Trigger Happy
311
But we know that an important part of any
videogame character is its dynamic form, and, sure
enough, Pac-Man’s animation lets him partake of
another kind of sign. As he moves around, the missing
“slice of pizza” expands and contracts, resembling a
schematic mouth in profile. It actually looks like a
mouth that is opening and closing. In this way, Pac-
Man is also to some extent an icon. Peirce defines an
icon thus: “Likenesses, or icons . . . serve to convey
ideas of the things they represent simply by imitating
them.”
The third type of sign that we need to know about is
the index. Imagine if Pac-Man’s maze were a schematic
map of an actual maze. In that case, it would be an
index—basically, a pointer sign. In Peirce’s terms:
“Indications, or indices . . . show something about
things, on account of their being physically connected
with them. Such is a guidepost, which points down the
road to be taken, or a relative pronoun, which is placed
just after the name of the thing intended to be denoted.”
Pac-Man is both a symbol and, to a lesser extent,
an icon. That’s not unusual: in fact, many if not most
signs are actually combinations in varying ratios of
two or all three of these basic types. A map, for