The Object of the Game or “why the f&#k are we really doing this?”

 

Hi there, dear casual reader! Take my hand and follow me into the Wayback machine to take a quick trip back to a place we used to call a “video arcade”.

If you’ve ever played videogames, chances are you are familiar with an old coin-op that became very popular in the early 80’s. So popular, in fact, that it spawned a pop culture craze named after it. 

The game in question was Pac-Man, and one of the many reasons it became so popular was its devious simplicity: you used a joystick to control a yellow round creature gobbling up dots inside a maze. There were four different colored ghosts obsessed with stopping you, (Blinky, Inky, Pinky and Clyde, in case you were curious about their names). At the four corners of the maze there were “power pellets”. When you "ate" one of these, the ghosts got scared and turned blue for a few seconds when you could chomp them up, leaving behind a pair of blinking eyes that would glide back to the chamber at the center of the maze to regenerate. Twice during each maze, a special bonus prize appeared under this chamber (cherries, a strawberry, an orange, an apple…) beckoning you to risk getting caught by the ghosts just to “eat” it. There were many ways to earn points: eating dots, eating power pellets, eating ghosts (each one increased in value after the last, so you earned the most by eating the four ghosts after gobbling one power pill) and eating the bonus prizes. Oh, and after a few mazes, you got to see a “cut scene”, which were animations featuring the game sprites with upbeat electronic music.

Sounds like fun, right? Well, it was. But to be honest, I just brought it up because it was the best thing I could think of as an example for today’s rambling, which for me started with a seemingly simple question: what was the object of the game?

In Wikipedia, it says “eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts”.  Simple, straightforward, right? So, the first times you played, you just tried to get the most bang out of your quarter by trying to stay alive long enough to finish up one screen. Then two, just to see the first cut scene. Then three, to see which bonus prize would come after and line them up at the bottom of the screen. Then six, just to see the second cut scene… But after playing the game a few times, you started noticing a “high score” number on top. If you were the best player, your score was shown there for you to boast until someone else broke it (vanity boards, where you could sign with your initials, came a bit later).

So… what was the object of the game? Eating the dots? Finishing a screen? Avoid getting eaten? Eating the most ghosts with a single pellet? Seeing all the bonus prizes? Discovering the cut scenes?

The answer came when videogame championships turned into a thing, and “professional” gamers worked their way up to stratospheric scores by memorizing patterns through the maze. The object, it seemed, was to get the highest score.

But… was it? I mean, yeah, any game clearly states what the goal is. But a casual player would not have a chance to get the highest score, right? So why play, then?

Years ago, I took a leadership course and one of the lessons that stayed with me was based around that very question. We were assigned a mission that needed various complicated tasks to complete. At the end we realized we got lost in the minutiae of the tasks while losing track of the main goal, which was clearly stated in the initial instructions. So, lesson number one: never lose sight of the main goal.

However, when you start looking at a task, or a “game” if you will, you realize there are many different angles to approach it depending on your personal position and what you want to take out of it. The object of the game becomes clear only if you put some thought into what you want out of the experience.

Going back to the Pac-man example, we mentioned “staying alive”, getting a high score, finishing as many screens as possible, discovering the bonus prizes and cut scenes, but what about developing hand-eye coordination, becoming popular among your friends as the best player in your neighborhood, or scoring with chicks at the arcade? (Yes, that was a thing back then, or so they tried to make us believe).

And what about the creators of the game? Their goals were completely different: making a popular game, becoming famous programmers, selling a lot of units, getting promoted at Namco (the company that released it), making a lot of money (licensing and merchandising might not have been at the top of their priorities, but it sure did become a priority at some point).

But I might be going too meta. Let’s stick to the object of this, and any game… which ultimately could be just to have fun. To spend some time doing something that keeps you busy, to get a brief sense of accomplishment and let those endorphins flow.

So many options, right? It just blows your mind. My point here is that a task, any task, just like a job, any job, might have so many possible goals that it’s worth taking a moment to think, before jumping into it, “why am I really doing this”?

And that goes double when thinking about big life decisions: Why do I want to study this major? Why am I choosing this profession? Why am I getting married? Why do I want to have kids? Why am I taking up this hobby? Why am I exercising? Why do I want to travel to that destination? Why the hell am I writing a blog? Some of these seem to have obvious reasons… but do they?

If you ask anyone in my profession, which is movie distribution, the honest answer you will mostly get is “selling tickets and getting butts into those seats” (exhibitors might mention “selling popcorn”). Very cynical, and thankfully not a lot of people think that way.

Fortunately most of us do this because we love movies, we enjoy telling a story, we love the glamour and razzle-dazzle related to dealing with talent, we enjoy the challenge every different release poses, maybe even becoming part of a cultural moment… but I bet if you dig deeper you will start getting even more different reasons: some enjoy analyzing market data, others creating digital content, others enjoy negotiating with press and content creators, others have a passion about creating art for posters and OOH print… The fewer, I hope, will say there are worse ways to make a living (poor unfortunate souls, as an infamous sea witch would say).

So, wrapping up, you might want to take a moment to think why you are doing what you are doing right now. And I don’t mean reading this blog… but if you choose to give it a moment’s thought, was it entertaining? Did it help you spend a few minutes in a more constructive way than playing Candy Crush or watching TikTok? Hopefully it will stay with you for some time. Hopefully it will be a good conversation starter if ever we meet in person.

Anyway, give it a thought. You might discover there’s more to life than gobbling dots.

Oh, and in case you want to try it, here’s a link where you can play Pac-man online. No need to put much thought into why you’d choose to do that, really.😉

Peace out!