Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 311)

Trigger Happy
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Japan, that at the time was just beginning to claim a
role as a global financial power—as a satire on a
different kind of consumption: late-twentieth-century
capitalism. Hence our parable at the start of the chapter.
For Pac-Man, consumption cannot end; no conceivable
quantity of dots is enough. He will continue to search
them out and eat them until he dies.
What about those jellyfish with eyes? They are
symbols, but they are also more iconic than Pac-Man
himself, in that their eyes are relatively well-defined.
Pac-Man has no eyes at all, but the jellyfish blobs,
which are according to the game actually “ghosts,”
have eyeballs with mobile pupils. Now, the ghosts are
actually some of the most semiotically advanced items
in the game—partaking of all three modes of sign—
because their eyes also function indexically. Where the
eyes are looking is where the ghost is going to go next.
The eyes “point”; they work as an index. This is a
particularly important sign for the player to be able to
read, as for most of the game she must avoid contact
with the roaming ghosts on pain of death. (Pac-Man’s
death animation, by the way, slots admirably into our
political theory of the game: his mouth opens wider and
wider, passing the horizontal and continuing, until