Trigger Happy
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
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