Some important life long lessons that I learned from Pac-man

Although my first computer game I vividly remember I played is Warcraft 2: Tide of Darkness , but before I had a computer, I remember Pac-Man because it is the first game I ever played in cheap made in China CD player machines besides Asteroid and Lunar Lander. (*P.S : That is before high speed broadband and facebook takes over pretty much of our lives)

But when I see the Google homepage on 22nd May 2010, the you can play Pac-Man in mazes looks like Google, all my childhood gaming memories are coming back.

(Arghhh ...It brings back memories)

Hey, can we can learn from something from this 30 years old game ? Heck, we can. Let me shows you what is the tiny little things that we learned from Pac-Man.

(1) You don't need violence or sexism to promote products.

As we can see the current top selling games like Fallout 3, Call of Duty , Bio-Shock, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Serious Sam , Dragon Age, Grand Theft Auto or any games for that matter, we can see the sexism and violence that are occured in game. Even when in the 70's time, we can see the shooting games such as Asteroid, Space Invader, Asteroid coming out, it is one of the kind of game which do not have weapons for the players to defend instead you are just a round yellow man who had to contend from chasing by the four ghosts in the maze and we cant even see the eyes of 8-bit Pacman ! :) And yet, it is one of the most played game in its time and available on any platform. (I played it in my CD machines)

(2) Simplicity is still the best.

If you offered a RM 100++ games titles which is packed with features and the simple games like Pac-Man, the non gamer will simply choose the Pac-Man. That is what makes Apple successful, simple and intuitive to use. Such as case for Pac-Man, even you give it to a 10 years old who never played it before, they will know how to play the games. They will know, they had to eat the small dots and the big dot will make the ghost vulnurable ( can be eaten ) , finish all the dots to advance to the next level. The simplicity makes the game more addicting. Hence, it is why I play casual flash games nowadays more to over the box title...

(3) When you start on a task, finish it before moving to next task

If you played Pac-Man before, you know that you had to clear all the small dots in that level until you cleared all the dots. Same as in real life, we may be overwhelmed by endless tasks but hey , we can take a small steps at a time to solve our tasks one by one and slowly in times to come, we may be able to finish all the work.

(4) Bad guys won't stay down for long . . .

The cells could only keep the bad guys out for just that long . . . Hence, we need to be always prepared for any inevitable outcome. That's why in movies, we can see Spiderman 1,2 or 3, Ironman 1,2 , Batman, Siperman . There are endless of bad guys in this world, if Kira ... exist ....

(5) If you had power, just flaunt it !

In Pac-Man, the big dot represent the power-up which will makes the ghost to become vulnerable to be eaten. When it happens, just don't waste any chance ! Eat them all and score extra bonuses as well as send them back to their cells for time being. :) Such as in real life, in this modern world, there is no such place for chivalry, when you can bring your enemy down, finish them for good and leave no room for them to rise up.

(6) Sometimes make a mistake in life is better than makes no mistake at all

The Pac-Man famous split screen bug is probably the best things we ever had (by the terms of embedded language). Why? Imagine, if not the bug, the game is played indefinitely by the expert players who may form some sort of addiction to the games (such as Korea to SC2) and it may prevent the addiction caused by playing too much game in the 70's or 80's.

Hehe .. enjoy the munching the dots and also the ghost in Pac-Man games on the G oo gle . :)

Update:

http://www.google.com/pacman/

You can play the Pac-Man here although Google removed the game from the frontpage.