Bleeding Fiction

This comes via popular online radio personality (and my good friend) Eric Michaels. Of course it comes from Eric. Who else would it come from?

Pac Manhattan is just what it sounds like - a game of Pac Man played in the streets of Manhattan. In the area surrounding Washington Square Park, to be exact. There are four ghosts who chase one Pac Man around the streets and try to "eat" him. And they wear costumes. Of course they wear costumes.

This is "in order to explore what happens when games are removed from their 'little world' of tabletops, televisions and computers and placed in the larger 'real world' of street corners, and cities." On some level, I applaud the effort. Sounds like fun. But let's be honest. When you break it down, Pac Man is a game of "tag." It's an inverse, complexified game of tag, but a game of tag it remains. The same sort of tag that children have been playing in parks and, yes, streets, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This is not rocket-science; it's really quite simple. Tag is fun, study finished. Graduate students do not need to waste time or money studying it.

And if that were all they were doing, it would end there. But the game is more complex than that. Pac Manhattan features not just five players running around the streets in ridiculous costumes. There is another half to the equation. In a central location, armed with cell-phones, Wi-Fi internet connections and custom software, sit five controllers - one for each field player - who represent the ability of a player of the video game to see any part of the screen at a time; they communicate, via cell-phone, the locations of the other players and the state of the game board.

As I mentioned above Pac Manhattan is done as part of a study, a study sponsored by NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, a program devoted to "the study and design of new media, computational media and embedded computing under the umbrella of interactivity." This is a fancy way of saying they study Trans-Humanism, which has been an interest of mine for some small time now. Here we have a group of people who realized that technology is evolving at a crazy pace, who understand that we don't always have the mental capacity to adjust to it immediately and who want to turn it on its head; a group of people who said "look, we know this stuff is affecting us, let's see if we can do something to figure out how and lets see how we can turn that to people's advantage."

Is Pac Manhattan serious psychology? Will it really tell us anything about the way we live? I don't think so. But as often as this sort of thing descends into academic masturbation, you can sometimes get some gold out of the dross. And the pictures on the site, the idea of people in those costumes running around Washington Square Park for hours at a time? That's pure gold.