Is it strange that I spend a lot of time thinking about Pac-Man? Because I do and he makes me sad. He is unquestionably the ultimate loser of the video game world. He has no arms, no legs and only one function: to eat bland white pellets. Then as soon as he has consumed the hundreds of dots that were initially set in front of him, he has only a few seconds to enjoy the achievement before hundreds more take their place ad infinitum. There is no rest for Pac-Man. Only round after round of never-ending drudgery.
There is little for Pac-Man to look forward to at the end of the day. What does he have going for him in his life? A wife? Some wife – an almost identical circle with a bow. Besides, she’s out there doing her own thing anyway. She probably doesn’t have a lot of time for him. She has dots of her own to eat. Two people with miserable jobs do a pretty good job of making each other miserable. So what is there for him? An occasional piece of fruit and that’s about it. Do cherries really provide enough incentive to get out of bed in the morning for another soul-crushingly boring day of eating for the amusement of others?
Pac-Man doesn’t even have any cool powers that he can fall back on to keep himself amused. He can’t fly or shoot fireballs out of his hands. And he can be killed by ghosts. Of all the dangers in the world, ghosts rank pretty low on the list. It is physically impossible for a ghost – a physical nonentity, after all – to do you any sort of harm. They are nothing more than disembodied spirits and as such can have no effect whatsoever on the physical world unless the person who sees them allows himself to be affected.
It is clear that Pac-Man is not really “killed” by any ghosts. Their power is all in his mind. So-called “power pellets” merely act as a kind of placebo, allowing Pac-Man to overcome his fear and confront the imagined peril head on and deal with it, at least temporarily. When the ghosts do catch him, he simply allows himself to be consumed by fear and probably perishes of a heart attack at the sight of them. Pac-Man is obviously consumed with a never-ending and all-encompassing terror from which there is no escape. His mind is a web of horror and anxiety.
He truly leads a tortured existence. Alas, even death provides no relief for Pac-Man. He is simply reincarnated until he runs out of “lives,” and even then any callous teenager with a couple of quarters can wake him and start the nightmare all over again from the very beginning.
I used to think that Pac-Man must have a great inner strength to endure and that if I were him I’d probably hang myself, but then I realized it is probably impossible for a two-dimensional being with no arms and no legs and no neck to hang himself, or do much else for that matter.
Probably the only way he’d be able to kill himself is if somebody laid out some pills in a line so he could eat one after the other. But instead, Pac-Man can do nothing but be, as miserable as that must make him.
I doubt Pac-Man even receives any sympathy from his friends and colleagues in the video game world. It is easy to misunderstand him. To your average Bowser or Mario, it seems pretty easy for Pac-Man. While they’re out there throwing barrels and battling giant turtles, Pac-Man is nothing but a little blob whose entire day consists of greedily gobbling blips in no real physical danger besides that which he inflicts upon himself. One could even call him piggish and gluttonous in the way he eats to excess. It would be easy to be disgusted with his lack of concern for his physical appearance or the opinions of others. They don’t understand that he has not chosen this life.
Like all of us, Pac-Man was handed his lot and now must make the most of it. I admire Pac-Man like I admire few others. Who else has Pac-Man’s perseverance? Who else stares hard, monotonous labor in the face every day and refuses to back down, even forgoing retirement? And who else, despite emotionally crippling personal demons, faces his tasks with such a sense of unquestioning duty? Pac-Man is one of a kind. While most of us simply go through the motions simply trying to make it to the weekend, Pac-Man puts his heart and soul into everything he does every day. If you asked me which historical figure I try to model myself after, I wouldn’t choose Churchill or Lincoln or Jesus. Give me Pac-Man, that magnificent electronic working-class hero, any day.
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