Article: Roland Barthes reviews Pac Man

Paul Krumholz on McSweeney’s published “Roland Barthes Reviews Pac-Man”, imagining what the French semiotician would have written about video games. “The Fourth Republic projects an image of the traditional family over the Fifth: Ms. Pac-Man assumes her husband’s phantoms, and Jr. Pac-Man in turn inherits the burden. Jr. Pac-Man is born fractured, his fears and self-doubts already manifest in the apparitions that haunted his parents. One is informed by way of allusion that the holistic identity he seeks is, in fact, a spectre in itself”.

Read the full article at http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/roland-barthes-reviews-pac-man