Meaning What? - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 141

algorithms. The player makes moves that are iconic and if successful is rewarded
symbolically with frags or points; damage or injury is numeric. Sometimes the
symbolic feature is represented iconically: an arm won't respond as the player would
like, blurred sight impairs agency, and so on.
Sometimes there is no tension: Tetris is almost purely symbolic; a pure racing
game is almost entirely iconic—there might be a HUD but it only represents to us
the number of laps we have completed. Shenmue and games like it are largely
iconic-indexic; Shenmue certainly is in its adventure mode.
You might think that modern 3D games would be more iconic than symbolic
but that is by no means always the case. Very often properties of playable characters
and NPCs will be represented symbolically even though their avatars and behaviors
are iconic. This is nowhere better illustrated than in RPGs where setting up the often
extensive range of numerical values which represent the various attributes of a play-
able character are the game itself for many players.
Another example is Doom, where health is both iconic and symbolic and an
increasingly bloodied face in the HUD gives one indication of health while a number
between 0 and 100 is the “real” value. Health and its vehicular corollary, damage,
are usually represented symbolically either as a number or as a dynamic bar chart
as in Driver.
DENOTATION, CONNOTATION, AND MYTH
We have just seen that the same signifi er in Pac-Man can have two signifi eds simul-
taneously: what it denotes in terms of what we know about the world and what it
denotes in terms of gameplay, points, playable characters, NPCs, and so on. In fact
a sign can have many levels of meaning and this is very much true of Pac-Man. The
straightforward or obvious meanings from the fi rst two tables are normally called
denotations. We recognize Pac-Man's mouth through its basic behavior; we recog-
nize the ghosts and the fruit and so on. The points and other basic gameplay-based
meanings associated with the same signifi ers in the second table are also on the level
of denotation.
There are other additional, higher levels of meanings that add richness and
complexity to the game. These operate on the level of connotation. We have already
introduced both the terms denotation and connotation in the glass vial section of
Chapter 5 and used them to differentiate game content concerned with perceptual
opportunities: surprises are connotations while sureties are denotations. Just consider
the range of meaning of both types that the simple dining chair could play in a whole
variety of games. The two terms are useful because they are such a natural way of
talking about different types of meanings of things.
In Pac-Man there are levels of connotation that build upon the level of denota-
tion, both iconic-indexic and symbolic, we have just identifi ed and discussed. In
fact, Pac-Man was one of the fi rst computer games to have such a rich set of levels
of meanings and this in turn was an enabling factor for Pac-Man to connote a game
character; probably the fi rst true personality in a computer game. Characters do not