Paul Gerhardt, project director of the Creative Archive Licence Group, added the big news stories of the last three decades were "the punctuationmarks in the stories of our lives".
In the game, players take on a series of increasingly tough enemies in an arena drawn using only the basic characters and punctuationmarks available in Excel.
Emoticons, which represent moods and facial expressions using a combination of punctuationmarks, numbers and letters, are the darling of the texting world.