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.