The Marriage of the Analogon and the Code in Video Games
Christopher Woodill

The nature of the photographic image is more important to us than
it has ever been before.  With the proliferation of various media
based in the manipulation, display and recording of images, it is
important to understand the relationship between the viewer and
the image.  What is the content of a viewed image, and how is
that content shared with the viewer?  It is sometimes difficult
to tell as we see thousands of images flashing before us daily.  

In the 1960's, Roland Barthes put forth an analysis of the
photographic image, describing the relationship between the
photographic image and the viewer, and how that differed from
other forms of images.  His main thrust was to propose that the
photographic image was different than an artwork because it was
not a representation of an object but a perfect "analogon".  The
analogon is different than a representation in that it is not
mediated by a iconic code.  The idea was that the image in both
film and photography was an exact copy of the object it was
portrarying.  What is important for our discussion is what the
difference that Barthes wants to illustrate between something
that is photographed and something illustrated by other means:
for a photograph, the image does not stand for the real object,
it portrays it as it comes through to us in the same as normal
vision.

Many critics, notably Umberto Eco and Victor Burgin, have come
forward to criticize Barthes' notion of an analogon.  Their
argument is that there cannot be such a thing as a perfect
analogon for all images are mediated by a code:

     The theory of the photo as an analogue of reality has
     been abandoned, even by those who once upheld it - we
     know that it is necessary to be trained to recognise
     the photographic image.  We know tha tthe image which
     takes shape on celluloid is analogous to the retinal
     image,  but not to that which we perceive.  We know
     that sensory phenomina are transcribed, in the
     photograph emulsion, in such a way that even if there
     is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic
     images formed can be considered as wholly arbitrary
     with respect to these phenomina....every image is born
     of a series of successive transcriptions.  

The image, and everything else, is mediated by a code.  The idea
that we can look out and see a visual analogon is misguided,
because, claims Eco, we actually are reading a system of iconic
codes.

In the world of the 1960's, the image was beginning to be
manipulated.  Barthes writes about various techniques that cut,
crop, or otherwise change the objective reality of the analogon. 
But in the 1990's, the debate is not as simple.  The photographic
image has become more and less than a simple window on reality,
more in the sense that it has been reproduced and contextually
enlarged and less in the sense that the image has lost its
wholeness as it has been subjected to cropping, appropriation,
and disection.  The issue of whether Barthes or Eco is right has
lossed in this confusion of the image, as it becomes more and
more obvious that both the idea of the analogon and the idea of
the coded image are somehow both needed in the understanding of
the modern use of the image.

One of the areas in which this is apparent is in the world of
video games.  Video games are one of the most pervasive forms of
entertainment in the North American world.   Nintendo has become
a common word for children around the globe.  Furthermore, video
games (along with pornography) are the leaders in multi-media
technology.  For the semiotician, video games represent a unique
combining of cinematic analogon and a system of codes founded in
game-play.  By examining video games, we can see that there is
room for both the code and the analogon, for both play an
important role in the operation of video games.

The video game industry was established in the late 1970's, even
before personal computers were appearing.  The first video game
for the home was entitled Pong, and it consisted of a bar of
light at each end of the television screen which represented
paddles, and a rectangular blip of light which represented a
ball.  The object was to keep the "ball" in place by bouncing off
one's "paddle".  There was nothing else to the game: it had no
bells or whistles, and it became quickly boring.  What is
important about Pong in our discussion is that video games really
started as games, and had no sense of simulation.  The objects on
the screen were no more than markers for a particular system of
rules, in the same way that a set of chess men mark out a system
of playing chess.  The objects could look totally different and
their roles would be totally unaffected.  The only connection
they had to ordinary reality was movement, and even that was
limited to moving up or down.  Even the "ball" had little
simulation value: it did not operate like a ball at all in that
it only bounced in ninety degree angles.
     
In our example above, there is no role for the analogon to play. 
The image on the screen is merely a demarkation of a system of
rules, an "iconic code".  The shapes on the screen do not depict
anything: they are quite arbitrary.  An example of this
arbitrariness is a later development of the Pong concept, called
Breakout, where instead of two paddles there was only one, at the
bottom of the screen.  The rest of the screen was filled with
different coloured blocks which had to be hit by bouncing the
ball with the paddle.  These blocks had no meaning: they did not
simulate anything.  They merely acted as visual system of
markings, similar to more conventional games such as checkers,
tic-tac-toe, or bingo.  

