Trigger Happy
9
SIGNS OF LIFE
A jaundiced figure floats across the screen. He is constantly searching for things to eat. We are looking at a neo-Marxist parable of late capitalism. He is the pure consumer. With his obsessively gaping maw, he clearly wants only one thing: to feel whole, at peace with himself. He perhaps surmises that if he eats enough—in other words, buys enough industrially produced goods—he will attain this state of perfect selfhood, perfect roundness. But it can never happen. He is doomed forever to metaphysical emptiness. It is a tragic fable in primary colors.
You may well have played this game: it’s called Pac-Man. Videogames, like anything else, can be read in many different ways. A videogame may not be a “text,” but it is true that videogames talk to the player in a special sort of language, one that the experienced user knows by heart. And this isn’t a verbal language, it’s a graphic one. Videogames talk to us with signs.
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