Trigger Happy
Information overlord
Now as signs are basically vehicles of meaning,48 a videogame will, for its own part in the conversation, need to erect highly efficient, semiotic systems as it tries to present ever greater quantities of raw information to the player. That information can be broken up into different signs in different areas of the display.
Consider the screen of G-Police (see fig. 20). It shows a perspective construction of solid-looking buildings, roads, cars and other aircraft. In visual terms, this highly iconic construction is far closer to the film Blade Runner than it is to the videogame Pac- Man. But arrayed around the edges of the screen are ghostly, transparent figures that constitute a knotty system of signs that the player must read and react to in order to play the game competently. These figures are the game’s “HUD,” or head-up display, which recreates an actual military technology whereby instrument readings are projected on to the cockpit window directly ahead of the pilot so that he doesn’t have to look away for information.
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48 Or actually, on readings such as the Saussurean one, constitute meaning by virtue of their arrangement
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