Pac-Man Fucks
A man at Nintendo (R&D has yet to invent a woman in a PR role) once said that video game controllers have started to look like aircraft cockpits. I believe this was around the time of, or in relation to, the Nintendo Wii. I also can’t find any reference to this online: some variation of ‘video game controllers boeing 747 nintendo’ just brings me to Ebay pages for flight sim gear. You’ll have to take my word on this.
Whether I’ve hallucinated him or not, the point he was going for was that games alienate a general audience when you get to that cockpit extreme from a joystick and a single button. This is true. Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to be the only thing you’ll hear about in games for the next two years. But Pac-Man, for instance, had a corn cereal, and Grand Theft Auto 6 does not have a corn cereal. It does, however, have a collectors edition that costs hundreds of pounds without including the game. You’re telling me this is better? It’s not.
You’d better like Pac-Man because it’s going to be the prevalent example in this entire sequence of words. I like Pac-Man because it’s simple to pick-up and play to an extent that no other game besides Snake has bettered. I’m hemiplegic and benefit greatly from Pac-Man being a directional-pad only game. I also think that games being so complex to control now actively discredits them as a medium, as they’re harder to parse, so less people are playing them, and publishers have less incentive to tailor their themes and ideas for everyone. Pac-Man’s simplicity heralded a wholesome era of accessible games that I’m sad that we’ve lost, and I’m not just saying that because it’s the one game that I get to play on the bus.
In taking games away from grown adults because they can’t be bothered learning how to use a controller made out of Duplo, complex controls have egged publishers to chase - admittedly, very successfully - the remaining audience of adult males by inserting increasingly grotesque visuals and mechanics in their games. Grand Theft Auto 5 has the scene where you, the player, torture A Guy. The subtext is that you’re meant to feel manipulated into doing this by higher powers, and self-loathing at that, but I have a stinking feeling that publishers know that a good number of the game’s players wanked themselves blank over the image of plying a brown man’s teeth out and that all thought stopped there.
As you might imagine from the abominable sequence above and how it’s supposed to be the best that video games can do, publishers don’t care about appealing to any woman, or any person who is not a capital-m Man, anymore. In appeasing their idea of men who think every piece of media should be guns and tits and guns with tits by giving them games that are tits with guns, publishers have to keep pushing against standards of decency, because once something’s shocking, it’s not shocking anymore. This is the repulsiveness of where games have gone, and that of the structures that have taken them there.
Tell you what game has never contributed to this loop? Pac-Man. Not only should everyone play Pac-Man, but everyone can. Everyone did, once upon a time. Everyone is the target audience for Pac-Man. Do you know why? Because you need, what, a directional pad and a start button. A button for coins if you’re on an emulator like a cheeky bollocks. You couldn’t ply a guy’s teeth out in Pac-Man even if Namco had wanted you to want that. Namco would never. And I’ll tell you what, even then, it made a boat-load of money and everyone still likes it, instead of dimly remembering it as an incendiary item on the news.
The reason everyone fondly recalls what a Pac-Mans are is because it’s so simple. You’re a haunted pizza going waka-waka-waka for dots while four wee ghostie guys; Single, Pringle, Ready 2, and Mingle, are chasing you. In 1981, someone at Namco made the observation that it’s the experience of leaving a nightclub at 4am. This is why, for additional realism, you play as a woman in the sequel.
You do also eat a lot of fruit. Contrast this with the unassailable fact that no-one has eaten a cherry in a modern triple-A video game, because their target audience of men have been edged with thirty years of increasingly controversial video games (and much other media besides) to categorically believe that fruit is woke.
There hasn’t been a game released in the last decade - more? - with Pac-Man’s ability to delight the entire public, and I do think that that’s inextricably linked to it being so easy to understand and control (I will also credit Tetris and Space Invaders as being other games that have been simple enough to make everyone go tonto over them). Thinking about Nintendo brought me to Wii Sports, and how the simplicity of that saw it win the hearts of millions. Mam bowling a three hundred? That was in 2006. I am old. Now your parents don’t even want to play the doubles tennis with their Miis anymore when they come round; straight in’t dungeon.
It is naive of me to play at being a games journalist by suggesting that the art form’s golden age was Pac-Man in 1980, but, wasn’t it? With the exception of the Nintendo Wii in 2006, games stopped being aimed at everyone the moment we moved past Pac-Man; the arcade games of the eighties and the single-button joystick. Can you look me in the eye and tell me otherwise? I hold Pac-Man up to the heavens as the diametric opposite of what games are now. He’s just a guy, trying his best. He’s even a wife guy. When was the last time a video game had an honest to gosh wife guy in it? Ethan Klein in Payday 2? (I have just received word via telegram that this example has not aged well.)
We may have collectively forgotten that all a game needs to have universal appeal is an abstract character or a bunch of squares controlled with a directional pad and maybe, MAYBE, a single action button, but we could go back. We won’t, to be fully clear, but.