Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

processes of a character by reading an actor’s face. This process is hermeneutic: it is about interpretation.

But the imagination that videogames require of the player is a different process: it is pragmatic. It can be subdivided into two parts: “imagining into” and “imagining how.” “Imagining how” because at every moment this operation precedes the dynamic challenge of being able to predict how one’s actions will affect the system, and therefore what course of action is optimal; “imagining into” because one needs to understand the rules of the semiotic system presented, and act as if those rules, and not the rules of the real world, applied to oneself. The requirement is to project the active (rather than just the spectating) consciousness into the semiotic realm. The videogame player is absorbed by the system: for the duration of the game, he lives among signs (another way of describing the dissolution of self-consciousness in the videogame experience).

The person playing Pac-Man, then, may be said in a sense to be having a conversation with the system on its own terms. Just as human conversation involves a two- way transfer of and reaction to symbols (words), so a symbolically rich videogame, or other symbolic games like chess, shares the same structural basis,

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