How Pac-Man Eats (book review)

How Pac-Man Eats book cover

How Pac-Man Eats

Noah Wardrip-Fruin

The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2020

ISBN: 9780262044653

Review by Rob Gallagher

The videogame industry loves a good tech demo. Over the decades developers have used everything from race cars to rubber ducks, gleaming teapots to gelatinous ‘meatcubes’ to illustrate what their new products can do, providing referents for buzzwords like bump-mapping and dynamic lighting, ray tracing and inverse kinematics. How Pac-Man Eats adopts a similar approach, using a selection of vignettes and case studies to introduce readers to the analytical framework that Noah Wardrip-Fruin has constructed.

So what are the components of this framework? On the macro-level, How Pac-Man Eats proposes an understanding of videogames as ‘playable models’ built from sets of ‘operational logics’ (11). Drawing on the work of Joseph C. Osborn, Wardrip-Fruin identifies thirteen ‘major families of operational logics’: camera logics, chance logics, collision logics, entity-state logics, game mode logics, linking logics, pattern-matching logics, persistence logics, physics logics, progression logics, recombinatory logics, resource logics and selection logics (49). Viewed from this perspective, in-game events are legible in terms of the combination and concatenation of different logics: when Mario jumps and intercepts a power-up mushroom, for example, he is ‘enacting an entity-state transition, triggered by a collision, on an entity that remains under physics control the entire time’ (58).

Having defined his terms, Wardrip-Fruin explores three approaches to the design and implementation of logics and models: alternative, expansive and inventive. Alternative approaches ‘use an existing logic or model as it has traditionally been used’ but recontextualise it. Here Wardrip-Fruin supplies Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013) as an example, a game that borrows the ‘spatial movement’ model pioneered by id Software’s DOOM (1993) while placing players in a novel ‘type of space’ (a family home rather than a Martian military base) and a new ‘genre context’ (an interactive family drama rather than a gory sci-fi shooter) (xxv). Expansive approaches use ‘an existing logic or model … to communicate something new’ (xxv). This category holds the key to the book’s somewhat cryptic title: for while there had been plenty of games in which entities collided with one another before Pac-Man (Namco, 1980), Wardrip-Fruin argues that it was thanks to Toru Iwatani’s insatiable yellow blob that collision first became comprehensible in terms of one entity eating another, expanding the semiotic horizons of a familiar logic. Finally, inventive approaches attempt to forge new kinds of logics and models. Here Wardrip-Fruin draws on his own experiences working on the game Prom Week, an experiment in modelling the social dynamics of a US high school. His account of the game’s protracted gestation is, among other things, an argument for the importance of universities as spaces where designers can explore game concepts too novel and risky for commercial publishers to countenance. Crucially, the Prom Week team is concerned not just with creating ‘characters [who] decide what to do in complex and changing social worlds’, but also with ‘helping players understand character volition’ (87). As these twin goals suggest, How Pac-Man Eats is very much preoccupied with the question of how videogames communicate, enabling players to understand and interpret their inner workings and the scenarios they simulate. For Wardrip-Fruin, good game design means asking not just ‘How will this logic operate?’ but also ‘How will players understand this?’ (93-4).

In some ways How Pac-Man Eats is reminiscent of game studies as it was in the 2000s – an era rife with formalist scholarship that sought to definitively map the contours of the medium. Flip through and you’ll find plenty of references to canonical artgames of this era, games like Michael Matteas and Andrew Stern’s Façade (2005), Jason Rohrer’s Passage (2007) and Rod Humble’s The Marriage (2007). I’ve always felt like these titles betrayed a rather narrow conception not just of videogames and their expressive potential, but of art in general - as if the highest calling to which games could aspire would be finding new ways to portray the vicissitudes of bourgeois coupledom. It’s to his credit, as such, that while Wardrip-Fruin evidently holds the work of figures like Rohrer and Matteas in high regard, he also recognises how the critical and creative conversation has evolved over the last decade or so, thanks in no small part to the work of queer, trans and feminist scholars and designers. Nor is the book exclusively concerned with avant-garde, DIY and academic game production; in fact, it offers analyses of a wide array of commercial games old and new – from relative obscurities like Devil World (Nintendo R&D1, 1984) and indie darlings like Florence (Mountains, 2018) to blockbusting shooters like Bioshock (2K Boston 2007) and the anarchic microgame anthology WarioWare, Inc. Mega Microgame$! (Nintendo R&D1, 2003).

This big tent approach is surely preferable to the factionalism for which game studies’ early years are notorious, though it can sometimes feel like How Pac-Man Eats is too ready to gloss over the field’s formative controversies and constitutive tensions. This is hard to hold against it, however, when the book is clearly so keen to offer something for everyone. For me, some of the most interesting passages were in the sections on games as metaphors; here Wardrip-Fruin considers how reskinning can be a means of wringing new meanings from the same logics and models, while insisting that there are limits to what any particular game can be made to say - an argument he couches in terms of the ‘rhetorical affordances’ of specific playable models (205-7). Elsewhere we get a chapter challenging the consensus that Nolan Bushnell’s Pong (1972) succeeded where his previous game Computer Space (1971) had flopped because the latter was too unintuitive, via a comparative reading of Computer Space and Spacewar! (Russell et al 1962). A discussion of Adventure (1980), meanwhile, shows how Warren Robinett worked with and around logics literally hard-wired into the Atari VCS console – a machine essentially built to play variations on the theme of Pong – to create something far more ambitious. Each section acts as a kind of demo, showing how the logics and models framework might be applied by scholars working on different domains of gaming’s culture and history. It’s particularly easy to see how the vocabulary Wardrip-Fruin provides might lend itself to the discussion of game engines – the subject of much insightful research over the last few years. We get a glimpse of this in Wardrip-Fruin’s account of how the modular design of id Software’s megahit DOOM laid the groundwork for the rise of ‘tools such as Twine, GameMaker, Unity, and Unreal’ (213, 19).

Such glimpses are often tantalising, and many of the possibilities Wardrip-Fruin flirts with might have been the basis for book-length studies in their own right. Hopping between topics and case studies, revisiting debates from game studies’ past while demonstrating an awareness of more recent developments, the book is undoubtedly engaging and thought-provoking. True, its privileging of breadth over depth can be frustrating, like leaving a buffet stuffed yet somehow dissatisfied. But maybe that’s just how Pac-Man eats.