The Story a Film Cannot Give You

The Story a Film Cannot Give You

Pac-Man is almost nothing. A yellow circle, a maze, four ghosts. And yet the four ghosts are not the same. Toru Iwatani gave each one a color and a single hidden job, written into its Japanese name: the red one chases, the pink one lies in ambush, the cyan one is fickle, and the orange one feigns ignorance and drifts away when it gets too close. You are never told any of this. You feel it, ghost by ghost, until the red one seems to have a temper and the orange one seems shy.

That is the strange thing about a game. A film hands you the maker's story, finished, and you sit and watch it. The maker of a game intends a story too — but he leaves a space inside it, and you walk in. Your own story gets added on top of his. That extra layer, the one you build with your own hands, is why a game is one element larger than a film.

I did not really understand this until I began handling these machines every day. When I clean an old board and study how it was put together, I start to see the small decisions, the little battles won and lost inside it. It reads like history. Behind each one is someone who cared a great deal.

But the thing that decided me was watching my customers. The way they light up over a console I shipped — I realized this is an industry surrounded by an enormous number of people who love it. I am one of them. I only play a little, but when I learn the backbone of a game and then pick up the controller, the fun runs deeper. So I began telling those backstories. If I find them interesting, I figured, maybe one or two other people will too.