Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

instance, is an index, in that it shares in and points to deep structural features of the landscape it describes, but it is also an icon, in that it simply looks like the terrain as seen from the air. The illuminated first letter of a medieval manuscript is both a symbol, in that it functions as a component of language, and an icon, in that it is an illustration. An Egyptian hieroglyph is an icon, in that it is a pictogram, but it is also a symbol, in that it has an agreed meaning.

So, Pac-Man is a symbol. “His form,” the character’s creator has noted, “simply represents the personification of eating.” And indeed, Pac-Man is a game about eating. The dots littering his world are so perfectly symbolic as not to represent any object. They are there to be munched; that’s all.

While we’re on the subject of eating, note that the very theme of the game is at once infantile and politically loaded. It has been argued that Pac-Man was the first arcade game to be a substantial success with female gamers precisely because of this philosophy of consumption: eating is figured not as something to be wary of, but something to be celebrated, something (literally) empowering. However, it seems equally reasonable from this distance to read Pac-Man—a game from a country,

312