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CHAPTER 1

In Defence of Pac-Man

The eponymous arcade game, featuring the pill-popping, yellow pie chart, Pac-Man, was developed by Toru Iwatani and published by Namco in 1980. The ghost-chasing fruitarian is nearly forty years old. As he approaches the abyss of middle age, his prolific output shows no sign of slowing. Namco's release of Pac-Man 256, in 2015, means that in the 35 years since his inception, Pac-Man had appeared in over 50 individual videogames across practically every platform ever released. With videogames' position as the pre-eminent media form of the 21st century, Pac-Man's ubiquity and prestige in popular media is assured. Debuts in Saturday morning kids cartoon shows, pinball tables, music singles, card-games, and, long before Pokémon Go, augmented reality games, mean that the social and cultural influence reaches far beyond the dark, dank realms of the arcade and the games room. Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao adopted 'Pac-Man' as his ring name during his run towards being one of the greatest boxers to have ever lived; a nebula of the Cassiopeia constellation was attributed with his moniker as the collection of stars resembles Pac-Man chomping down on a power pill; the 'Pac-Man defence' is a business strategy employed by corporations which reverses a hostile takeover by buying shares in the aggressor corporation, whilst Norwegian scientists are using a miniaturised version of Pac-Man's maze to investigate the interaction of microorganisms. This legion of examples demonstrates how Pac-Man has come to be deified as one of the few videogame characters to truly attain what Henry Jenkins calls 'transmediality', where cultural artefacts are deployed and utilised far outside of their host medium.

The Pac-Man defence is instructive of the true transmediality of the Pac-Man. The action of turning back on one's aggressor, as Pac-Man does with his ghostly pursuers, has infused the dominant economic, political, social and cultural model of the West: capitalism. As countless political economists have identified, the purest form of capitalism is predicated on the principle of the state of nature, that is, the survival of the fittest. Fortunately, as this book highlights, capitalism, for a variety of reasons, is rarely seen in these unbridled forms, but the Pac-Man defence is this idea very much at work. In the playground the bullied turns back upon the bully; in the workplace the worker stands up to the manager; in the wild the prey bears its claws to the predator. Before reaching this point though, the individual pupil, worker or animal must be coaxed and educated that this course of action, where the aggressor is automatically conferred with rights far beyond its ken, is inappropriate and unacceptable. In many societies this is an action conferred by a safety net which takes the form of welfare, education and health support: it is the check and balance to the state of nature. This is also undertaken by parents or carers, siblings or partners who will nurture the individual to react and push back against prevailing forces.

It is perhaps telling that Pac-Man himself was created as a prelapsarian character, reliant on the player for input, coaxing and nurturing. Pac-Man himself is helpless without a player guiding him around the maze: upon starting a game, with no player input, Pac-Man will start moving autonomously before headbanging the wall of the maze. This mindless wandering is manifest in the physiological characteristics of Pac-Man. In classic iterations such as Pac-Man Championship Edition, Pac-Man has no eyes and relies entirely on the player for guidance and safety in the smooth spaces garnered by the relatively hostile environment of the classical labyrinth. It is interesting then, that even in the now legendary and widely-cited interview with Susan Lammers, Iwatani's perception of Pac-Man as an innocent caught in this state of nature is so often overlooked, seeing his character as one who 'hasn't been educated to discern between good and evil. He acts more like a small child than a grown-up person. Think of him as a child learning in the course of his daily activities'. Pac-Man as a character, alone in a maze, is amazed at this isolation, so resorts to one of the universals of human existence, eating, in order to survive. For modern societies, need has been supplanted by greed as the public flaunting of eating as a status symbol is rivalled only by the pornographic sheen of advertising that accompanies it. Viewed in this way it is possible to see how Pac-Man becomes a poster child for capitalism, as Iwatani continues, he's 'indiscriminate because he's naive. But he learns from experience'. Therefore, the ideal consumer, formed of universal need in the crucible of a labyrinth, becomes the ideal learner-worker to be deployed within the state of nature of capitalism, who will turn back on his aggressors when given the opportunity.

