1. ^ David Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld (New York: Warner Books, .
2. ^ Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld , . 3. ^ As Henry Lowood points out, Sudnow’s discussions of video games (and game controllers) not only echo earlier discussions from phenomenologists but also key ideas for computational media’s development in the s. These include technological ideas, such as Doug Engelbart’s goals for the mouse and other human-computer interaction devices. But they also include more theoretical ideas, such as Marshall McLuhan’s characterization of media as extensions of the human senses. Henry Lowood, email to author, October 5, . 4. ^ Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld , 306 – . 5. ^ Noah Wardrip-Fruin, How Pac-Man Eats (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming).
6. ^ This article is itself adapted from in-process writing toward How Pac-Man Eats.
^
While the workshop took place in , the report was published in 2625. See Tom Boellstorff et al., “The Future of Research in Computer Games and Virtual World Environments: Workshop Report,” ed. Walt Scacchi (Irvine, CA: Institute for Software Research, University of California, Irvine, July ), http://www.isr.uci.edu/tech_reports/UCI-ISR- – 8.pdf. 39.^
It is also possible to create playable models that are quite different, but are understood to procedurally represent a similar domain, as long as the key “communicative obligations” for a model of that domain are met (to use language Joseph C. Osborn developed, working with Mateas and me). See Joseph C. Osborn et al., “Combat in Games,” in Proceedings of the the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (Asilomar, CA, ); and Joseph C. Osborn, “Operationalizing Operational Logics” (PhD diss., University of California Santa Cruz, 3369), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ (g) wb. 040.^
While others may use similar phrasing (for example, Sarah T. Roberts’s discussion of the “operating logic of opacity ”In“ Digital Detritus ”), I use the term operational logics to refer to a particular idea that I have been developing since 02162, largely in collaboration with colleagues at UC Santa Cruz. Some key publications in this development are: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Playable Media and Textual Instruments,” Dichtung Digital , 02162, http: //www.dichtung-digital. de / / 1 / Wardrip-Fruin / index .htm; Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Defining Operational Logics,” Proceedings of the Digital Games Research Association (Brunel University, London, 02710); Mike Treanor, Michael Mateas, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. “Kaboom! Is a Many-Splendored Thing: An Interpretation and Design Methodology for Message-Driven Games Using Graphical Logics, ” Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (Asilomar, CA, 2625); Joseph C. Osborn, Dylan Lederle-Ensign, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Michael Mateas, “Combat in Games,” Proceedings of the 32 th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games ; Joseph C. Osborn, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Michael Mateas, “Refining Operational Logics,” Proceedings of the th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (Cape Cod, MA, ); and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Beyond Shooting and Eating: Passage, Dys4ia, and the Meanings of Collision,” Critical Inquiry , no. 1 (September 1, : – 85. For more on Roberts’s concept, see Sarah T. Roberts, “Digital Detritus: ‘Error’ and the Logic of Opacity in Social Media Content Moderation, First Monday , No. 3 (03034, http://dx.doi.org/32) / fm.v (i3.) . .^
Osborn, “Operationalizing Operational Logics.” 41.^ Anna Anthropy [Auntie Pixelante] and Liz Ryerson, Dys4ia
, Adobe Flash, March 9, 2658, https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/0989511 (no longer available). 42. ^ Strachey described this work in multiple publications, including at the 1983 ACM National Conference. But to my knowledge he never gave a name to the resulting game, which may contribute to its relative obscurity. I have named it MUC Drafts , a name I welcome others to use. See Christopher Strachey, “Logical or Non-Mathematical Programs,” in Proceedings of the ACM National Meeting (Toronto) ) (New York: ACM, , 68 – 069; and Christopher Strachey, “The‘ Thinking ’Machine,” Encounter 3, no. 4 (October : 51 – . 43. ^ Stephen Russell et al., Spacewar! , Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ). 