The creator of “Pac-Man” now seeks to make art through … – La Jornada (Bolivia)

The creator of Pac-Man, the famous “Pacman” Toru Iwatani, develops now “Gaming suit”, a new project that hopes to make art from the game and said his priority now is college and do a contribution to society.

The Japanese creator is in Barcelona (northeast) for the XI living Gamelab the Legend Award for Lifetime Achievement, and to develop, in 1980 , Pac-Man, an icon of contemporary culture and one of the most successful games of all time, to the point that electronic entertainment can not be understood without it.

The project that has long worked in collaboration with students of the Polytechnic University of Tokyo and the Arts, where he teaches about games, as hardware has a suit “that is, at the same time, player, screen and play, as a trinity, which acts without external hardware “, and which wants through the interactive game is to create art. He told Efe that this particular suit is full of screens and when the wearer moves can create art through the colors emitting or light drawings generated by the movement, which now pursues the artistic expressions of the game. To Iwatani, rather than limited to a phone or a screen play, you’re looking to be expressive in every part of the body, “into a world conceived as art” beyond virtual reality. This project will not be ready in a couple of years and recognizes that it will be in widespread use, as with the “Pac-Man”, but will be a minority. After 30 years of work in a company, already he has eight years as a teacher and defends: “I still have much to teach what is game, there are many areas for study because the gaming world today is an agglomeration of many things, and the field is infinite. ” He explains that at her university can educate a person in the department of game as planner, as a specialist in graphics and as a game programmer, and proudly says the department heads “has 8 teachers and 70 people in each course, until a total of 280 “whose training lasts four years. To this genius of video games, “the world of interactive entertainment has a great future because it’s a mixture of studies and knowledge where there engineering, mathematics and physics, literature, art and psychology.” He wants further that not everything is play to play, but to serve for something to contribute to society and that can educate or rehabilitate using the games as a tool. A Toru Iwatani does not really like violent games who have triumphed for a few years and ensures they are running in the minority, especially as smartphones have games to people who do not like too much leisure based on war or violence. And forecasts that, with the increase in the number of people using the smartphones will pass as with cinema, where a film classification depending drama, love story, entertainment and war. Iwatani has occurred in the nearly 30 years he has been in the industry to fifty gaming company Namco, as “Ridge Racer” and “Time Crisis” and today, and professor of Tokyo University, is director of the Research Association of Japan Digital Games, a division of Namco Bandai Games.