Indeed, Iwatani continues on to say that the inspiration for Pac-Man arises primarily from consumption. Eating food is a universal for living things and a videogame which focussed on this would have equal universal appeal to young and old, male and female, irrespective of race, nation and class. The use of the Japanese symbol kuchi ? was the initial inspiration, which connotes with 'hole' or 'opening', usually to a body. As Iwatani identifies, the manipulation of symbols has a specific and special power within language, so that the universality of kuchi extends to mastication, digestion, defecation and even sex. Meaning is not conferred, but is, like Kuchi (pun intended), particularly open to interpretation, as the term has been adopted and adapted into American English with the term 'coochi', a vulgar expression for female genitalia, presumably a linguistic by-product of the American occupation of Japan following World War II. The importance of the opening to Pac-Man's origin story extends as far to the – partly upheld – belief that the final shape of Pac-Man himself arose from Iwatani spying a pizza with a slice taken out of it.

As Toru Iwatani's afterword to this book outlines Pac-Man is a game about bridging the differences that existed in arcade game play at the time. Where many games focussed on shooting (e.g. Space Invaders), Pac-Man concentrated on universals of existence. If the human race proves anything it is that even in (or especially in) universality there is diversity and difference. PacMan addressed this contradiction, and in many ways is symbolic of the postmodern condition. In its flexibility and inclusiveness it uses the touchstones of postmodernism. The equity of 'high' and 'low' culture, textual wordplay, the increasing importance of games and access to information as a post-industrial society, in thrall to the individual, looked to overcome traditional obstacles where not all people are equal. In an unbridled state of nature this would be seen as equality of opportunity as there is – theoretical – universal access to resources. In societies where safety nets and interventions exist, this may include racial, sexual and disability equality enshrined in legislation which attempts to provide some semblance of equity through taxation and redistribution.

Thoughtfully and gracefully, and in keeping with the postmodern moment, Iwatani aimed to create a videogame where the traditional distinctions between work and play, private and public, black and white, male and female, did not apply. As discussed below, videogames, as part of a long and rich tradition of games, are unquestionably tied to a learning experience. Amusement arcades, where the most technologically advanced arcade games were located, were seen as a transitional space between the public and the private, and unlike bars and pubs, were not subject to laws limiting access to under-18s. People went to play games and they appealed to all. This is breathlessly documented in Martin Amis's visual extravaganza Invasion of the Space Invaders, where he witnesses an actress whose case of 'Pac-Man hand' was so severe that it resembled blood pudding. Still, as a developer working for a corporation whose main aim is to make money, the pursuit of equality through the pleasure principle of consumption is also good for profits.

Similarly, postmodernism through legislation or positive action looks to overcome inequalities, for better or for worse, but always in the pursuit of profit. For instance, women of the mid and late 20th century were impelled to go out to work. This is, in many cases, seen as liberation and emancipation, with the struggle for equality of pay and opportunity continuing to this day. Less widely discussed are some of the effects of this. In spite of a litany of extra people being in work, living standards have stagnated and in many countries have fallen: everyone is working more for less. Women undertake the 'triple shift' of care for young and old relatives whilst working full-time: in the quest for having it all, there is nothing left. The emotional labour of caring for children and elderly relatives has been partially contracted out to nurseries and care homes which is, usually, undertaken by women, often immigrants, who work with soul-destroying monotony cleaning kuchi and its variant excretions. While it remains questionable if this care can be outsourced offshore, many of these nurturing tasks still need to be done in the domestic environment, as chapter four shows, so as to prepare for, or repair for, the state of nature which is sold to us and masquerades as 'freedom'. Freedom to choose, freedom to vote, interest-free credit cards, free labour (internships), free-trade zones, free from Europe, free-fire zone, nuclear-free, free-data, free-Internet. It is not the lack of freedom, but a surfeit of it which is the cause of concern of those parents, teachers, social workers, youth leaders, nurses, midwives, charged with bringing young, naive beings into the world so that they can be guided and coaxed to live, thrive and survive in smooth, cool, postmodern spaces.

Play and games have always been attributed with the predicate of learning. Apart from the classic texts by Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois, Freud used the interaction between child and parent as a means to treat through psychoanalysis and there is a burgeoning of literature and enterprise around simulations, serious games and gamification, where, in truly flexible and postmodern fashion, the boundaries between work and play, toil and leisure are liquidised (exams can be fun too) and imbibed as human factors, skills which are important to the dominant economic model seen in areas as diverse and universal as decision-making, communication, teamwork and leadership. Using play and games as means to an end, and not as the young, naive child does, merely as an ends within itself, is innovative and creative. Medical simulations permit students to learn and make mistakes in an anodyne environment, whilst trainee pilots can gain operational hours in a passenger jet without putting 200 people at risk when buying the farm.

