Trigger Happy
gradually turning to red for minimum. The shaded brackets at either side of screen center, meanwhile, are indices: at left for craft speed (colored above the middle for forward speed, below the middle for reverse); and at right for engine thrust. Again color is overlaid symbolically, with a bright yellow for high forward velocities or accelerations, red for low ones, descending into blue and purple for reverse.
The signs at bottom left, meanwhile, furnish symbols (numbers) for altitude, but again provide the same information indexically, as an arrow pointing to subdivisions of a meter that rises and falls. Top center is the player’s radar, which works as a triumvirate of all three semiotic modes: symbolically, because each (green or red) dot is agreed to stand for a civilian or enemy craft; indexically, because the red triangle “points to” the next mission objective; and iconically, because the whole arrangement is a simplified “picture” of local space.
If it remains largely true that the interplay of symbols constitutes the richness of the gameplay itself,49 there is a complementary truth that indices
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49 Although some
