Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 318)

Trigger Happy
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processes of a character by reading an actor’s face. This
process is hermeneutic: it is about interpretation.
But the imagination that videogames require of the
player is a different process: it is pragmatic. It can be
subdivided into two parts: “imagining into” and
“imagining how.” “Imagining how” because at every
moment this operation precedes the dynamic challenge
of being able to predict how one’s actions will affect
the system, and therefore what course of action is
optimal; “imagining into” because one needs to
understand the rules of the semiotic system presented,
and act as if those rules, and not the rules of the real
world, applied to oneself. The requirement is to project
the active (rather than just the spectating)
consciousness into the semiotic realm. The videogame
player is absorbed by the system: for the duration of the
game, he lives among signs (another way of describing
the dissolution of self-consciousness in the videogame
experience).
The person playing Pac-Man, then, may be said in a
sense to be having a conversation with the system on its
own terms. Just as human conversation involves a two-
way transfer of and reaction to symbols (words), so a
symbolically rich videogame, or other symbolic games
like chess, shares the same structural basis,