Overlooking The Perilous Chapel 4: Are you there God, it's me Pac-Man

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Once the thrill of finishing the first level of Pac-Man is gone, and capturing the high-score at your local arcade is a distant memory, what does the repetitive challenge of the game offer us?  After three hours of continuous play, that "wokka-wokka-wokka" has to being doing some kind of damage, and for what, a new cut-scene?  Carpal tunnel syndrome?  Or really, REALLY, does anyone think they're gonna get famous?  Get rich and retire on Pac-Man $$$?  This isn't golf or billiards.  It isn't chess, the "Sport of Kings".  The Video Game is the sport of Teen's, Freak's, and Loner's, not Kings, not "the Jet Set", and not "the Best People".

"Pac-Man Machine?  Ha-ha!  Sorry, it's just, well, we don't play that here Mrs. Torrance"

But why does someone climb Mt. Everest, or do any of that shit?  Bro, they just do.

Billy Mitchell is that kind of bro.  The "King of Quarters", the Pac-MAN, proclaimed Video Game Player of the Century in Tokyo in 1999.  And the first to record a perfect game of Pac-Man, meaning, every available ghost, every available fruit, every single point WITHOUT LOSING A SINGLE LIFE.  Over six-hours of wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka.  Say what you want, that's just an incredibly mind blowing achievement.   Yet, Billy Mitchell is not a household name.  He'll never be considered an A-List celebrity.  And as far as I can tell, his main source of income is from hot sauce not Pac-Man.  "Ricky's Hot Sauce".  It doesn't even carry his own name.

Mr. Billy Mitchell

The skill, discipline, and talent of Billy Mitchell is not that far removed from the skill, discipline, and talent of a world class golf, billiards, or chess player, yet the disparity in income, fame, and respect of the Video Game Player of the Century and the Player of the Century recognized in any of these other games is staggering.

I hope you understand just exactly what was involved in executing the "perfect game" and why I feel his achievements are, ahem, overlooked.

Here is a link to a website that breaks down the ins and outs of modern day Pac-Man theory.  Yes, I said THEORY:

http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html#Chapter_4

There are high-level concepts, rules and laws that drive the dynamics of the game. Without a knowledge and understanding of them, it is just absolutely impossible to succeed at the highest levels, and forget the hope of ever achieving a perfect game.  Let's call this the "occult wisdom" of Pac-Man, the hidden truths to the game that can only be accessed through two ways: extremely disciplined attention, or access to a cheat sheet like the link above.

Now, the creator Toru Iwatani, and his team of developers, they are the originators of just about everything that IS Pac-Man.  They devised the concepts, rules, and laws that drive the game, and they buried them within the code of the game.   Maybe embedded is a better word.  The point is is that they programmed everything into the game play that would be extracted and written into the modern day "cheat sheet".   If it's in the game its because Toru and crew put it in there.  Kinda like a movie director.

"Hey asshole, I got next game."








As the Pac-Man playing universe took shape, it became apparent that some people were better than others, but why?  Reflexes and simple hand-eye coordination?  More time and more quarters?  Probably.

But even then the highest level players with the most highly refined physical skills started to separate from each other.   The elite video game player started to emerge.

What made someone an elite player?   What did the elite see that no one else could see?

Patterns.  Rules,  Laws.  Concepts.  A map buried within a maze, a mathematically precise knowledge embedded in the game.  It turns out that while most of us are running away from and chasing ghosts,  Billy Mitchell and the elite players are CONTROLLING the ghosts.

I don't think that Toru Iwatani and crew knew that this was possible.  I don't think that this was "programmed" into the game as the ultimate game playing goal.  Pac-Man was a game of cat and mouse,  where the power shifted between Pac-Man and his pursuers.  It wasn't designed to be a game where the ghosts had all the control, especially not a game where Pac-Man had all the control.  What fun would that be?

Room 256 was Overlooked

Level 256 wasn't "programmed" into Pac-Man, it was DISCOVERED by elite players with incredible vision, discipline, and patience.  Players with extreme will power and confidence.  Okay, maybe too much time on their hands, but hey, we all have hobbies.  Elite players racking up millions of points soon began stumbling into Level 256 and realizing "Pac-Man is not in Kansas anymore."

In 1999, 19 years after Pac-Man was released, Billy Mitchell did the absolutely unthinkable.  By scoring the 3,333,360th point, he not only navigated all 255 standard levels of Pac-Man perfectly, he even navigated that Joycean clusterfuck of Level 256 perfectly too.  Think of the trial and error that occurred, the dedication to traverse all 255 preliminary levels, perfectly, just to deconstruct and master that 256th.  It's fair to assume that it would be enough to drive a person completely insane.  

But I only assume that because I am not in control of the ghosts.  I run and I chase, I live and I die, I struggle and I fight to just get past the next level, and I always come up short of perfection. 

Jack Torrance isn't in control of the ghosts either.

Level 237 at The Overlook

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka- All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-wokka-

Hmm…I wonder….what 19 plus 237 is?

