Is navigating a maze full of belligerent ghosts and fruit of unknown providence from a top-down perspective as easy as Pac-Man makes it look? That’s the question addressed in this episode of Immersion, a web series based around replicating video game ideas and mechanics in the real world and produced by Rooster Teeth Productions, best known for their Halo-based machinima series Red Vs. Blue.
The producers set up a warehouse with a maze of curtains and touch-lights (to represent power pellets), and placed a stationary camera looking down on the whole thing. Then, they strapped video goggles to their hapless runners, forcing them to watch their own movements from the top-down view. The Pac-Men are let loose to grab as many points as they can by stomping the touch-lights while a team of ghosts pursues them.
It’s maybe not the most scientific experiment ever performed in the growing field of ludology, but it does prove the long-investigated hypothesis that it’s pretty funny to watch people in giant pastel ghost costumes swear at each other and beat people with foam baseball bats.