Trigger Happy
Japan, that at the time was just beginning to claim a role as a global financial power—as a satire on a different kind of consumption: late-twentieth-century capitalism. Hence our parable at the start of the chapter. For Pac-Man, consumption cannot end; no conceivable quantity of dots is enough. He will continue to search them out and eat them until he dies.
What about those jellyfish with eyes? They are symbols, but they are also more iconic than Pac-Man himself, in that their eyes are relatively well-defined. Pac-Man has no eyes at all, but the jellyfish blobs, which are according to the game actually “ghosts,” have eyeballs with mobile pupils. Now, the ghosts are actually some of the most semiotically advanced items in the game—partaking of all three modes of sign— because their eyes also function indexically. Where the eyes are looking is where the ghost is going to go next. The eyes “point”; they work as an index. This is a particularly important sign for the player to be able to read, as for most of the game she must avoid contact with the roaming ghosts on pain of death. (Pac-Man’s death animation, by the way, slots admirably into our political theory of the game: his mouth opens wider and wider, passing the horizontal and continuing, until
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