The idea of iconic codes reigns without contest in the era of
Pong because the computer technology at the time did not have the
power to simulate reality.  It would not be for several years
that even an attempt would be made, and it is only recently has
the analogon had even a fighting chance in the video game world.
     
If video games had stayed at the level of Pong, they would have
died quickly.  Soon after, the dawn of a new type of video game,
the simulation, appeared.  A simulation was a system of code
which modeled reality, in the same way that a mathematical
equation might model a physical phenomina like gravity.  Again,
the image plays a different role than the photograph in that its
job was not to depict reality but to model it.  The image that
appeared on the screen was a metaphorical picture, made of
objects on the screen which represented the objects being
simulated.  Some of the first examples of this type of game were
simulations of various sports such as baseball or football, as
well as combat scenarios.  It was this stage which really created
the drive behind video game production, because what had been
created was the ability to create a context.  Instead of
meaningless blips the images became characters in a fictional
context.  Although one would not call them analogons, one could
begin to see iconic resemblances between the images and simulated
objects: people started to look like people, airplanes began to
appear as airplanes, and so on.  Although there was little
ability to present anything that captured reality in the sense of
Barthes' analogon, the motivation for that goal was evolving.

     One of the great booms in video game production for the home
came with the Atari 2600, which came out in 1982.  This was the
first ever Nintendo type system, and with different cartridges
one could have a supply of several hundred video games in the
comfort of your own home.  With this increased market, there was
increasing needs for differences between games: in order to sell
more than a few video games to the public, one had to convince
them that the latest issue of Space Turkeys was different than
the last one.  If we were restricted to the days of Pong, there
was an extremely limited number of symbols to be arranged.  The
increase in technology in the form of better graphics created a
vast of array of symbols, of a more complex code.  An example of
this was the introduction of colour: if we think of baseball, the
identification of two teams by colour greatly improves the
playability.  

     With Pong, the only value that the symbols had was in the
play of the game, for they were only ordinary rectangles.  But
with these new video games, they had the capacity to have their
own identity seperate from the context of playing the game.  One
of the greatest examples of this was Pac-Man.  Pac-Man evolved as
a mass phenomenon which would not be duplicated until the arrival
of Nintendo's Mario Brothers.   As illustrated by Figure 2, Pac-
man was little more than a circle with a piece of it cut out, but
that shape began to have an identity when the shape became a head
with a mouth, eating up everything in sight.  The Pac-Man image
is not an analogon: it is completely fabricated from geometric
shapes.  But it is iconic in that it represents the human face,
albeit distorted and simplified.  If one has ever played Pac-Man,
one realizes that the shape really has no use in terms of game
play except as a marker for the position on a board (the maze). 
The pac-man could have been left a block, and the game would play
exactly the same way.  But having a Pac-Man created a character
that could be expanded outside of the game, in order to give the
game a context.  It would be the same as if we took the common
game of checkers and gave each peice character names, and mourned
their death when they were taken off the board.  Pac-Man became a
hit because of its playability, but also because of image
considerations such as colour (it was one of the first to be in
colour), design and context.  While Pong was based in a faceless
world, Pac-Mac created a character in a fantastic world.  

As Pac-Man became more popular, there were added new characters
to the Pac-Man family, included baby-Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. 
The only difference between these new games and the original Pac-
Man was a new playing board (the mazes were different), and
minimal changes to the character (The only difference between Ms.
Pac-Mac and Pac-Man was that she had a bow on her head).  At the
time, this was enough to keep the Pac-Man empire strong, as
people who had been exhausted from playing the original would
come back and play a slightly revised version.  Pac-Man was
limited to four movements: up, down, left and right.  It was a
game that had almost no frills, except that it had a funny shaped
playing piece which led to an enormous merchandising run
resulting in Pac-Man breakfast cerial, a Pac-Man cartoon, a
roller skating song called Pac-Man fever, and Pac-Man underware.

What started with Ms. Pac-Man, and will become important in our
discussion of the analogon later on, was the introduction of
scenes which acted as a reward system for achieving various goals
in the game.  After completing three stages, the screen displayed
a scene where Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man met and kissed.  This scene
had nothing to do with actual game play, and served only to
reward the player by giving him a context, narrative, and scene
played out before him.  The scenes were little more than simple
cartoons.  This is where the analogon would be introduced, as a
cinematic reward system for successful game play.

