In the Pac-Man game, Caliban is the hero who wins by collecting all of the dots, while having ghosts try to defeat him. I imagine a parallel connection between the hero gaining points in the game by collecting dots with Caliban convincing others of his story. Every time Caliban convinces another individual that his nation language is legitimate in its written form, the hero gains a point. The ghosts represent the others who haunt him and attempt to make him believe that his language is not worth trying to communicate in because both his appearance and his language differ from the colonized groups’ established societal norms, as Caliban says his girlfriend “kinda look at i funn. / y” (131-132). Compared to the ghosts, the hero looks different because he is an orange blob. Whenever the hero loses by getting caught by a ghost, I imagine a parallel connection to Caliban getting pushed “down” by authority figures even though Caliban continues to try to move up in social status (234). The dots are like X’s and the more Caliban collects, then the more he is able to express himself in the way that he would like, as shown in the poem. When the hero has won, Caliban and the rest are together on the same team because Caliban has successfully acted like a Moses-figure. Caliban goes on his own individual journey in order to convince others that his nation language is legitimate, and when he triumphs that means he has led the way to eventually unite his and the others’ cultural and linguistic communities. Caliban is fighting for “we,” which shows that he is not solely fighting for himself (161). Instead, Caliban is fighting for a more inclusive world. In the end, the ghosts and the hero peacefully coexist without having to change who they are as individuals, as the character’s looks remain the same. By adapting the poem into a video game concept, the poem loses its sense of empowerment at the end, its storyline, and certain nuances that are hard to reflect, such as the reference to “brigg / flatts” (168-169). In addition, unlike Caliban who desires to make an original piece of work, Minesweeper and Pac-Man are established games, so they are both not pioneering pieces of work.
Minesweeper code: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K93HB0VMHgXudSM45ZB8jL1y7Segy-iS/view?usp=sharing
StdDraw class: https://introcs.cs.princeton.edu/java/stdlib/StdDraw.java.html
Pac-Man code: https://github.com/plemaster01/PythonPacman