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...