Wakka wakka wakka

My social research methods course is all but complete, the other producers are back from mat leave and vacation, and my home reno is a whisper away from done – it’s blog o’clock!

I’ve been playing some Pacman in a Flash app while on the train on this old laptop I use to turn my commute into some of the best times I have in a day. As a child I spent days playing this from a cartridge on the Atari 800 and, while I’ve known that Flash and other emulated versions of the yellow uber-consumer have been around for a while, I never sought them out. But now, the Pac is back and I’ve been having a blast.

There is a real beauty in its components, so simple that you can pretty much list them off the top of your head:

• 2D maze of primary blue
• One bright yellow avatar consisting of one character affordance – a giant mouth
• The single joystick interface (in its Flash incarnation, arrow keys)
• Two rates of motion – normal and eating (impeded)
• Four directions of motion and that only rarely due to the maze constraints
• Four antagonists with rudimentary AI, mostly just patrol paths
• Four “power pellets” that reverse the roles of protagonist and antagonist for a few seconds
• Ghost Pen from which antagonists spawn.
• Pacing – with every level cleared, movement is faster, power pellets work for less time, and the value of bonus fruits increases
• Primary objective – eat all the dots (10 points each)
• Other objectives – eat all bonus fruits (increasing); eat all ghosts (first ghost 200, doubling for each subsequent to a maximum of four)
• Great audio – wakka wakka wakka wakka bloook! bloook! blooook! Wawawawawwawawablooooop!

I love it. Such immediacy of connection – hugely immersive and engaging. Emergent behaviours and gameplay. Getting a sense for ghost motion, devising your own strategies to support taking objectives. Shifting priorities - while eating the ghosts is the big point-maker in the early game, this diminishes against the rising value of fruit and decreasing power-pellet effectiveness.Creating your own games – do I play for points? Level-clearing? Revenge? The Triple Crown? Taking shots of Crown Royal?

I really miss the joystick - there was an amazing tactile immersion with that interface. And, in the Flash version, the aspect ratio reflects the arcade game rather than the TV-configured version I had when I was ten so my old patterns are useless. But fumbling through it, getting the rhythms, it’s new and nostalgic at the same time.

When Namco makes gathering games, they make gold. Now I want to play Katamari Damacy again. Naaa nana na nana na na na na na nana na…