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Trigger Happy
317
importantly, it does in fact explain at one level what it
means to play a videogame. Because it helps to
reconstruct something the player is doing
automatically—there can be no doubt that to play the
game well she must understand how all the signs on the
game screen interact, in just the ways we have
described. Human beings are very good at reading
complex systems of signs without having to describe to
themselves what they are doing.
Now Pac-Man is twenty years old. We have seen
how videogames have progressed since those days. We
might expect, then, as videogames have increasingly
enjoyed the power to build ever more convincing cities
of the unreal, that their systems of semiotics, being the
bricks and mortar of those edifices, have themselves
become ever more complex and interesting. At first
sight, though, it seems as if that isn’t necessarily true.
Deep in conversation
From the playful web of signs in Pac-Man, modern
videogames seem to have, in their increasing powers
of graphical photorealism, become ever more
pervasively iconic. Compare Pac-Man with the
player’s characters in Soul Calibur (see fig. 17);