All Work and Play - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 169

However, even a game as apparently simple as Breakout can denote and connote
game context. In Breakout's case we have probably the world' s simplest back - story;
literally the name of the game. We have to break out through the wall denoted by
the arrangement of bricks. The prison is connoted by the wall, a synecdoche, the
part for the whole, the wall for the whole prison. There are no layout signs in Break-
out to help in this connotation but they probably are not needed. The simple signs
and the nature of the agency on offer suffi ce.
Platform games often used layout signs to enhance the game's context. Dark
Castle is a classic platform game released in 1986. Typical of platform games, Dark
Castle uses layout signs extensively as backdrops to the main action. Such layout
signs add an enormous amount of atmosphere to the game by setting levels in caves,
forests, and so on. Of course, such layout signs play no role in the gameplay. All
the other signs, the stalactites, the moving platforms, rocks that can be thrown, bats,
and so on, that are part of Dark Castle are examples of one or other of the other fi ve
classes of CBS.
Incidentally, Dark Castle has a classic ghost sign. At one point you are walking
through a cave when you simply fall though the ground beneath your feet and lose
a life. There is no way of knowing the presence of this hazard the fi rst time through
but you quickly learn to recognize where it is. It is apparently a sign with no signifi er
that you learn the meaning of through exercising agency. However, another way of
looking at it is that the hero falling through the fl oor is a signifi er signifying the loss
of a life. The trap door itself is a connotation; if we have fallen through the fl oor
there must have been a hole in the fl oor, a trap door that we cannot see. The ghost
sign uses the act of agency to transform a signifi er into a signifi ed, a connotation of
an object we cannot actually see. There is nothing unsemiotic about this, it's just an
enabling feature of interactive media.
What is the interactive sign in Shenmue? Ryo, of course. We can tell Ryo where
we want him to go and what we want him to do, but the interactive sign in Shenmue
is not the playable character, merely an aspect of it. Remember the section “ Making
Up Pac-Man” from the last chapter. Ryo has a rudimentary personality that con-
strains what the player would like him to do in certain circumstances. There are his
martial arts skills, which are developed as the game progresses. There is his voice
and questions he asks people. There is his relationship with Nazumi. There is a whole
range of objects, such as the inventory of Ryo's possessions that he carries around
with him and the notebook that gets added to as we progress through the game (but
which we cannot ourselves write in). Ryo is a complex character.
There is also a whole host of actor signs, the eighty or so NPCs. Controller
signs are represented by buildings, streets, street furniture and, it being Japan, by
tissue paper walls that are just as substantial as concrete. Because so many objects
are rendered in 3D there is very little use of layout signs in a modern action adven-
ture such as Shenmue.
In the way we are using them, CBS operate at a level quite close to implementa-
tion; they give a strongly functional view of the interactive meanings of individual
signs in computer games. Signs can be classifi ed using CBS in terms of their con-
tribution to gameplay and, as we have seen, the syntagmatic relationships between