Western Modes of Videogame Production Alex Wade Department of Social Sciences Loughborough University United Kingdom [email protected]
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The State of the Art: Western Modes of Videogame Production Alex Wade Department of Social Sciences Loughborough University United Kingdom [email protected] business was typical of a start-up in an infant industry; ABSTRACT early on they struggled to see the coin slot for the cabinet., until Bushnell asked Al Alcorn to make an arcade game This paper intends to offer some preliminary insights into based on table-tennis. The game, christened Pong (1972) the milieu that produce the world of videogame play. was an unqualified success and Atari tripled in size before Beginning with an historical overview of the industry the end of 1972. To effectively meet demand with supply, from it’s inception as a major entertainment medium, I Atari turned the creative process of videogame will examine the means by which production of development into an object lesson in mass production, videogames has been set-up and sustained and it’s heavily influenced by Fordist principles. Asked to work subsequent successes and failures. From here, I will map 16-hour shifts at the minimum wage, unskilled workers these instances onto culturally relevant theoretical models. were - superficially at least - employed contrary to the By using empirical data from interviews with developers, Fordist ideal of ‘mass production as mass consumption’ programmers, artists and producers throughout the West, I [27] where the eight-hour workday allows for potentially will investigate the current state of the art in the industry high consumption. Yet these lengthy shifts at the and analyse the relationships, differences and similarities workface did not reduce consumption, but served to that contemporary videogame production has with its intensify it. While Atari mopped up pools of surplus local antecedents. Finally, I will offer some thoughts on the labour, employing nearly every person sent to them by future of videogame production and the increasing employment agencies [38], employees were ‘fenc[ing] opportunities of expansion it offers to sociological televisions and buy[ing] heroin’ [9]. Consumption was exploration of situated – and displaced – play. endemic. Atari became a ‘notorious Mecca of drug abuse’ [39] and sex as piecemeal workers set up a AUTHOR KEYWORDS collection ‘to help with unwanted pregnancies’ [11]. Videogame production and consumption, history of production, videogame spaces Under Bushnell’s guidance Atari’s ‘work smarter not harder‘ model bore fruit, his companies approach a INSERT COINS: THE BEGINNING mixture of styles. At once echoing 1960’s anti- establishmentism, with the view that games development In 1971 Don Hoefler proclaimed the area on the San was ‘somehow a counter culture thing’ [56] it assimilated Francisco peninsula to be ‘Silicon Valley,’ a place where elements of 1970’s functionalism, where the performance companies specialising in electronic computing situated of the product was more important than its vintage, or its themselves. The following year, Atari incorporated and image; when Atari market tested Pong they ‘put it on a moved into ‘a crude 1,000 –square-foot space in an wine barrel . It wasn’t even a full size [cabinet]’ [13], inexpensive concrete building’ [36] in Santa Clara, the an approach to beta testing that would never be acceptable 1 spiritual centre of Silicon Valley. Atari’s approach to to consumers or producers today, who, irrespective of the intrinsic use of a product expect it to at least appear 1 This paper focuses on the commercial production of would never have been any money in the till.’ [35] Therefore, videogames and therefore will not examine in any detail the we can see that 1972 is the true year zero of videogames, the point before the founding of Atari by Nolan Bushnell in 1972. point where gaming – to précis Kent’s subtitle – ‘changed the Suffice to say, he played Steve Russell’s Spacewar incessantly world’. [34] and from there learned how to create hardware for videogames. Ralph Baer, the engineer whose idea for an electronic game on a television screen he allegedly plagiarised, says ‘He put the business on the map. In fact without him there Situated Play, Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference © 2007 Authors & Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author. 