Trigger Happy
there is nothing left of him at all. In his mania of consumption, he has eaten himself.)
What about Pac-Man’s little cousins below the playing area? By videogame convention, these represent the number of lives he has in reserve. While the Pac-Man in play is almost entirely symbolic, therefore, the smaller ones function both symbolically and indexically. As a group, they constitute an index of “how many,” in the same way as counting beans. This is an indexical function, remember, because the number of yellow disks is congruent with, or “points to,” the number of tries a player has left. There is a similar mix in the large dots (one might even call them blobs) near the corners of the maze. Like their smaller brothers, they are symbolic (of pure, abstract food), but their increased size also functions indexically. They are bigger in circumference, and hence they are bigger in utility—better for you. Pac-Man earns ten points every time he eats a regular dot, but fifty upon eating a blob.
The blobs have a further function: as power-ups. When Pac-Man eats a blob, he may for a short while turn and chase the ghosts that have thus far been pursuing him. We can now say that in semiotic terms, power-ups actually function as second-order signs—
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