Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
We even fi nd intertextual code swapping in Pac-Man. We already discussed the
myth of the supernatural and its references to fi lm and novels. Another excellent
example of using codes in this way is the representation of the luxury fruits that
offer extra points. Their presentation is reminiscent of the fruit to be found in
one-armed bandits, slot machines, which promise money to be won but at a risk—
you might lose it all. In Pac-Man getting the points the fruits offer is very attractive
indeed but there is a very great risk attached—you might lose your life (well, the
current one, anyway). Now we can see the paradigmatic choice of cherries and
strawberries represented as they are. They make an intertextual code reference to
amusement arcades and gambling and in doing so connote risk. Other icons for
foodstuffs might well have worked equally well at the level of denotation—
we would have recognized them—but they would not have offered risk as a
connotation.
MAKING UP PAC-MAN
Let ' s fi nish our work on Pac-Man by considering Pac-Man himself, or rather the
process we, as players, go through in order to see Pac-Man as a playable character
rather than some anonymous pointing device like the cursor in Windows-based
programs. We already saw that each ghost in Pac-Man is a signifi ed constructed by
the player from a number of distinct signifi ers.
Why do we see Pac-Man as a character? If we compared Pac-Man with other
games from the classic era you would not see the lunar lander in Lunar Lander as
a character even though it represents the player in the game. It is a machine you fl y,
but not a character. The same is true of the vast majority of games of that era and
the way the player is represented in them. Let's start at the beginning and consider
how the process of character building might operate in this case.
Pac - Man 's basic signifi er is a yellow dot that alternates with a yellow dot with
a slice taken out of it when we, the player, cause it to move. Seeing the slice alter-
nately disappear and appear seems to suggest that the signifi er is signifying pizza.
Toru Iwatani, the games designer, was in fact inspired by a partially eaten pizza. We
have already discussed the fact that this signifi er denotes pizza and connotes food,
fast food, in general.
Pac-Man can move but only if we command him to. In the case of this game
we can simply give him a direction to move in. But as he moves his mouth opens
and closes and he makes noises: a chomping noise if he bumps into one of the little
yellow dots, a beeping noise if he does not. We cannot control this aspect of his
behavior. Pac-Man does behave autonomously to a certain extent. The mouth
opening and the chomping noise syntagmatically suggest the connotation of eating.
Pac-Man is a playable character represented by an autonomous mouth and a certain
autonomy of movement.
Most people do not see Pac-Man as just a mouth, however; they see him as a
character. One of the textual codes is the rhetorical code, which contains various
fi gures of speech: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony; these have to do
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