Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 345)

Trigger Happy
347
pragmatic imagination for the symbolic interaction. The
semiotic demands of videogames are becoming greater
all round.
One irregular videogamer, an habituÉe of Pac-Man
and Tetris, told me on playing Tomb Raider for the first
time: “I found I was looking at Lara rather than
worrying what was going on in the game.” This is
revealing: iconic modern games certainly hit you first
with their pictures. But that’s no bad thing, because if
you like the icons, you are more likely to want to get to
grips with the symbols. Good videogame characters
please us visually and thus function as our motivation
for continuing the struggle. They catch our interest
simply because we like them, and would prefer to see
them succeed.
In this way they are playing on our hermeneutic
imagination—but of course we also need to exercise
our pragmatic imagination when controlling them in
order to help them overcome their problems. And here
again we notice the desirable limits of videogame
“reality.” Remember that there is a limit on how
purely, accurately iconic we want videogame
characters to be: Lara Croft must always remain no
woman in particular, for that is her charm. And we
don’t really want in a videogame to kill and mutilate