desideratumthe microblog of keith chu

Pac-man Explained (via reddit)

rooktakesqueen:

I had a course in video game design and AI in graduate school. One of the first things the professor (who is awesome) asked us to do was… “Describe Pac-Man.”

Most of our responses talked about the game mechanics, the fact that the player travels through a series of mazes filled with dots, the player tries to “eat” all the dots by moving over them, and is chased by four ghosts, who can be eaten for a short time if the player eats a Power Pill placed in several locations in the maze, etc.

He then said to us, that’s true, but that’s only part of the answer. If he’d given the same question to a philosophy or literary criticism class, rather than a class full of engineers, their response may have been something like “Pac-Man is a metaphor for the futility of modern life. The player exists only to consume the maximum amount of material posessions possible, and the game can never be won, it only gets faster and more difficult with each stage until the player inevitably dies.”

Tuper Tario Tros (via neatorama)

An excellent Tetris/Mario mashup game.

Gamer Wedding Invitation (via reddit)