May 8, 2004

WHILE videogames aren’t everyone’s idea of a sport, they are to me and therefore I’m doing my column about one this week. So there.

Actually, it’s not a videogame as such, more a re-creation of one. It seems that a bunch of students in New York have taken it upon themselves to dress up and play Pacman on the streets of Manhattan (pacmanhattan.com). Yes, beloved reader(s), five intelligent students have taken it upon themselves to dress up as a yellow ball and four pink ghosts and run around the streets of a major world city.

Now, many of you may be reading this and thinking, "What’s the point of that?" whereas my mum’s reading it thinking, "He went to university for this?" Well, according to the site: "This analog version of Pac-man is being developed in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications graduate program, in order to explore what happens when games are removed from their "little world" of tabletops, televisions and computers and placed in the larger "real world" of street corners and cities."

If they’d wanted to see what happens when games meet reality, they could have just go to a park and watched the kids beating the crap out of each other pretending they’re characters from Final Fantasy.

So Pacmanhattan isn’t just an excuse to muck around then. One practical upshot of this is that the list for the Interactive Telecommunications program has probably rocketed to the stage where they’ll have to recreate Unreal Tournament just to get the numbers down.

WAY back in the dark mists of time I wrote a column about competitive eating, a sport where people stuff their faces with as much food as possible against the clock. Last week one of them pledged to eat his way through 100 cubic feet of popcorn to celebrate the premier of a documentary about the sport.

The documentary maker says the experience taught him that the competitors “really are athletes”, so there’s hope for me yet. As to popcorn man, there’s no news as yet as to whether he survived the attempt or – wait for it, I promise it’s a good one – popped his clogs. BOOM BOOM!