Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Pac-Man Principle: A User's Guide To Capitalism
    The Pac-Man Principle: A User's Guide To Capitalism
    The Pac-Man Principle: A User's Guide To Capitalism
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    The Pac-Man Principle: A User's Guide To Capitalism

    By Alex Wade

    3/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In spite of being well into middle-age, Pac-Man's popularity shows no sign of decline and the character has appeared in over sixty games on virtually every games platform ever released. According to the David Brown celebrity index, in 2008, nearly three decades after initial release, 94% of Americans were able to recognise Pac-Man, which gave the character greater brand awareness than Super Mario. Pac-Man, with its avowed commitment to non-violence was a videogame of many firsts, including being designed to appeal to children and females and providing the first narrative interlude in a videogame. Although iconic, Pac-Man has not been subject to sustained critical analysis. This book helps to fill that gap, providing an extensive, sophisticated, but accessible analysis of the influence of Pac-Man on the way that we live in contemporary western societies.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Hunt Publishing
    Release dateJul 27, 2018
    ISBN9781785356063
    The Pac-Man Principle: A User's Guide To Capitalism
    Author

    Alex Wade

    Alex Wade is a writer, freelance journalist, media lawyer and lecturer. As well as running the Surf Nation blog, Alex has edited and/or contributed columns and features for many national newspapers and magazines including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent titles, the FT, The Telegraph, Huck, Wavelength, The Surfer's Path, Flush, Coast and Cornwall Today. In 2009, Alex was short-listed as Sports Feature Writer of the Year in the Sports Journalists' Association's awards and he has sat on various occasions as a judge for Coast's annual awards. He was the first UK writer to cover surfing in serious depth for a national newspaper. Alex has travelled the globe extensively in search of the biggest waves and best breaks. He has written about surf breaks from Hawaii and Costa Rica to France and Portugal. Despite a restless life he thinks he has found paradise in West Penwith, Cornwall, UK, where he surfs all year round.

    Read more from Alex Wade

    Related to The Pac-Man Principle

    Related ebooks

    Philosophy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Heather Widdows: The Ugly Side of Beauty

      Jan 30, 2019

      The philosopher on how our appearance intolerance hinders ideas and human flourishing The post Heather Widdows: The Ugly Side of Beauty appeared first on Guernica.

      11 min read

    • Article

      Why Millennial Leftists Have Made a BBC Filmmaker a Cult Hero

      Aug 11, 2021

      Flowing dreamlike between pop culture, politics, and psychology, Adam Curtis’s documentaries both complicate and articulate a senseless world.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Fields Remain Dark

      Aug 1, 2024

      I write this having just run a five-day folk horror festival, so to say this concept if fresh in my mind would be an understatement. The genre may for many be associated with the classics, the so-called unholy trinity of The Wicker Man, Blood on Sata

      6 min read

    • Article

      Definitely, Maybe

      Sep 16, 2021

      Definitely, Maybe
      31 min read

    • Article

      Feeding the Future: On the Algorithmic Apocalypse

      Mar 22, 2018

      Science fiction often presents two nightmare visions of the future: one when the world has ended, and one when the world hasn’t, where “progress”—technological, typically—determinedly continues, for better but mostly worse. Whichever you find least f

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Correct Use Of Beasts

      Jun 6, 2022

      The Correct Use Of Beasts
      5 min read

    • Article

      Chris Packham: ‘We’re In Deep S***. We Need Science More Than Ever’

      Mar 15, 2021

      Chris Packham is on a mission - to energise viewers with such amazement at the natural world, that they fall in love with science, and thereby help put us on track to improving our planet. While this may have been a subplot in much of his previous wo

      4 min read

    • Article

      Cyberpunk Rules

      Oct 1, 2020

      Cyberpunk Rules
      6 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Mar 21, 2024

      Reviews
      5 min read

    • Article

      Trigger Happy

      Aug 13, 2020

      Trigger Happy
      3 min read

    • Article

      Matters Of Play

      Oct 29, 2018

      As you read this sentence, there is a child, eight years old, toiling in a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His father works alongside him, equipped only with hand tools; his mother is dead. The child is responsible for collecting

      5 min read

    • Article

      Homo Narrativus And The Trouble With Fame

      Aug 29, 2019

      Our understanding of fame is critical to how we see each other and our society. But it is also badly wrong. Let me tell you why. We humans are storytelling and story-finding machines: homo narrativus, if you will. In making sense of the world, we loo

      9 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Oct 25, 2019

      Reviews
      6 min read

    • Article

      Second Life For Coffee Grounds

      Mar 1, 2023

      Second Life For Coffee Grounds
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Dirtbag Is Back

      Jul 26, 2022

      The Dirtbag Is Back
      5 min read

    • Article

      Around The Web

      Nov 6, 2017

      Until the 19th century, hardly anyone recognised the vital role that everyday buyers play in the world economy. Professor Frank Trentmann, author of Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, traces the growth in momentum and awareness of

      2 min read

    • Article

      Ideas

      Dec 15, 2023

      Ideas
      2 min read

    • Article

      Post Script

      Dec 28, 2023

      Post Script
      2 min read

    • Article

      A Positive Future For Forteans

      Aug 8, 2024

      A a regular reader of Fortean Times since the mid-1990s, I have noted recent articles and letters describing the hostile conditions for forteana at present. I want to argue that the opposite is the case: that there has never been a better time to be

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Pac-Man Principle

    3/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Pac-Man Principle - Alex Wade

      [email protected].

      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’,¹ 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’.² 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’.³ 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 口 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. Pac-Man 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.⁴ Still, as a developer working for a corporation whose main aim is to make money, the pursuit of equality through the pleasure principle

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1