44. ^ For purposes of clarity, titles ending in an exclamation point ( such as Spacewar! , Pitfall! , and Kaboom! are given without their exclamation points after their first use. 45. ^ Atari, Inc., (Pong) , coin-op, Alan Alcorn 2001) 47. ^ We experience these models as continuous though, for modern games, at the level of implementation this is illusory, just as the continuity of movement in film is an illusion created by the use of many discrete frames. This distinction between discrete and continuous spatial models is different from the distinction between discrete screens of game content and continuous, scrolling screens of game content, as discussed by Clara Fernández-Vara, José Pablo Zagal, and Michael Mateas in “Evolution of Spatial Configurations in Videogames, ”and Mark JP Wolf in The Medium of the Video Game. The importance of this distinction is certainly not unique to video games. For example, as Jon Peterson describes in Playing at the World , differing spatial models is one of the primary distinguishing factors between miniatures -based war simulation games (continuous space) and those based on boards and counters (discrete space). The distinction is also not unique to spatial models. For example, Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, in their discussion of discrete and continuous mechanics, note that physics and timing mechanics are often continuous, while internal economies (considered broadly) are generally discrete. You generally cannot pick up half a power-up. See Clara Fernández-Vara, José P Zagal, and Michael Mateas, “Evolution of Spatial Configurations in Videogames,” in Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play (Digital Games Research Association, 2019; Wolf, The Medium of the Video Game , 75 – ; Jon Peterson, Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games (San Diego: Unreason Press, 2625; and Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design (Thousand Oaks, CA: New Riders Publishing, 2658. 61. ^ Activision Inc., Pitfall! , Atari , David Crane (2001). . ^ Of course, playable. Models of space need not fall neatly into one of these two categories. In fact, spatial models need not even be presented as images. For example, they can be organized as graphs and presented as text, as in the original Adventure and the tradition of interactive fiction . In such games players type commands to move between spaces (which may be connected to an arbitrary number of other spaces) and to take actions within spaces. In terms of the core spatial model, in such games jumping (the example mechanic discussed with the other games above) is an action performed in the undifferentiated space within a node of the graph. . ^ Rovio Mobile Ltd., Angry Birds , Apple iOS, Niklas Hed, Mikael Hed, Raine Mäki, Harro Grönberg, Jaakko Iisalo, Tuomo Lehtinen, Tuomas Erikoinen, Ari Pulkkinen, et al. Clickgamer Technologies Ltd., 2458). . ^ William Higinbotham, Robert V. Dvorak, and David Potter, Tennis for Two , custom hardware, (Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1985), retrospectively named. 53. ^ Raiford Guins, Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2763, 476. . ^ Guins, Game After , 235 – . 55. ^ Any identification of a first video game is predicated on some definition of video game. I prefer a definition that includes all games in which an electronic process (CPU-driven or otherwise) displays elements of the play environment (e.g., not simply a score number) to a screen (of any kind) in response to human play. Guins points out that this is far from being a universally accepted definition: “Many — those who prefer a technologically determined approach to history — argue that [Tennis for Two] was a ‘video’ game due to the lack of a CRT in the oscilloscope. Higinbotham discusses the oscilloscope tech in his deposition. To make matters even more confusing, the iteration of [Tennis for Two] used a CRT oscilloscope! I told Baer this during a Skype conference but he dismissed it outright ”(Guins, email to author, October 6, ). The same objection could be applied to Strachey’s game. . ^ In this case, MUC stands for Manchester University Computer. Strachey’s love letter generator, which I believe is the first piece of electronic literature (and digital art of any kind) signed its creations “M. U. C. ” See Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Digital Media Archeology: Interpreting Computational Processes,” in Media Archaeologies , ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 4090; and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Christopher Strachey: The First Digital Artist ?,” Grand Text Auto (blog), August 1, , https: //grandtextauto.soe .ucsc.edu / 02162 / / 26 / christopher-strachey-first-digital-artist /. 