Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Am what I eat

Trigger Happy

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

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