For us feminists there's Pacgirl too

Does anyone else remember the ZX Spectrum? Bitter-sweet recollections have returned since I tried out a dinky little Pacman game online. I used to have an old cassette player into which I popped the games and waited several generations while it screeched and whirred away sounding oddly like a toaster racing around a wet Brands Hatch.

For us feminists, do you remember Pacgirl too (she had a pink bow I think, as all of us double XX chromosomers do)? Although the lack of identifiable gender traits makes it androgenous Pac I suppose, which is fine too. The older generation of games had vastly inferior graphics and simplistic game playing strategies (remember the relative thrill of discovering Mario could pop down those tunnel pipes to collect bonus coins?). Despite this, playability was still arguably comparable with now.

All this leads my graphics befuddled brain to one conclusion only- we must evolved to have the propensity, or even need, to operate avatars in virtual worlds and skip between platforms. This has been passed down since way back in the the Eve and Eve era. I wonder if there's a little section of our brains which one could dub the fantasy region: responsible for daydreams involving Angelina Joli, nocturnal phantasies (really that is how Freud spelt it, so it was more similar to phallic I can only suppose), and of course wildly imaginitive alcohol-induced self-images (I myself become John Travolta on the dancefloor after the third beer and up until the fourth). All of these virtual worlds come from the same part of our heads and render us susceptible to gaming, thereby explaining the otherwise unexplicable allure.



http://www.schulz.dk/pacman.html