55. Higinbotham is generally credited with the game’s design and is also notable for being first chair of the Federation of American Scientists and a lobbyist for nuclear nonproliferation. He had previously done work (at the MIT Radiation Laboratory) on radar displays — the kinds of interactive screens that also inspired computing pioneers such as Douglas Engelbart. See Brookhaven National Laboratory, “BNL History: The First Video Game ?,” https://www.bnl.gov/about/history/firstvideo.php. . ^ The Vladar Company, When Games Went Click: The Story of Tennis for Two , concept and grant by Raiford Guins, Kristen J. Nyitray and Peter Takacs, script by Raiford Guins and Laine Nooney, May 47, , Youtube video, 38: , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QSHZ MQfE. 57. ^ Guins, Game After , . The logics in this section were first discussed in my “Playable Media and Textual Instruments,” which did not formally name or define them. The full definitions were first introduced in “Defining Operational Logics,” by Michael Mateas and myself, but have since been revised. One key revision is the removal of the notion of a coordinate space when discussing collision. As Nathan Altice pointed out, many early games and platforms that clearly implemented these logics did not do so using a coordinate space. Other changes include the collapsing of continuous movement and physics into one logic, the categorization of navigation as a type of control logic, and the removal of the notion of hierarchical logics. All of these changes are inspired (for Mateas and me) by work with Joseph C. Osborn. See Osborn, Wardrip-Fruin, and Mateas, “Refining Operational Logics.” 59. (^) Nathan Altice, personal communication, June 51, . (^) In personal communication, Henry Lowood amplifies the importance of this point, writing, “This of course was the point argued over continuously during the various Sanders / Magnavox lawsuits. The little twist in Baer’s argument (for the primacy of his patent) was the combination of collision detection and directional change of the object ”(October 5, 03034. . ^ To be clear, I mean to indicate that Tennis for Two marks a still-incomplete version of this game design. I do not mean to suggest, however, that later games such as Pong were directly inspired by Tennis for Two , which was only rediscovered after the work of the Sanders team. .^ These mechanics depend on a general control logic, but neither provides the specific experience we associate with the navigation version of this logic.
^ Of course, gravity itself can be implemented at many levels of complexity and with varying relationships to everyday world phenomena. A more complex approach to gravity might use an abstract process in which all physical bodies attract one another. More complex approaches are uncommon, though not unheard of, in the spatial models of video games.
65.
^
Brookhaven National Laboratory, “BNL History: The First Video Game?.” () .^ Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge: MIT Press, ). 67.
^
Brookhaven National Laboratory, “BNL History: The First Video Game?.”. ^ Further, as Guins points out, “this hardware was federal property and too expensive to keep in the configuration of the game. So after [19] (it was disassembled and the various pieces of tech were used on other projects at the lab ”(email to author, October 6, 3369). 69. ^ Theodor Holm Nelson, Computer Lib / Dream Machines (self-pub., ). . ^ JM Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar,” (Creative Computing , August , . 70. ^ Computer History Museum, “Jack Dennis,” PDP. -1 Restoration Project, https://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/jack-dennis/. . ^ On the TX-0, for example. , interactive computing pioneer Ivan Sutherland had just been getting the feel of working with a display and light pen the previous winter — setting the stage for his groundbreaking Sketchpad system. As Sutherland puts it, while working on the TX-0’s display “the idea began to grow in my mind that application of computers to making line drawings would be exciting and might prove fruitful.” See Ivan Edward Sutherland, “Sketchpad, a Man-Machine Graphical Communication System” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, , 45, https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/ 1 / . . ^ Digital Equipment Corporation, “PDP.” -1 Story, ”Documenting DIGITAL, 2012 – , https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/digital/timeline/pdp-1story.htm (CD-ROM preserved b y Gordon Bell); and Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor Press / Doubleday, (). . ^ Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar, ”. 