لطفا منتظر باشید ...
A Sign Represents Something Other Than Itself
A sign represents something other than itself; it "stands for something."The mark of a circle (O) in the game of Tic-Tac-Toe, for instance, represents not only an action by player "O" (as opposed to player "X") but also the capture of a certain square within the game's nine-square grid. Or consider the interaction between two players in a game of Assassin. A tap on the arm might represent "death" or "capture," depending on the rules of the game. In either case, the tap is meaningful to players as something other than a tap. This concept of a sign representing something other than itself is critical to an understanding of games for several reasons. On one hand, games use signs to denote action and outcome, two components of meaningful play.The marks of an "X" or "O" in Tic-Tac-Toe or the taps on the arms of players in a game of Assassin are actions paired with particular outcomes; these actions gain meaning as part of larger sequences of interaction. These sequences are sometimes referred to as "chains of signifiers," a concept that calls attention to the importance of relations between signs within any sign system. On the other hand, games use signs to denote the elements of the game world. The universe of Mario, for example, is constructed of a systems of signs representing magic coins, stars, pipes, enemies, hidden platforms, and other elements of the game landscape. The signs that make up the game world collectively represent the world to the player-as sounds, images, interactions, and text. Although the signs certainly make reference to objects that exist in the real world, they gain their symbolic value or meaning from the relationship between signs within the game. We can illustrate the idea of signs deriving meaning from within the context of a game with an example drawn from the history of Scrabble. In late 1993, a campaign was initiated against Hasbro, the company that owns and distributes Scrabble, requesting that the company remove racial and ethnic slurs from The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD). This rulebook of officially playable or "good" words contained, at that time, words such as "JEW," "KIKE," "DAGO," and "SPIC." As a result of pressure from the Anti Defamation League and the National Council of Jewish Women, Hasbro announced that fifty to one hundred "offensive" words would be removed from the OSPD. As Stefan Fatsis writes in Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players,
The Scrabble community went ballistic. A handful of players, notably some devout Christians, backed the decision. But a huge majority led by a number of Jewish players, accused Hasbro of censorship.Words are words, and banning them from a dictionary would not make them go away, they argued. Plus, the players tried to explain, the words as played on a board during a game of Scrabble are without meaning. In the limited context of scoring points, the meaning of HONKIE, deemed offensive in the OSPD, is no more relevant than the meaning of any obscure but commonly played word.[14]
Within the context of a game of Scrabble, words are reduced to sequences of letters-they literally do not have meaning as words. Rather, the letters are signs that have value as puzzle pieces that must be carefully arranged according to the rules of spelling. Thus, although the sequence of letters H-O-N-K-I-E has meaning as a racial slur outside of the context of a game of Scrabble, within it the sequence has meaning as a six-letter play worth a number of points on the board. Within Scrabble the chain of signifiers represent words stripped of everything except their syntactical relationships. Outside of Scrabble, however, the words represent racial animosity. Looking at chains of signifiers within a game means dissecting a game in order to view the system at a micro-level to see how the internal machinery operates. But entire games themselves can also be identified as signs. Viewing them from a macro- rather than micro-perspective allows us to look at games from the outside, seeing them as signs within larger sign systems. The game of Tic-Tac-Toe, for instance, could be seen as a sign representing childhood play, whereas the game of Assassin might stand for college mischief in the 1980s or the film The 10th Victim, which inspired the game. [14]Stefan Fatsis, Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), p. 149.
