The Platform Culture of Intellivision
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Implementing Intelligence: The Platform Culture of Intellivision Tom Boellstorff The University of California, Irvine Department of Anthropology 3151 Social Science Plaza Irvine, CA 92697-5100 949-824-9944 [email protected] Braxton Soderman The University of California, Irvine Department of Film and Media Studies 2000 Humanities Gateway Irvine, California 92697-2435 949-824-3532 [email protected] Keywords Platform, Platform Studies, Intellivision, Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, Aesthetics INTRODUCTION The Intellivision home game console, developed by Mattel Electronics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is an understudied platform in the history of video games. The portmanteau “Intellivision” invokes the idea of an “intelligent television” while also alluding to the system’s intelligent vision as a game console. The system’s name functioned as a marketing maneuver that fought two-fronts simultaneously: elevating the system above the more popular (but less technologically sophisticated) Atari VCS while remediating the television (understood pejoratively as the idiot box). Yet, beyond these obvious implications, we argue that Mattel Electronics cultivated an aesthetics and pragmatics of intelligence that shaped the entire Intellivision platform: from the initial hardware design that sought to produce “sophisticated game play” (Chandler, 1982) to the design of the system’s unique controllers that resembled touch-button phones, from its library of games that often redefined play through notions of seriousness, strategy, education, and simulation to Mattel’s embrace of a modular and extendable platform that promoted an aesthetic of augmented intelligence through various peripheral devices. If the Intellivision did not have the processing power and memory for encoding complex artificial intelligence, then how was “intelligence” implemented into the system? This paper explores how cultural assumptions about intelligence were expressed within a platform containing severe technical limitations. One way to examine platforms as social phenomena is via “etic” cultural analysis: that is, by making claims about characteristics of a platform that are not acknowledged as such from an insider or “emic” perspective. For instance, Nick Montfort and Mia Consalvo explored how the development of the Sega Dreamcast system “relates in important and Extended Abstract Presented at DiGRA 2018 © 2018 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author. interesting ways to the work of 20th century avant-garde movements” (2012) without claiming that Dreamcast developers understood what they were doing in terms of these art movements. Yet, what we call the “platform culture” of Intellivision was both emic and etic. Unlike “avant-garde” with respect to the Dreamcast, “intelligence” was an explicit and implicit marketing strategy, aesthetic, and pragmatic principle for the Intellivision. This paper pursues two main goals. First, we develop the notion of “platform cultures” as one way to expand the conceptual frameworks of platform studies, treating platforms as social phenomena and culture as thoroughly immanent to the platform itself. For Intellivision, “intelligence” was not simply a marketing slogan, but a social, aesthetic and pragmatic phenomena immanent to the entire development and deployment of the platform. We argue that approaching the Dreamcast in terms of the “avant-garde,” the Intellivision in terms of “intelligence,” the NES or Famicon in terms of “family” and so on, provides a perspectival social and cultural frame for analyzing a platform’s network of technical and computational affordances, game aesthetics, political economy, audiences, and transplatform relations. Second, we analyze the significance of intelligence within the context of Intellivision. How did Intellivision’s design, development, games, and marketing foreground a particular expression of intelligence? How did Mattel Electronics’ aesthetics (and pragmatics) of intelligence influence specific technical features of the platform? We argue that Intellivision’s implementation of intelligence was apparent within its comparative marketing strategies and privileging of visual realism, its emphasis on the modular extensibility of the platform, its technical design and development, and Mattel’s embrace of creative, immaterial labor practices. First, the comparative framework often appeared in slogans from Mattel Electronics, such as “Once you compare, you’ll know,” asking consumers to leverage a visual intelligence based on the criteria of realism to understand the differences between Intellivision’s “advanced” graphics compared to its main rival the Atari VCS; moreover consumers and gamers were asked to compare gameplay and technical specifics of various systems where the Intellivision was often represented as the proper choice for sophisticated, “intelligent” gamers. Second, the modular extensibility of the Intellivision—through various technical peripherals—produced an imaginary of augmented human intelligence including the addition of speech (Intellivoice), creativity and learning (the Keyboard Component and Entertainment Computer System with synthesizer), 24/7 network connectivity that promised unlimited “serious play” (the Playcable system), and even hints of transplatform infiltration and corporate espionage (the System Changer that could play Atari CVS games). Third, the technical, “intelligent” design of Intellivision, including its system architecture, a basic “operating system” known as the EXEC, and inclusion of onboard Graphics ROM (for predefined graphics) and Graphics RAM (for programmer defined graphics) emphasized automatic programming, encapsulation, and “smart” reuse while allowing computational resources for individualized experimentation and creativity. Fourth, like Atari, Mattel Electronics embraced prescient ideas of intelligence as play, explicitly blurring boundaries between work and play, labor and leisure, within its programming culture. Overall, we argue that these aspects of an aesthetic of intelligence and the platform culture that embraced an “intelligent vision” represents nothing less than an implicit theory of the progressive human that foreshadows and informs some of the most -- 2 -- consequential cultural discussions of our current time, including issues of creative labor, tensions between innovation and repetition, the proliferation of “smart” devices as extensions of human creativity, and transformation of frivolous fun and play into intellectual seriousness. Our analysis of Intellivision’s aesthetic of intelligence demonstrates that etic and emic cultural analyses of platforms provides a perspectival, interpretative lens that expands the conceptual frameworks of platform studies. Moreover, given the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence in contemporary, everyday life our paper offers a prehistory of “intelligence,” a snapshot of a particular historical situation where intelligence was explicitly and implicitly coded into a technical platform through a set of practices and assumptions that have shaped the present moment. OPTIONAL BIO Tom Boellstorff is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is the author of many articles and the books The Gay Archipelago, A Coincidence of Desires, and Coming of Age in Second Life. He is also coauthor of Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method and coeditor of Data, Now Bigger and Better! A former Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, he currently coedits the Princeton University Press book series “Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology.” Braxton Soderman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies at The University of California, Irvine. He has published articles in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, The Journal of Visual Culture, Games and Culture, and elsewhere. He recently co-edited a special issue on permadeath for The Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds. BIBLIOGRAPHY Altice, N. I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer/Entertainment System Platform. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015. Apperley, T., & Parikka, J. (2015) “Platform Studies’ Epistemic Threshold,” in Games and Culture (2015), pp. 1–21. Chandler, D. (1982) “Intellivision History and Philosophy.” The estate of David P. Chandler. 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