Meaning What? - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 145

intentions and perceivable consequences. We won't go into the relationship between
semiotics and gameplay further at this stage, as that will be the subject of the next
chapter.
When we are considering the relationships between signs, semiotics identifi es
another very important relationship which may be less obvious but is nonetheless
highly infl uential on the kinds of meanings we attribute to signifi ers. The paradig-
matic relationship between signs is the relationship between those signs we fi nd in
the game and those we do not. At fi rst sight this might seem ridiculous; there are
far more signs that aren't to be found in the game than are; how will considering all
these be of help us? Well, the idea is that for every sign present in a game there
would have been a set of other signs that could perhaps have done the job as well,
so why weren't they chosen instead? When we play a game we are aware of some,
probably not all, of the signs that could have been chosen and this knowledge infl u-
ences the kinds of meanings, connotations in particular, that we make.
There is a little test or thought experiment—the paradigmatic test—you can
easily carry out by asking yourself the following kinds of questions about
Pac - Man:
• Why ghosts and not space monsters, lions, or missiles, for instance?
• Why cherries and strawberries and not hamburgers and hot dogs?
• Why does Pac-Man look like a pizza with a slice missing and not a piece of
pie with a slice missing or a chocolate bar or a steak?
• Why not depict Pac - Man as a vacuum cleaner?
• Why does the food scattered around not look like cakes, slices of bread,
potatoes, or other types of food?
Let's take two of these. First of all, imagine Pac-Man as a pie and as he moves
a slice of pie disappears and appears to denote a mouth and connote eating. What
has changed in terms of connotation? For one thing, we have lost the general con-
notation of pizza as fast food, as an integral part of consumerism; pizza is synony-
mous with these. Pie has quite differing connotations to do with small-town America,
the traditional home, and so on. So if we change pie for pizza we retain the connota-
tions to do with food and eating but we lose the myth of consumerism. The point
of paradigmatic analysis is that the players will have in the backs of their minds the
knowledge of what choices were made and what weren't and this will affect the
kinds of meanings they construct. In this context, representing Pac-Man (or Vac-
Man, as he might have to be called) as a vacuum cleaner would have been even
more inappropriate.
How would the game change if the ghosts were to be replaced by missiles, for
instance? We would lose the haunted house connotations and the myth of the super-
natural for a start. A house with slow moving, intelligent missiles could be pretty
threatening but would not generate a coherent pattern of connotations that counteract
the myth of consumerism that Pac-Man and his activities so cleverly connote. The
point is that not only are we aware of and actively constructing the connotations
and myths that the game of Pac-Man as a whole offers us but we are also aware of