Trigger Happy
Look at the cherries below the playing area, for instance. They seem iconic (like fruit), but in fact they are indices: they indicate that shortly some cherries will appear temporarily in the middle of the screen. If Pac- Man eats those, they earn him 100 points, or ten times the value of a single dot. Now imagine that your score is 9,900, there are only three dots left in the maze, and there is a cherry sign below it. Rather than complete the level by eating the dots—worth a measly 30 points— you would be better advised to wait for the cherries to appear in the center, because they will then operate symbolically as a power-up, giving you an extra life. In that situation the cherries signaling below the maze would be a third-order sign. They would be (deep breath) an index denoting the future appearance of a symbol about other symbols.
Now, all right, hang on. Pac-Man is a videogame, no? It’s not rocket science. It has chirpy music, bright colors. You trundle around the maze eating dots and getting your own back on the ghosts. It is fun. It would be lunacy to suggest that someone playing Pac-Man is consciously doing all this semiotic calculus.
But this analysis does help in two ways. First, it demonstrates that videogames are complex systems rather than just simple toys. Secondly, and more
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