All Work and Play - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 159

Pac-Man used a simple set of controls: in the original arcade game and the
various game console versions that came out later, the game used four arrow keys,
pointing up, down, left, and right. Associated with these arrow keys were four com-
mands, to go up, down, left, and right on the game board; or north, south, east and
west if we think of the game's visual display as a “ top - down ” view of the game
world. So the signs that make up the controls have a denotation to do with the way
they appear on the console and they also have a symbolic meaning to do with the
effect they can have on Pac-Man when pressed. In fact, there is more; the arrow
keys signify the following:
• Four red arrow buttons pointing out from a central point, denotation.
• The potential to command Pac-Man to move north, south, east, or west; up,
down, left, or right: the connotations of the buttons and the intentions these
connotations suggest.
• Issuing the command to make Pac-Man move north, south, east, or west when
the buttons are pressed: working to turn an intention into a perceivable
consequence.
Notice that although these arrow keys can be perceived, can signify visually, we do
not in fact respond to them in this way when we are playing the game. They are
haptic signifi ers that are both tactile and proprioceptive. Tactile simply refers to our
sense of touch, which breaks down into two types of sensation:
• The surface properties of things: Rough, smooth, cold, warm, patterned, etc.
• Forces acting on our body through objects themselves subject to forces: For
example, a ball that we catch, a chair we bump into, the chair that we are
sitting on.
Proprioception is our sense of where our limbs, fi ngers, knees, ears, and other bits
and pieces are, even when we cannot see them. Proprioception is the means by which
we feel for a light switch in a darkened room that we are familiar with; we cannot
see our hand or the fi ngers that are part of it but we sense exactly where they are in
relation to the rest of our body.
We normally think of games as being mostly about sound and vision, with just
a few games such as Rez and those that can make use of force feedback joysticks,
for instance, employing haptics. However, most games employ haptic signifi ers to
allow us to issue commands to the game engine.
There are thus two distinct functions which signs have in computer games:
• Those that signify the current game state
• Those that signify the physical means of intervention.
It makes sense to allocate differing sensory modalities to the two: sound and vision
to signify game state, and haptics to signify intervention. That way it is a lot easier
to keep the two types of work separate.
If you ever played one of the early, web-based versions of Pac-Man, pro-
grammed as a Java applet, where you had to use the mouse to click on the arrow