While Pac-Man was really an overly complicated version of a board
game, it was the simulation that began to bring reality into the
world of video games.  A simulation, as defined by Baudrillard,
is a hyper-real activity, where one is so seduced by the
simulation that one cannot tell the difference between the real
and the imaginary.  In the early 1980's (which was incidentally
when he first wrote Simulations), such a definition would not
properly describe video game simulations  nor would it today.  A
simulation, in computer terms, is a computer program that
modelled reality.  The technology has never yet been able to
simulate anything well enough to mimic reality to any degree of
fooling people into thinking they are actually in a different
world.

One example of a simulation is the car-racing type video game. 
One of the first was entitled Pole-Position.  Like all car-racing
games, poll-position came equipped with a steering wheel, gas
pedal, break pedal, and a gear shift.  This introduction of a new
interface helped to create the simulation effect with real
objects: you drove the fictional car with a real steering wheel. 
Certainly, the simulation would not have been as successful had
one had to drive the car with cursor keys or a joystick.   The
object of the game was to complete the course before time ran out
and without crashing.  What is different about Pole-position from
Pong was that the game modelled reality, or at least modelled a
cinematic reality.  For the first time, perspective was
introduced, and the road curved over the horizon hopefully in a
similar manner to regular driving, and cars would periodically
come from behind the horizon into the field of view.  Like most
video games, as we shall see when talk of recent video games, the
pole-position concept has been improved over the course of about
ten years, but the basic modelling processing remains the same. 
We shall take up this example again when we talk of the
cinematization of video games.

When one talks of the use of the analogon in video games, one
notices it in two different ways, as either part of the actual
game play, or as a reward system which acts outside the game.  In
today's video-games, both are used.  The analogon here means a
particular image or set of images that form a unique and perfect
transcription of reality.  While Pac-Man was almost totally non-
contextual, mainly because the technology at the time could not
effectively fabricate a context, the latest video games take
place in a particular time and place, in a highly specific
context.  The characters in these latest video games have
specific personalities, and exhibit those different styles on
screen.  Only with an imaging system created not by a code but by
a cinematic analogon can we achieve this level of realism.  

One must remember that the code has not departed: the game still
is the basis of all video games.  The cinematic  analogon acts to
create the reality of the game, but does not change its purpose. 
The whole style of the game shifts from one of interacting with
markers on a game-board to interacting with a movie.  If we
return to our example of car-racing games, the game now takes on
the feel of an interactive movie.  The simulation is of a high
enough quality that it feels real, and the images on the screen
support this feel.  In the latest version of the car-racing
concept, one drives through various "scenes", and part of the
enjoyment of the game is in watching out for scenery.  On the
sides of the road are beaches, rocks, farms, and so on all of
which are simulated: they all look real.  These scenes are
extraneous to the game, but they occur simultaneously as game-
play, an instant feedback reward.  
     
One of the most controversial video-games on the market is
entitled Mortal Kombat II (even the name is frightening).  What
makes it controversial is that while a car-racing video game
simulates the activity of driving a car (a relatively peaceful
endevour, providing one doesn't crash), Mortal Kombat II
simulates a martial arts style combat to the death.  What makes
Mortal Kombat II interesting in our discussion of the use of the
analogon is that it uses the cinematic analogon both as part of
the action of the game-play and as a reward system for winning. 
In Mortal Kombat II, there are several different characters to
choose from, each of which have their own particular look, style
and strengths.  The differences create a relationship between the
visual and the code.  There are differences in the codes of each
characters in that a combination of buttons and movements of a
joystick produce different results.  But there are also
differents in the analogon: once the code has been entered, than
the analogon takes over, displaying instantly the result of the
code, a couple seconds of scene which results in the players
character punching, kicking or jumping over his or her opponent. 
This analogon is real enough to simulate even the unwanted parts
of violence: the character on the screen becomes bruised, beaten
and bleeds all over the floor when attacked successfully.  

      After winning a round, Mortal Kombat II gives you a bonus
scene: the ability to watch your character slaughter your
opponent.  Each character has a different killing style: one
kills by ripping his opponents arms out of their sockets, another
turns into a dragon and chomps his opponents head off.  What
keeps people coming back is the constant search for new cinematic
analogons, for new scenes.  If one has mastered one character's
killing move, there are still several other characters who each
have new scenes.  At fifty cents an attempt, one can see the
marketing genius in this.  Furthermore, as one reaches higher
levels in the game, one gets the priviledge of competing against
brand new opponents; in other words, we get to view new scenes.

