indeed, that they constitute a kaleidoscopic,
prestissimo
exercise in semiotics, which is the
everchanging interaction of signs. More than
advertising or the Internet, videogames, in their
immense speed and complexity, have to that extent
become the most sophisticated systems of
communication of meaning that the culture has yet
seen. Now if that sounds like an overstatement,
videogame action does not have overarching “meaning”
in the way a novel or a film does; it is untranslatable,
like music. Our scrutiny should instead be focused on
the fast-moving low-level “meanings” that enable us to
understand the videogame system.
We have seen how videogames distort reality for
their own purposes, creating in the process a world of
deliberate unrealism. But how does it hang together?
And how does it speak to the player?
I am what I eat
Consider the playing screen of Pac-Man (see fig. 16).
What do we see? A maze-like structure of tubular
walls, the paths lined with dots of two distinct sizes;
four jelly-like blobs with what look like wide eyes; a
disk with a slice taken out of it. Above the maze are a
line of text and two sets of numbers; below it are more