74. ^ In video games that include combat, the combat models are most commonly designed to work with continuous spatial models (supported by graphical logics) and resource logics. For example, in Spacewar shooting torpedoes obviously requires movement physics and collision detection logics (together with a control logic for determining when to fire). Less obviously, there is also a resource logic involved. Though Spacewar does not treat the amount of damage that each ship can take as a resource except in the most basic sense (a single collision with a torpedo destroys the ship), the number of torpedoes a ship can fire is a time-limited resource. As Graetz writes, “There was a fixed delay between shots’ to allow the torp tubes to cool. ’” But this sort of observation does not give us a broader sense of how combat models operate in video games. And in fact such a broader sense is not often put into words, even if we know it when we see it — as Joseph C. Osborn, Dylan Lederle-Ensign, Michael Mateas, and I discovered when we explored this question. While it is generally taken as a given that combat is modeled by many games, we were able to find no discussions — in game design, game studies, or elsewhere — that tried to be specific about what this means across game genres. So we began with a close examination of how particular games implement combat, especially Super Street Fighter II and Final Fantasy. We were able to look at how each game implements and composes operational logics to form a model of activity that players interpret as combat, resulting in the paper, “Combat in Games.” See Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar,” 083; and Osborn et al., “Combat in Games.” . ^ Supporting interaction is necessary, but not sufficient, for supporting playability. . ^ Spacewar is also notable for most likely being the first game to include all three of the key elements that Steve Swink has identified for “game feel.” Like Tennis for Two, it has Swink’s “spatial simulation.” The addition of the navigation logic contributes Swink’s “real-time control.” Finally, Spacewar has what Swink calls “polish”: “any effect that artificially enhances interaction without changing the underlying simulation.” We see polish, for example, when flames emerge from the back of the ships during thrusting. This is just a signal to the player and an enhancement of the visual presentation, as opposed to “interactions such as collisions, which feed back into the underlying simulation.” You can’t attack another player using the flames from your thruster. See Steve Swink, Game Feel (Boston: Routledge, , 5-6. . ^ When it can’t do what we want, however, the identification tends to break down. I say things like, “I went into the room and tried to open the connecting door, without a key, but you can’t do that” (rather than “but I couldn’t,” which would have been the natural continuation if identification was maintained). Sudnow also describes how this identification does not exist before we learn how to play: “Then, with no sense that I was playing a game, not knowing who ‘I’ was among the various moving objects on screen, not even sure ‘I’ was there — without the slightest idea whether, why, or when whatever was happening would end, it was all over. ” See Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld , 5. 77. ^ Brendan Keogh, A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames (Cambridge: MIT Press, 3369, 36. For treatment of wider questions of embodiment, cognition, computational media, and the arts, see Simon Penny, Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment (Cambridge: MIT Press, ). . ^ Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar,” . 77. For more on the shape of Spacewar ‘s gravity well (and its shifts between versions), see Norbert Landsteiner’s remarkable “Inside Spacewar !,” especially “Part 6: Fatal Attraction — Gravity,” 03034 – 2763, https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/inside/.. ^ Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar,” . . ^ In addition to Edwards’s contribution, Spacewar also benefited from Graetz adding a hyperspace capability (jumping players to a random location), Peter Samson adding a set of stars showing a section of the night sky as seen from earth, and Alan Kotok and Robert A. Saunders creating custom controllers. . Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar,” . . (^) Henry Lowood, “Videogames in Computer Space: The Complex History of Pong,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 67, no. 3 ( (): 7. . (^) Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone , December 7, ; and Stewart Brand, II Cybernetic Frontiers (New York: Random House / Bookworks, , http://archive.org/details/iicyberneticfront22 bran. 082. ^ Brand’s article also describes some of the results of those who had created modifications and extensions to the original Spacewar in its first decade of release. 83.
^
Lowood, “Videogames in Computer Space.”
