Trigger Happy
exercising the pragmatic imagination. And indeed, we can say that a videogame is better as its symbolic conversation becomes more interesting.
The aesthetic importance of symbols to videogames is played on in the commercial sphere too, in marketing imagery. The four “action” buttons on the right of the PlayStation control pad are identified purely by abstract symbols: circle, square, triangle and X. These symbols have become so closely identified with the PlayStation and PlayStation2 hardware that Sony can release advertisements that identify themselves as such only by having the four symbols somewhere on the page. One particularly inventive image, “Lovely Buttons” (press advertisement, 1999), simply shows a young man and woman in tight Tshirts, staring with blank sexual confidence into camera. Upon closer inspection, what appear to be their protuberant nipples are actually tiny, solid PlayStation symbols poking through the fabric. The advertisement carries no other information, textual or otherwise, to identify the brand as Sony. The symbols are all.
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