Pleasure - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 38

For more information on Zork, text adventures , and interactive fi ction in general
you should read Simon Montfort' s Twisty Little Passages (2005) .
PAC-MAN
What's coming now will follow a familiar pattern. Pac-Man is usually credited as
being the fi rst video game character. Before that, you steered spaceships, gun turrets,
moon landers, and other, almost always mechanical, devices. Here is a quote from
Toru Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man: “I designed Pac-Man to be the simplest char-
acter possible, without any features such as eyes or limbs. Rather than defi ning the
image of Pac-Man for the player, I wanted to leave that to each player' s imagina-
tion.” As usual, links for images and reviews of Pac-Man can be found at the end
of this topic.
In its day Pac-Man was a great success and as popular with girls as with boys.
Let's take a look at Pac-Man in terms of our aesthetics and see if we can get a clue
to its enduring popularity.
Pac-Man is interesting in terms of agency because at fi rst sight, thinking purely
in terms of interaction and interface, the player doesn't actually have much to do.
You simply select a direction for Pac-Man to travel in. However, in terms of inten-
tion and perceivable consequence we see that Pac-Man is actually quite sophisti-
cated. Your character needs to chomp through as many “pills” as possible to gain
points. We can also direct him to the big pills, which are power-ups as well as more
points, and allow Pac-Man to kill the ghosts. Of course we have to make sure he
avoids the ghosts when they cannot be killed because they cause Pac-Man to lose a
life. The player can also choose to get Pac-Man to eat the fruit that appears from
time to time in order to gain yet more points. The actions the player performs are
very basic and easily learned but Pac-Man is about strategy: avoiding getting killed
by the ghosts, killing ghosts, gaining as many points as possible, and getting onto
the next level. Pac-Man constantly prompts us to consider intention—what we would
like to make happen—and perceivable consequence—what actually happens. It is
faster paced than Zork but not as twitchy as Spacewar. This is at the heart of the
success and pleasure of Pac-Man.
At fi rst sight we have a story about the supernatural, ghosts, and haunted houses,
along with a strange chomping mouth that eats anything it comes into contact with.
Each game of Pac-Man is different but after a while the actual characters become
of lesser interest as they fail to develop and the levels are always laid out in the
same way. We can tell stories about how we succeeded or failed, but there is no real
story to build up—we just get to recount what we did, much in the same way as you
could with Tetris.
Are we transformed into Pac-Man? It seems unlikely. We might empathize with
him to the extent that we don't want him to die but we do not think we become
Pac-Man in the sense that we do with shooters and certainly not RPGs. But we
should try putting ourselves back into the mindset of people who played Pac-Man