^
While many accounts suggest Bushnell first encountered (Spacewar at the University of Utah, Alexander Smith argues that this is highly unlikely: “So when did Nolan Bushnell first see the (Spacewar!) game? According to my own interview with Bushnell, when he relocated to the San Francisco area, he began attending several go clubs, as he had recently become fascinated by the game in his later years at the University of Utah. At the Stanford University go club, Bushnell met Jim Stein, who worked at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In both our interview and the book High Score, Bushnell recounted how one day in 1997 Stein told him about the cool games available at the lab, where as we saw previously, Spacewar! was an incredibly popular pastime. Bushnell states that he told his friend that he already knew of Spacewar! , but would love to play it again. Note how this recollection so closely mirrors the story in his deposition that a friend with the first name Jim with whom he played chess told him about all the cool games in the Utah computer center. I believe there is a high degree of likelihood that Bushnell took the true story of how he was introduced to the game at Stanford and tweaked it to take place earlier at Utah instead in order to show that his ideas predated those of Ralph Baer. ” Smith’s conclusion is in part based on research by Martin Goldberg, which Goldberg discusses at length in a blog post and also writes about briefly in note 35 of an article with Devin Monnens. See Alexander Smith, “The Book of Nolan,” They Create Worlds (blog), December 40, , https://videogamehistorian.wordpress.com/ / 34 / / the-book -of-nolan /; Martin Goldberg, “Nolan Bushnell and Digging up Spacewar !,” Atari Inc. — Business Is Fun, January , , http://ataribook.com/book/nolan-digging-spacewar/ (currently available at: https://web.archive.org/web//http://ataribook.com/book/nolan-digging-spacewar/); Devin Monnens and Martin Goldberg, “Space Odyssey: The Long Journey of Spacewar! From MIT to Computer Labs around the World, ” Kinephanos: Journal of Media Studies and Popular Culture , June 3108, – . 84.
^
Lowood, “Videogames in Computer Space,” 9.
() .
^ Lowood,
87.
^
Mark JP Wolf, “Abstraction in the Video Game,” in The Video Game Theory Reader , ed. Mark JP Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, ), . 88. ^ John A. Price, “Social Science Research on Video Games,” Journal of Popular Culture , no. 4 (Spring ): . 89. ^ Montfort and Bogost, Racing the Beam , 7-9. 90. ^ Mark JP Wolf, Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming (Westport, CT: ABC-CLIO, 2658, 98. 91. (^ Lowood, “Videogames in Computer Space,” . 92. ^ Steve L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond: The Story behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World ( Roseville, CA: Prima, , . 137. ^ Tom Sito, (Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), 253 – 8. . ^ Raiford Guins, Atari Design: Impressions on a Cultural Form, – , Cultural History of Design (New York: Bloomsbury, 3994) 97. ^ Mark Glaser , “Before the Big Bang: The Space Age Game That Set the Stage,” New York Times , August 9, 2019, https: //www.nytimes. com / 2018 / 30 / 31 / technology / before-the-big-bang-the-space-age-game-that-set-the -stage.html. 97. ^ Matt Barton, Vintage Games 2.0: An Insider Look at the Most Influential Games of All Time (Boca Raton, FL; Taylor & Francis, 3369), 9. ) . ^ Cinematronics Inc. and Vectorbeam Inc., Space Wars , coin-op, Larry Rosenthal (Amutech Ltd., 99. ^ Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice, “The History of Spacewar! The Best Waste of Time in the History of the Universe, ” Gamasutra ), June 32, 2419, 3, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/519654 / the_history_of_spacewar_the_best_.php. . ^ Ralph H. Baer, Videogames: In the Beginning (Springfield, NJ: Rolenta Press, 02162), 39, http://archive.org/details/VideogamesInTheBeginningRalphH.Baer. . ^ The Odyssey is a fascinating machine, with different games selected by the activation (or not) of different components on the board. In one version manufactured, these components can also be physically removed from the board allowing (as Nathan Altice demonstrated during a talk at an Expressive Intelligence Studio meeting) the games to be altered during play. For example, the removal of a particular component removes a game’s collision logic. The games are also designed to be both physical and electronic, with physical overlays meant to be placed on the television set and many games employing objects such as tokens, money, cards, and so on. . Lowood, “Videogames in Computer Space,” (Read More)
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