Trigger Happy
importantly, it does in fact explain at one level what it means to play a videogame. Because it helps to reconstruct something the player is doing automatically—there can be no doubt that to play the game well she must understand how all the signs on the game screen interact, in just the ways we have described. Human beings are very good at reading complex systems of signs without having to describe to themselves what they are doing.
Now Pac-Man is twenty years old. We have seen how videogames have progressed since those days. We might expect, then, as videogames have increasingly enjoyed the power to build ever more convincing cities of the unreal, that their systems of semiotics, being the bricks and mortar of those edifices, have themselves become ever more complex and interesting. At first sight, though, it seems as if that isn’t necessarily true.
Deep in conversation
From the playful web of signs in Pac-Man, modern videogames seem to have, in their increasing powers of graphical photorealism, become ever more pervasively iconic. Compare Pac-Man with the player’s characters in Soul Calibur (see fig. 17);
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