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PACK-MAN is a modified version of the game PacMan in which five joysticks combine to move the single PacMan. In other words, if three people move their joysticks upand two people move theirs down, then PacMan will move up. If one person moves left and one person moves right, PacMan will do neither. The software remains essentially unchanged, although it runs much slower (to account for the speed of group decision-making) and graphics have been added across the bottom of the screen to communicate what each of the joysticks is doing at any given time.

The photograph above is from the February 7, 2006 installation of the piece (which included some pizzas) at ESL in Los Angeles. You can listen to a couple minutes of people playing the game (culminating in frustration and disappointment) by clicking on the link below. Since the game has been slowed down so much, the music is similarly shifted, producing a pretty nice soundtrack.

I worked on the piece with Fiona Whitton. It’s made of five beanbags, five custom-built joysticks that use MIDI cables to communicate with a microcontroller, which then sends information on to a computer that’s running the original Puck Man ROM. Not pictured are the projector and speakers which kind of make the game seem bigger than it ought to be.

This is a view from the other direction. Although the game is just getting started, you can see a D and a U, which means that someone is already trying to go down and one person is already trying to go up, when they should just be going left. Although the ROM was run very slow (10% normal speed), every 7 or 8 minutes, it would speed up to normal speed, usually resulting in crisis, screams, and death.