Meaningful Mechanics - Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design - page 283

n A symbol is a sign where the signal is related only to its meaning by convention.
Individual names are a good example, as are many words. Names do not resemble
the people they indicate, and most words we use share nothing with the objects
they indicate; we need to learn them all. Another example are roses (signal) that can
stand for love (meaning). The roses have no inherent relationship with love, and
our association between them is learned from convention. Cultures in places where
no roses grow use other symbols to stand for love.
classic semiotic terminoloGy
The terminology we use in this topic is slightly different from the classic terminology
used in semiotics. Where we say a sign is a double entity consisting of a signal and
its meaning, a semiotician would say a sign is a double entity consisting of a signifier
that stands for a signified. These are terms coined by Ferdinand de saussure (1915). The
relationship between signal and meaning, or signifier and signified, is indicated as a
form of representation: The signal represents its meaning. Thus, a book can represent
an philosophical argument, and a game can represent certain ideas on the qualities of
a particular product. From now on, we will often use the term representation to indicate
this relationship between a signal and its meaning.
The categories of icon , index, and symbol were devised by charles sanders Peirce, most
of whose important work was published after his death in 1914 (Peirce 1932). Peirce didn't
use the terms signifier and signified, , but his work was later adapted to fit the founda-
tions laid by saussure. if you are interested in finding out more about semiotics, we don't
advise you to go back to original works of Peirce and saussure, because they are not very
accessible to a modern audience, and a good deal of research has taken place since their
day. We recommend that you look at John Fiske's Introduction to Communication Studies
(2010), which offers a useful modern approach both to semiotics and to communication
theory generally.
According to semiotic theory, symbols play an important role in our knowledge of
the world. Symbolic signs such as words allow us to speak about things in the world
in general terms and transfer observations from individual cases to more general
situations. The word apples is just a sound we make with our mouths, or a series of
squiggles on a page, but it can refer to a particular collection of real apples or to the
general concept of apples, including ones of different varieties. It also has a whole
range of other connotations and usages. The Dutch word for potato is aardappel
(“earth apple”) because when potatoes first arrived from the New World the Dutch
had no name for them and chose to modify a familiar one. The sentence “you're
comparing apples and oranges” isn't even about apples at all; it means “you're making
an invalid comparison.” Finally, the fruit that Eve ate in the Bible is often described
as an apple (though that's not actually in the Bible ), so the apple has come to stand
for eroticism in art (though that's not in the Bible either). In sum, words provide
shortcuts with which we can communicate large and complex meanings efficiently.