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/