I could see it working -- very, very remotely -- if the gamer is familiar with a language that uses symbols to communicate (Egyptian, modern Chinese because, yes, Chinese alphabets are made up of "pictures").
You mean pictograms. Modern Egyptians do not use a pictographic language, but I know what you mean. Languages start with pictograms for each concept, then typically move into a stage where individual syllables are represented by increasingly abstract pictograms. They then move to what can be briefly called a "one sound=one letter" format. Of course, languages can stop anywhere along this line, and have, as you point out. Chinese and Japanese are examples of the first stage. But we all use symbols every day, usually without being aware how common they are in our lives. And words as such are translated by our minds into symbols or series of symbols during mental processing.
But uh, for most people, I think the response would be: WTF is this? You don't understand that a "house" in the IE button bar stands for your designated homepage, or that a red X means "stop"? You have to scroll down to read game titles you've got in folder, rather than selecting by icon? My point is simply that current usage sets the terms of familiarity. Crawford argued (pretty passionately, it has to be said) for a uniform language of symbols which would make it easy to communicate emotions, not just actions and items, in games. I suspect if his idea had been taken up during the formative years of computer gaming, it would not have remained in that original state. Too many developers would have had input, and the idea would have changed to something a bit more intuitive. For example, we might have had the option to hit a given key combination and get a word representing each symbol, instead of the symbol. Had this happened, "WTF" (which is a symbol, instantly recognizable once you know the meaning without having to process the individual letters) might have been a modern response of someone reading the incredibly stiff, outtrageously two-dimensional conversation trees that pass for dialog in modern computer games. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />
