Intervention
13 Ways of Looking at "Pac-Man"

January was apparently Andrew Ross month over at Dissent. Two articles, Jeffrey J. Williams's "How to be an Intellectual: The Cases of Richard Rorty and Andrew Ross" (in the Winter 2011 issue of the magazine) and Kevin Mattson's "Cult Stud Mugged" (an online original), track Ross's evolution from a so-called cult-stud into someone more akin to an academic labor reporter.

Though the tone of each of these articles differs significantly -- Mattson is by far snarkier and consquently more amusing than Williams -- the upshot of each is that Ross has matured into a serious, Dissent-approved scholar after a flashy but shallow cult-stud start. Their larger, more trenchant point is that the casualization of acadmic labor, September 11, the various wars of the last decade, and the financial crisis have collectively "mugged" cultural studies afficionados, revealing its modes of analysis to be significantly less studly that was previously imagined.

This discussion has reminded me of my own introduction to cultural studies, way back when I was an undergraduate at Cornell. Whatever may be true of Ross's work, past and present, I think the shift away from cultural studies isn't only about a turn toward more "serious" issues, such as grad student unionization, sweatshops, and income inequality. I have been tracking a similar shift even in the way we analyze "merely" cultural objects. This is where Pac-Man comes in. I should warn my readers, that this post will only discuss two of the thirteen ways one might look at the game.

I.


Let me now quote at length from Racing the Beam to indicate the insights Monfort and Bogost bring to Pac-Man:

Even before we get to the game’s hero and villains, Pac-Man’s method of drawing the maze demonstrates one of the major challenges in porting the game to the Atari VCS: time. In the arcade game, the programmer would load character values into video RAM once per maze, using the character tiles to create its boundaries. On the VCS, the maze is constructed from playfield graphics, each line of which has to be loaded from ROM and drawn separately for each scan line of the television display.

To be sure, mazes had already been displayed and explored in VCS games like Combat, Slot Racers, and Adventure. But these games had to construct their mazes from whole cloth, building them out of symmetrical playfields. The arcade incarnation of Pac-Mac demonstrates how the notion of the maze became more tightly coupled to the hardware affordances of tile-based video systems. In the arcade game, each thin wall, dot, or energizer is created by a single character from video memory. Though the method is somewhat arcane, the coin-op Pac-Man also allowed up to four colors per character in an eight-bit color space. (Each character defined six high bits as a “base” color--which is actually a reference to a color map of 256 unique colors stored in ROM--with two low bits added for each pixel of the bitmap.) This method allows the hollow, round-edged shapes that characterize the Pac-Man maze--a type of bitmap detail unavailable via VCS playfield graphics. The maze of the VCS game is simplified in structure as well as in appearance, consisting of rectangular paths and longer straight-line corridors and lacking the more intricate pathways of the arcade game.

What should be immediately apparent is that Monfort and Bogost have very little interest in approaching Pac-Man with a semiotic tool-kit; instead, they want to give an account of the form of the Atari VCS version of Pac-Man relative to the technical, economic, and temporal limitations constraining its development. More than anything, their fantastic little book reads like a technically-literate guided tour or history of the game console.

More and more, I find myself drawn away from the approach to studying culture and the arts represented by Berger and toward the richly rendered historical, technical, and formal description offered by accounts such as Racing the Beam. Those three registers -- the historical, technical, and formal -- turn out to be tightly linked together. You simply can't discuss one without discussing the others. Such rich descriptions must always be pressed into the service of larger arguments, of course; technical description for its own sake is of little interest apart from the claims such description serves. Yet a close attention to technical details allows Monfort and Bogost to paint a richer picture of these early Atari games than a non-technical treatment could. One comes away from this history with a renewed sense of how amazingly creative early game developers were.

III.

This is a longwinded way of suggesting that the shift away from the older cult-stud model -- which these Dissent essays register -- seems not only to apply to political, economic, and historical questions, but also to textual analysis and to the study of culture as such. To my mind, this shift is almost all for the good, though it is in some ways less fun than the earlier model.

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