Overlooking The Perilous Chapel 3: Doc-Man

Overlooking The Perilous Chapel 2: Jack-Man

                                                 O

                                     O

                       O

                                                                        O

                                        O

                         O

?

?!

!?!?

!!!!!!!!!!

"The red ghost's character is aptly described as that of a shadow"

Overlooking the Perilous Chapel: Pac-Man

Pac-Man needs no explanation.  It's a relatively simple game, one any novice can play with out much instruction.  It almost seems instinctual.  But imagine if instead of playing the game from the traditional perspective, you had to play Pac-Man from a first person perspective?   Even Billy Mitchell would have trouble adjusting to this shift in perspective.  Well, maybe not Billy Mitchell.

For the average player, this new perspective would turn a relatively simple game into an incredibly complicated one.  The position of the ghosts would be unknown, and just trying to keep track of your location, how many dots remain, and where remaining dots are would make clearing level one a minor miracle.  But with time and practice, success doesn't seem impossible.

What does seem impossible is this:  imagine if you had never played Pac-Man before, never knew the goals or rules, and were asked to jump in blindly to the first person perspective version of the game.  How long would it take for you to figure out what the hell was going on?  Would you automatically assume that the red colored dude was trying to kill you?   How would you know that you could kill the flashing blue dudes?  All of these elements could only be discovered after hours of trial and error, and many, many lives.

You might continue to eat the dots and gain higher and higher scores, but would the experience be any fun?  What would compel anyone to continue to play this game?  Maze of Death would seem like a better name than Pac-Man.  It would take a very shrewd student of the game, playing many, many hours to ever notice certain patterns and clues that could lead them to acquiring the same knowledge and same success that a person playing from the traditional perspective has.

Ask yourself, if there was no one there to inform you, how long would it take you to realize:

1.  There are only 4 ghosts, one of each color

2.  There are only 4 flashing blue ghosts, and these are the same 4 different colored ghosts

3.  There are only 4 super powered dots, which are the cause of the 4 ghosts to

 change into flashing blue ghosts

4.  You can kill flashing blue ghosts

5.  The cherries that appear out of nowhere do nothing

6.  Travelling through the open doorways are not an exit, they just transport you to the opposite side of the maze.

7?

8?

9?

This list can go on and on.

For those who grew up with Pac-Man, playing Pac-Man, it might be difficult to remove your own knowledge and truly appreciate just how complex a mystery this game would be for the uninitiated playing in the first person perspective.  But placed into a different context, the differences in perspective are fairly simple to understand.  Examine the differences between a God and his creation, or a Father and a Child.

Examine the differences between Jack Torrance and his son Danny:

Jack's Perspective

Danny's Perspective

ghosts!

Pac-Man was released on May 22, 1980.

The Shining was released on May 23, 1980.

Above image from the brilliant MK Ultrasound.
Check out more of his excellent work at http://beingthere723.blogspot.com/

A Sirius Man Eats Whole Wheat Bread

Samuel Beckett wrote of James Joyce:  "To Joyce reality was a paradigm, an illustration of a perhaps an unstatable rule…It is not a perception of order or of love; more humble than either of these, it is a perception of coincidence."  Before we can comprehend reality, we must perceive it accurately, we must examine closely.

Upon closer examination, the apparent continuity error in the game of chess between HAL and Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey was not an error, it was simply a bluff made by HAL to gauge the perception of Poole.   This truth, although in plain sight, was buried by Kubrick, and would only be discovered by the majority of his audience until many years later.  It appears Kubrick, like HAL, was also bluffing.  Was it for the same reason HAL bluffed Poole?  To gauge the perception of the audience?  Sneaky bastard.

Joel and Ethan Coen are a couple of sneaky bastards too.

There is nothing wrong with simply appreciating A Serious Man as a dark comedy, or enjoying 2001: A Space Odyssey as an epic special effects driven science-fiction film.  But the Coen's are, as I said, sneaky bastards.  And like Kubrick, they are offering us something much more profound than just a comedy.

In A Serious Man, Lawrence "Larry" Gopnik and Arthur Gopnik are brothers, who both involve themselves with extremely complex and intellectual exercises.  One embodies the madness of artistic creation, the other the burden of proof.   

The Mentaculus

Arthur is a lonely lumpy soul who spends his time gambling, lurking, and obsessively scribbling into print a work called The Mentaculus, a title that conveys a calculus of mentation.  It is his "probability map of the universe", and is written in a language that seemingly only makes sense to Arthur.  One quick glance and it looks as though poor Arthur is quite ill, mentally.  Yet it reminds me of something else written in a language no one can seemingly understand….

James Joyce, one of the most highly respected artists of the 20th century, spent the last 17 years of his life working on what he called his Work In Progress, which eventually became Finnegans Wake.  Finnegans Wake is a work of literature that makes absolutely no sense to 99% of the people who attempt to read it.  The other 1% claim, rather loudly, that it is a work of genius.  It would be a whole lot easier for the majority to dismiss this book if it weren't for the fact that so many intelligent and respected people populate the 1% who revere Finnegans Wake.  What the hell do they know?  What do they see that the rest of us can’t?