     One of the most telling examples of this new dominance of
the analogon is that people spend almost as much time watching
others play video games as they do playing them.  Because of this
new enjoyment of the image, one needs only to watch others play
in order to get the thrill of discovery, to receive the
entertainment of seeing new scenes.  Conversely, the game-play
has to remain fast and efficient: if the analogon displaces the
code, than no one will play.  Playability has not ceased to be a
factor, it has just been joined with the seduction by the
analogon.  In new video games, one gets the speed, control, and
excitement of the old style video game, but also receives a
reward for playing in the form of a cinematic analogon.  
     Some video games are strictly excuses for buying the
cinematic analogon.  They act as gambling centres where the prize
is a few seconds of a scene.  One example of this is Laser-Strip
Poker.  The game is absolutely trivial: a banal version of poker. 
What is really important is the reward for winning: a
continuation of a scene played by a laser disc of a person
stripping.  What is revealing is that when one loses, the laser-
disc just plays backwards, so that the dress flies from the
ground back onto the woman.  What one is purchasing is not the
pleasure of the game: the game only acts as a system of bringing
in revenue.  In order to get the woman completely stripped it
takes about five or six dollars worth of quarters.  The game is a
complete tease: while one can make the person on the screen to
take off some of the clothes with promises for more, everytime
you make an error (which when playing a chance game like poker is
quite often), she puts a piece of clothing back on.  Thus, in
order to see the entire scene, one must consistently win, which
is incredibly difficult.

     One of the more recent marketing schemes is what I call the
three round elimination.  There seems to be a delicate balance
between winning and losing: if one loses in the first round, one
feels ripped off.  Furthermore, one does not get an accurate
assessment of how the game plays: without a few minutes to try to
grasp the rules of the game, the video-game will just be
frustrating.  What video game manufacturers seem to have done is
design the game in such a way that there is a practice round at
the beginning of each game (three rounds).  If we take our
example of Mortal Kombat II, the video game gives you almost
exactly three rounds of play to get used to the game.  After you
reach that third round, the difficulty increases enormously,
usually ending your game.   This of course is a brilliant use of
the analogon: it is used in the same way that a movie preview is
used.  In order to get the past the preview, you have to keep
sinking in increasingly more money.   The first three rounds give
you an analogon teaser, enough so that you want to see the rest
of the scenes. 

     In the future, the cinematic analogon will be replaced with
a virtual one.  However, the same type of system will probably
remain.  Remember, the key to marketing video games is to keep
charging tolls for going father, so that each step of the way is
a contest to see more of the scene.  The same will be true for
commercial virtual reality: one will begin to see virtual reality
versions of Mortal Kombat II, where in order to see the final
scene one will have to win a contest first.  The idea of a free-
flowing world where one can explore with no limits is a myth that
will die when virtual reality becomes commercially viable.  The
only way to keep making profits is to restrict the flow of
information.  On the other hand, it is also the only way of
keeping the game player interested.  One has to build in the
drama into the game so that the player wants to keep coming back. 
Many games now actually have an ending: the final scene is
played, and than the credits roll up.  To get to the end is a
sweet victory for the player, but it is also a dissappointment
because the contest is now over.  

     In the world of video games, the analogon serves as the
basis for entertainment.  It has not always been that way, and
the video game "tradition" must always be kept in mind when
understanding how people interact with video games today.  Even
though the analogon is what is being sold, it is still sold
through the medium of a coded system of rules similar to a game.  
Even with the latest video games, which feature movie quality and
stereo CD sound, they still are dependent on the game mechanism:
without a good game behind it, the video aspect will not sell. 
Unlike the cinema, the drama is built into the competition and
the interaction, not into the analogon itself.  The analogon
serves as  a reward for a few minutes work.  The suspense is
actively in you: it is not displayed for you, but you live it as
you are playing.  This is what makes interactive media so
promising: if we can make the suspense built into the
interaction, than it is the person playing with the medium who
resolves it, not the image on the screen.  The analogon then
serves as a true world-creator, but the interaction through the
game allows the user to become part of the drama.  
                              Notes