At face value, Pac-Man might support the construct that is consumerism. Well, has he known any different? Endless consumption is all he knows, which is kind of sad if you think about it. Sticking with the original Pac-Man game, which came out in 1980, Pac-Man’s free market-like environment mirrors our own free-market in the 21st century.
Pac-Man’s purpose in the game is to consume all the dots in the maze and eventually move on to the next level. There is no end, no final gratification to the game when you reach the final level because it’s unbeatable due to a bug in the game. So, where does that leave him and the rest of us?
Pac-Man’s world is much akin to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. He is virtually trapped inside a maze and knows no other world beyond the one constructed for him. Would his views on consumption change if he were introduced to another world? Were they his original views to begin with? How does this connect to our world?
Indeed, we are trapped in a maze of our own construct. We have created a globalized marketplace based upon our basic need to consume resources we need to survive. What was once a piece of grub found on the ground tens of thousands of years ago has spawned too many businesses to count. Today, we must buy things in order to survive; this is the maze we have built.
Pac-Man’s Sisyphean task to always consume can relate to our reality of being trapped inside a world surrounded by our own dots. It's extremely difficult now to overcome consumerism much like Pac-Man cannot get out of his maze victorious despite his efforts to do so. Even after our death if we wish our bodies to be placed somewhere, that somewhere will usually cost us something.
So, is Pac-Man one big allegory about our inescapable world of consumption? Am I reading too much into a video game? To me, it’s doubtful that the creator of the game was thinking that far into his creation, but it’s fun to speculate about.
