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Trigger Happy
309
disks and what looks like a brace of cherries. Now,
considering this image solely as a picture, why do some
paths in the maze have dots while others are empty?
Why is there one disk inside the maze and others,
slightly smaller, outside it? And what has all this to do
with fruit? It is confusing, arcane. The game screen is
inscrutable when approached as simple representation;
it demands to be read as a symbolic system.
Take that little disk. That is Pac-Man himself, the
character under the player’s control. He doesn’t look
like a man, he looks like something you’d stick on the
rim of your glass of gin and tonic. (Toru Iwatani in fact,
as we learned, was inspired by partially eaten pizza.)
Nevertheless, the crude yellow shape is agreed to stand
for Pac-Man. It is therefore a symbol. A symbol is a
sign whose meaning is determined by social
convention, like a number, a theater ticket or the word
“starling.” Charles Sanders Peirce, besides leading a
notoriously libertine life, also found time to invent most
of modern semiotics. He defined a symbol thus:
“Symbols, or general signs . . . have become associated
with their meanings by usage. Such are most words,
and phrases, and speeches, and books, and libraries.”