It is unsurprising that Iwatani was also an advocate of this philosophy, as long as it chimed with the corporation's pursuit of profit: 'I think that unless education is fun and entertaining, people won't learn ... there are many people with enough interest to pay good money for educational software'. Games that provide something beyond their own context mesh coherently with the concept of transmediality and fit with the professed aims of capitalism to exploit any and all milieu, including personal interests, in the ephemeral search for profit. Proof of this is seen in the ways in which videogame players sign up to a free beta test and effectively crash test the – usually flawed – software to destruction. This is a labour-intensive process which may have been previously undertaken by play-testers hoping for a break in the videogames industry but by being marketed as having 'early access' to a desirable piece of software, much of this labour can be virtually and willingly outsourced, all in the name of freedom: freedom from cost to the corporation and freedom to attain early access to desirable software. This example merely endorses the line of thinking that innovation is impossible without having some competitive element in the economic process. Games then have a double role to play here in terms of engendering competition between individuals (capitalism) with pre-agreed rules and outcomes, and also providing the basis for cooperation (checks and balances) to achieve the best outcome for all.

Pac-Man is a good early example from a videogame of seeing this in action. Pac-Man is that naive, innocent child, who would like to consume for pleasure and turn the table on the bully ghosts, but can only do this with intervention and guidance from another whose motivation is to eat as many ghosts, fruit, dots and pills as possible so that they can enter their three letter initials on the high score table and attain kudos and public fame. Yet as Carly Kocurek highlights in an excellent essay about the influence of early coin-operated arcade games, it is not only the content of games which are directly linked to capitalism, but also the practices that are undertaken around them, in their usage and their play. With the child playing with a tea set, there is an open-endedness conferred on whether she serves her dolls high tea, or in a pique of creative destruction, decides to smash the cups against the wall. For those playing an arcade game, the rules are very much set and there is little scope for innovation in the practice of play, no matter how much innovation is employed in the design and development of the game. This is because early arcade games, partly due to technical limitations, but mainly due to increasing revenue streams, were often based on the twin tenets of being extremely difficult, which meant a great deal of expenditure to attain proficiency, but were also closely tied to progression i.e. moving from one level to the next in pursuit of the high score, rather than emergence where more of the game is revealed the longer it is played.

For the pay-to-play model common to arcade games to be proficient it was necessary to become highly skilled at following the rules laid down in and by the game. This is why, as chapter six explains, guidebooks educating players in how to 'game' or 'play' the system proved to be so popular. To play well, to follow the rules and the objectives laid down by the game meant that the 'longer a player can play, the more points he can earn, and the more clout he has in the competitive social environment of the arcade'. It is not possible for instance, as Martin Amis dreams of doing, of sending Pac-Man into the ghosts' den at the centre of the screen: to do so would lead to certain dematerialisation of Pac-Man. It does, however, mean that if the game is played at a high level for a long period of time, it would be possible to stretch out the 10p put into the machine for hours, fulfilling the protestant work ethic identified by Max Weber where less is indubitably more.

Yet, again, as with all elements of capitalism there are contradictions and, in this instance, the conceit of less is more has an inverse legacy, the results of which are still being revealed today. The arcade and the games within it are a playful, postmodern spin on the state of nature. They are the embodiment of what philosopher David Harvey calls 'flexible accumulation' where new spaces are opened to capitalism and the processes common to capitalism are intensified. One credit can be stretched to last all day; hard work is rewarded by extended play. For the children who grew up in the arcade of the 1980s, this is normal and normed behaviour. For the late 1990s meritocracies of Europe and America where these children became adults, the pay-to-play economic model was adopted wholesale: a necessary bargain of citizenship was that rights and responsibilities were in check and balance: if you had no job, you had to work at getting one; you have a right to smoke, but a responsibility not to in public. The contemporary flexibility in work, such as freelancing, zero hours and fixed term contracts are pay-to-play models shifted from consumption to labour. The high scores that were accumulated were not rewarded by extra lives or names as three letter initials, but credit cards, 125% mortgages and payday loans validated by the names of signatures on loan forms, that ultimately in 2008 meant that even the banks couldn't afford to pay to play anymore, the tab for which governments are still picking up: cheques and balances indeed.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Pac-Man Principle"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Alex Wade.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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