Well, in the context of the discussion, you can "teach" Emacs to play Pacman. Imagine sending left/right/up/down commands to a Pac-Man emulator or whatever. The emulator itself may not "understand" these commands in pure text, accepting some digital form of them, but whatever format it accepts, it probably can be reduced to sequences of alphanumerical characters.

Similarly, when the emulator broadcasts current coordinates for pieces, or sprites of them - they still can be reduced to plain text.

As a matter of fact, if you want to play Pacman in Emacs... you can just play Pacman in Emacs: https://github.com/emacsmirror/pacmacs

Everything can be reduced to text. Sure, I'm of course pushing it here with my "all digital information reduces to bits, and thus could be text", but the meaningful processing requires understanding the inherent structure and relationships within that data.

It's like arguing that "all books are just sequences of letters". That's technically true, but meaningless without understanding grammar, semantics, and context.

What I'm saying is akin to: "First step to understanding all the books starts with understanding letters..."

Anyway, emojis are of course text - even though they are stored as encodings. For example, LLMs process them exactly like any other text characters - they're tokenized, embedded, and handled through the same mechanisms as words. I should've use a different analogy to make my point clear, but you know what I meant.