Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

whereas Pac-Man is abstract, largely symbolic, Voldo (left) is a triumph of iconic or pictorial representation.

Now what does this do for the player’s sense of involvement with the game? The unique feature of videogames, after all, in terms of the structure of their consumption as a medium of mass entertainment, is that we are not merely spectators but participants. And we participate by identifying with “our” character on screen. A gameplayer whose ship has just exploded does not say ruefully, “The ship just exploded”; he says, “I died.” So might it be true that we cannot “relate” to characters who are pictorially too well defined? J. C. Herz thinks so: “Characters in Mortal Kombat have fingers and stubble. You watch them. Pac-Man has one black dot for an eye, and you become him.”

We might interpret this claim by suggesting that a game concentrating on the interplay of symbols is a richer experience than one involving mostly icons. A game of Snap, for instance, consists entirely of comparing icons (the pictures on the playing cards), whereas a game of chess is symbol manipulation in excelsis. The requirement of the player to treat game objects not merely as pictures but as symbols represents a greater cognitive challenge.

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