Trigger Happy
pragmatic imagination for the symbolic interaction. The semiotic demands of videogames are becoming greater all round.
One irregular videogamer, an habituÉe of Pac-Man and Tetris, told me on playing Tomb Raider for the first time: “I found I was looking at Lara rather than worrying what was going on in the game.” This is revealing: iconic modern games certainly hit you first with their pictures. But that’s no bad thing, because if you like the icons, you are more likely to want to get to grips with the symbols. Good videogame characters please us visually and thus function as our motivation for continuing the struggle. They catch our interest simply because we like them, and would prefer to see them succeed.
In this way they are playing on our hermeneutic imagination—but of course we also need to exercise our pragmatic imagination when controlling them in order to help them overcome their problems. And here again we notice the desirable limits of videogame “reality.” Remember that there is a limit on how purely, accurately iconic we want videogame characters to be: Lara Croft must always remain no woman in particular, for that is her charm. And we don’t really want in a videogame to kill and mutilate
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