682 competent. Fittingly, for a creative outfit which frowned The installation of videogames into the home can be seen on sequels, licensing and copying of ideas, Atari was as part of the upward mobility of videogames as they prescient of the 1980’s attitude of ‘flexible forms of work moved away from everyday spaces into replicating the organization’ [45, 28] with their haphazardly inventive experience of the public sphere in the home arena. Home use of temporary labour, employed in a manner which consoles were to arcade games what VCR’s were to was attuned to viewing work as an extension of cinema: a threat. In many ways, Atari’s 1977 move to the consumption. The hazing of the fringes of production and home market was part of wider social change, whereby consumption is seen by Ritzer as a key characteristic of consumers are encouraged (or coerced) into the the service class in the 21st century [57] and counters the productive and consumptive process. Mass production rigid time and motion control associated with traditional associated with massive choice, with functions to alter the secondary industries. difficulty, speed and number of players, the Atari VCS liberated the consumer from Fordist models of Ultimately, we can identify signs of the Atari approach in consumption with the choice of when, where and how to postmodern practices of production and consumption play, but at the same time estranged the player from the evidenced by the 1990’s ‘computer-geek-as-chic’ culture public sphere; no longer would there be crowds of people seen in Coupland’s sardonic glance at the videogames watching a high-score attempt on Space Invaders (1978), industry JPod [16]. But these resourceful attitudes to or guidebooks on how to impress the watching masses work and consumption also caused (mis)association. such as How to Master the Videogames [31]. Subsequent Traditional coin-op such as pinball and fruit machines books looked at how to master home videogames and historically operated at the lower end of a cash-rich were written by Atari who were searching for synergy market which included betting and racketeering. Both between electronic and print media. With the public Atari and Namco of Japan were linked with the Mafia and sphere no longer operating as the medium between Yakuza respectively, with fraternal systems of production producer and consumer, there was a breakdown in that and distribution demonstrating that innovative approaches most nascent of social formations: the relationship. transgress established boundaries of norms and values Solidarity at Atari also flagged. In 1978 Bushnell had before becoming embedded in the economy. This appears been forced out by new owners Warner Communications to be a feature of postmodern economic modus operandi and many at the company felt that it had ‘lost its soul’ ‘paternalistic (‘god-father’ ‘guv’nor’ or even mafia-like) [40] which was manifested in Atari’s retail approach labour systems revive and flourish as centrepieces rather which prefigured the tactics of ‘clustering’ [43] seen by than appendages of the production system.’ [29] Whether aggressive marketeers Starbucks and The Gap in the 21st organised crime was also dictating the hierarchy of century. Atari used its preeminence to saturate the public videogame labour is not altogether clear. What is and private sphere leading to the crash of 1983. It is apparent from the early days of Atari is that there was no fascinating to note that the game which is symbolic of the holistic production management technique and they end of the golden age was Atari’s ET: The Extra borrowed, as well as devised, a diverse range of practices Terrestrial (1982), a rushed synergistic motion picture to achieve their goals. license – the antithesis of Bushnell’s drive for creativity - which created it’s own Roswell incident as millions of In spite of this mélange of production, the playing of cartridges were buried in a New Mexico landfill.[20] videogames by consumers remained prescriptive and The videogame industry survived through, not in spite of, structured. There was little choice involved in what to its transfer to the home, validated by a movement to a play, if a gamer wanted to play Asteroids (1979) and dual core of production and consumption. Defender (1980) on the same cabinet, it was simply not an option. Equally important is where these games were THE UK SCENE situated: often within the smoky fug of a subterranean arcade that had curfews placed on them for teenagers. Atari took a selection of the best and the worst socio- Although arcade games proliferated to 1.5 million economic models to reach hegemony and subsequent countrywide in the US during 1982, Bushnell viewed the implosion, which eventually concluded with more settled home as the future venue for videogame consumption. growth for the market as a whole. Nevertheless, the His concept was simple: create a console that would play make-up of videogame production and consumption in games that were interchangeable. Similar in approach to 2007 has more in common with the UK in 1986 than the swapping the printed circuit boards of an arcade cabinet, US in 1982. This was and remains the basis for the UK’s the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) had cartridges buoyant industry in the early 21st century. that were effectively extensions of the hardware, yet it was a triumph of synergy between solid state media in the While videogames were attaining orgiastic status in the home, with the other popular consumer wonder of the US, Sinclair released the Spectrum 48k to UK retail in time, the VCR, relying on electromechanical operation.