It is possible that The Mentaculus is Arthur’s Work In Progress.  Unfortunately, Arthur is living in Minnesota in the 1960's, and cannot command the kind of audience that Joyce did.  We don't even know if Arthur has ever allowed anyone else to read it.  Ironically, he lives with the one person who might make sense of his masterpiece, his brother Larry.

Schröedinger's Cat

Larry is more successful than Arthur, he has a wife and two children, a career, and a solid social identity.  

Larry is very intelligent, a Professor of Physics, and spends his time lecturing on the laws and theorems  calculated by people even smarter than he, yet he remains the epitome of "those who can, do, those who can't, teach."  Larry is shown lecturing on the Schröedingers Cat thought experiment, and it is a good reflection of Larry's life.  Larry is both Teacher and Student, Married and Alone, Faithful and Faithless, Found and Lost.  It all depends on the observer.

Schröedinger's cat is also a good reflection of the Standard Model of Quantum Physics at the moment, as it remains both Fact and Fiction.  The calculations and equations of quantum physicists promise a unified theory of everything, an explanation for the existence of time, space, and the universe that we live and die in.  The mathematical equations have promised that matter is composed of certain scientifically observable objects, the most important being the top quark, the bottom quark, the tau neutrino, and the Higgs Boson,  So far the bottom quark (1977), the top quark (1995) and the tau neutrino (2000) have been discovered, just like the calculations have promised.  But the Higgs Boson remains the elusive companion of this group, and is still referred to as the Hidden Variable.  We can't claim the Standard Model to be fact until this is finally observed.

"In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork". Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark", as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork". But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau" words in "Through the Looking-Glass". From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark", in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."

 Murray Gell-Mann

Arthur and Larry (Art and Law), two very different brothers, are actually both searching for the same thing, the hidden variable to life, but all they have to show for in their search is loneliness and divorce.  It is said that it is always darkest before the dawn, and for Arthur and Larry, it's getting pretty dark in Room 2³ of the Jolly Roger Motel.  

"Arthur, you've got to pull your self together"

"It's all shit Larry.  It's all shit."

"Arthur don't use that word."

"It's just fucking shit."

"Arthur."

"Look at all that Hashem has given you.  What has he given me?  He hasn't given me shit."

"Arthur, what do I have?  I live at the Jolly Roger"

"You have a family.  You have a job.  Hashem hasn't given me shit.  He hasn't given me bubkes!"

"It's not fair to blame Hashem, Arthur.  Please.  Sometimes….please calm down.  Sometimes you have to help yourself."

"Hashem hasn't given me shit.  Now I can't even play cards."

We have two brothers embracing in the void of an empty swimming pool, lost in a world where Hashem, the divine God they were raised with, has abandoned them.  

There is a message next to Arthur, (a sign?),  that is painted on the concrete, a message that neither are paying attention to.  The audience is most likely not paying attention to it either.  

The message is never revealed completely, but common sense tells us that 3 FT NO DIVING is painted on the concrete as a warning to those who would jump into the shallow pool.  Nothing profound.  But a knowledge of James Joyce and quantum physics is not a common sense, it is a rather uncommon sense, and in this scene, seen through a lens informed by Joyce and quantum physics, the perception of a very curious coincidence occurs.

James Joyce uses the symbol "Ǝ" in the architecture of Finnegans Wake to represent what the Buddhists call "void" and the Taoists call "wu-hsin" or NO MIND.  This NO MIND represents the "class of all possible minds", meaning the aggregation of all possible minds.  This mind does and does not exist, like that damn cat, and is best expressed in the paradoxical language of mystics and the mathematical equations of quantum physics.  Robert Anton Wilson in his brilliant essays on Joyce equates Joyce's Ǝ with the Hidden Variable of quantum physics.

If we allow ourselves to fill in the missing letters through this lens, this message, written on the edge of a void, might be trying to say:

Ǝ

NO 

DIVINE

WHY?  Well, we have two brothers embracing each other, one a poor man's James Joyce, the other a poor man's Schröedinger, and both are lamenting their relationship to the divine.  The message is both pessimistic (NO DIVINE = NO GOD) as well as optimistic ( Ǝ NO DIVINE =  the Hidden Variable, the class of all things Divine is right by you!).  The Coen's have planted a message that seemingly embraces both the pinnacles of artistic and mathematical expression, a message buried as deep as the bluff of HAL.

But do the Coen's believe that the message is the pessimistic one or the optimistic one?  

There is a clue, another message buried somewhere else in the film, one that is more explicit even though it only appears for a brief second of screen time.  If you are paying very close attention, I think the Coen's are very clear as to their answer, because it seems that the elusive companion of the quarks, the Hidden Variable of the Standard Model of quantum physics is as close to Arthur and Larry as the coincidental message painted in black by the side of the pool.  It's right there in The Mentaculus.

I think I'm going to go re-read THIS.

Update:  Courtesy of The Secret Sun