Killspeak

Jamey Pittman’s “The Pac-Man Dossier” is all about Pac-Man, only barely sparing readers the actual machine code in which the game is written (something Nick Montfort just couldn’t resist adding into his excellent “Combat in Context”). Fortunately, there’s much more to the dossier than technical details, and so it appeals not only to programmers and game dorks: it’s about history, complexity, and culture.

Pac-Man is the most successful coin-operated game ever and one of the most recognizable cartoon characters in the world. The original game—to say nothing of its many sequels and adaptations—has been in demand since its release almost 30 years ago, from its arcade cabinet, to home computers and emulators, up to the release of Pac-Man: Championship Edition on the Xbox 360 in 2007. Pac-Man is a part of gaming history, among the few games (like Tetris) that deserve to be considered classics, well worth learning more about.

Pittman does a good job of covering Pac-Man‘s many aspects. He has not only gone over old strategy books, but, with access to the source code and decades of study by fans, the actual behaviour of the software. He describes a lot of technical details without becoming dry or irrelevant; what details are, are trapped in tables.

The processes of Pac-Man are presented clearly, particularly those concerning the ghosts’ behaviour, but Pittman doesn’t make the mistake of presenting it as a simple game. Indeed, though he doesn’t say it, Pac-Man is another example of how relatively uncomplicated processes acting together can lead to complex behaviour (an example more familiar and relatable than Conway’s Life).

Though Pittman spends most his words on the software, he also goes over some design decisions—from the cross-gender appeal of a non-violent action game based on eating, to the colours of the sides of the cabinets—and, to me most intriguing, touches on Pac-Man culture and lore:

Blinky will increase his rate of speed twice each round based on the number of dots remaining in the maze. While in this accelerated state, Blinky is commonly called “Cruise Elroy”, yet no one seems to know where this custom was originated or what it means.

This endearing little mystery (and the speculation which follows it) is one example of the human dimension of Pac-Man. The article breaks down exactly how each of the ghosts behaves and why, and goes on to mention the ghosts’ various Japanese and English nicknames, how players saw in each ghost a different style of play, a personality. The game isn’t just about the mechanics of play or the colourful, beeping rewards it gives its players, but what people see in it, what they’ve made of it (cf. Senet).

It’s great to have such a full picture of a game, from the low level of memory bugs in the software to Buckner & Garcia’s Pac-Man Fever. Pittman does a good job of showing us Pac-Man as system and of telling us its story, of reminding us that it is still very human.

After all, someone had to feed those quarters in.