Meaning What? - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 150

with the way we make meanings out of texts. You should be familiar with metaphor
and irony but might not be so with the other two, although I guarantee that you use
them all the time.
Metonymy is the part of speech that replaces the object we wish to refer to with
something related to it. On the news, reporters will say “Westminster” or “Washing-
ton” when they mean the government or they might say “ number 10 ” when they
mean the Prime Minister. These are both common examples of metonymy.
Synecdoche is similar to metonymy but is characterized by “part for whole”
or “whole for part” relationships. When you ask someone if they have their wheels
with them you really mean their car, or when you say, “I was stopped by the law,”
you mean one police offi cer and not all of them and their support staff and the
justice system and so on. Pac-Man is a synecdoche; his mouth stands in for his
whole body.
That he is signifi ed as whole person is supported by the fact that he can be
commanded but also has autonomous behaviors. But there is more; Pac-Man can be
killed, can be reborn, can get power-ups and threaten the ghosts; we have a simple
and rather violent society here in which he is the principal because he is the playable
character. So in a very real sense Pac-Man is only present as a disparate set of signi-
fi ers, denotations, and connotations that allow us, the player, to build him in our
minds. It turns out that this is true of all playable characters. Pac-Man is an instance
of the code of the playable character, an integral part of the code of interaction that
we will begin to study in the next chapter.
FILLING GAPS
By way of an illustration we have applied semiotics to the analysis of Pac-Man in
some detail and for good reasons. Pac-Man is an interesting and highly infl uential
game. Our theories to date bring this out clearly. Semiotics seems to have completed
the picture that we were building up through our other analyses. In Part I of this
topic, we studied a number of other games using the theories we introduced. In doing
so we raised a number of questions that those theories did not appear to answer.
Let's pick up on four of these games, Spacewar, Rez, Driver, and Shenmue, and see
how semiotics can help us complete the picture for these as well. There were a
number of issues raised in earlier chapters that semiotics can resolve— for instance,
the role of the codes of fi lm in the narrative potential of Shenmue.
One of the reasons Spacewar was so successful was the way it evoked deep
space so beautifully despite the extreme limitations imposed on graphics and pro-
cessing power. There are a number of contributing factors to this: the clearly recog-
nizable spaceships and their graceful movements, the gravitational pull of the little
sun, and the backdrop of stars and the void of deep space. The fact that the space-
ships are recognizable as spaceships is an intertextual reference to comics, sci-fi
fi lms, and the like. The spaceships, launch rockets really, belonging to NASA and
the USSR in those days looked very different from the two we are offered by the
game. By referencing codes from other storytelling media the game's builders enable