Understanding Computer Game Culture

UNDERSTANDING COMPUTER GAME CULTURE THE CULTURAL SHAPING OF A NEW MEDIUM CONTENTS1 CONTENTS...........................................................................................................3 INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................7 I. CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY........................................................................25 1. Computer Games as Interactive Text..............................................................29 2. Computer Games as New Media......................................................................44 3. Computer Games as Cultural Form.................................................................49 II. COMPUTER SIMULATION..............................................................................69 1. Mathematical Modeling......................................................................................72 2. Modeling Thought...............................................................................................88 3. Modeling and Interpretation..............................................................................98 4. Modeling and Culture.......................................................................................111 III. VIRTUAL ONTOLOGY...............................................................................123 1. Analyzing the Virtual........................................................................................125 2. The Virtual as a Possible World......................................................................136 3. The Virtual as Mimesis.....................................................................................151 IV. SIMULATING A SELF.................................................................................173 2. Playing God........................................................................................................186 3. Point of View.....................................................................................................203 V. THE PURPOSE OF PLAY.............................................................................223 1. Playing as Coping with Reality........................................................................229 2. Gaming as Coping with Competition............................................................238 MEDIA CITED.................................................................................................255 PUBLICATIONS CITED......................................................................................261 APPENDIX: FULL LIST OF CONTENTS.............................................................269 1 Full list of contents available in appendix. “Saying it once and for all, man only plays, when he is man in every sense of the term, and he is only fully man when he is playing.” Author's trans- lation of Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 15th letter, 1795. “Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful, and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous, and loathed because they impose slavery.” Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays, “Ma- chines and the Emotions,” 1928. INTRODUCTION In 1952, Alexander Douglas, a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, England, programmed an interactive game of Noughts and Crosses (Am. Tic-tac- toe) as an experiment in human-computer interaction (see Douglas 1954). It was a single-player game in which the player used a telephone to dial the number of the square she wanted filled. In 1958, Willy Higinbotham, a scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York programmed Tennis for Two, a rudimentary Pong-like game which was played on an oscilloscope, a technical device for visualizing changing electrical currents. Both Douglas and Higin- botham created working prototypes of their games and demonstrated them. The time was not ripe, however, and the interest in their work waned soon after. In the summer of 1961, however, a new mainframe computer called the Programmable Data Processor 1 (PDP-1) arrived at the computer lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unlike its predecessors, it boasted a cathode-ray tube screen and was capable of handling the input of more than one user at a time. In order to demonstrate the visual and interactive capabilit- ies of the newly arrived machine, Steve Russell, an engineering student, decided 8 UNDERSTANDING COMPUTER GAME CULTURE to write a program which would use graphics and respond to users' input in real-time. The result was Space War (1962), a two-player computer game in which two space ships fight one another moving around a gravity-emanating planet at the center of the screen. Each player can rotate her spaceship, thrust its engines and fire missiles to the other ship. Interestingly, Space War was among the first graphical computer applications. By way of comparison, the first digital computer-generated film was made in 1963 by Edvard Zajac at Bell Labs in order to simulate the motion of a communication satellite (Binkley 1993) and the first time computer graphics were publicly exhibited as art was by Georg Nees at the Studio Galerie at the University of Stuttgart in January 1965 (Candy & Edmonds 2002). When comparing the evolution of computer games to that of film some half a century earlier, a number of parallels can be observed. A first element that they have in common is their technological origin. When Thomas Edison, inspired by Eadweard Muybridge's demonstration of moving image photo- graphy, filed his patent for motion picture recording and playback in 1887, he did not see his invention as a step toward a new form of representation, let alone art, but simply as a technological means for recording reality. It was only later when films grew longer and montage developed into a powerful grammat- ical tool that people began to see film as an artistic form. In a similar way, neither Alexander Douglas who developed Noughts and Crosses as an experiment in human-computer interaction, nor Steve Russell who created Space War as a demonstration program for the PDP, saw computer simulation as anything but a programming challenge. At best, they realized that it had potential as a form of entertainment, but as computers were large expensive hulks at the time, any commercial endeavor was bound to fail. A second parallel between the development of film and that of computer games is that, at least in the USA,2 they both went through a phase in which they were marketed as coin-operated attractions on fairs and in amusement halls. Edison's Kinetoscope, which appeared in 1894, was a peep-show-type 2 In Paris, Louis and Auguste Lumière built the cinématographe, a device serving both as camera and as projector, and patented it in February 1894. They organized a private screening in March 1895 and a first paying show later that year. They would never build a peepshow or coin-operated version of their invention. INTRODUCTION 9 viewer. The spectator would insert her coin and then look through a small hole, as if it were a telescope, behind which a short sequence, usually no more than twenty seconds, of moving images would be projected. The Kinetoscope be- came a commercial success and different versions would be placed in parlors all across the United States: “a flotilla of picture peephole machines featuring films of flexing strongmen, highland dancers, cockfights, trapeze artists, contortion- ists, and trained bears” (Herz 1997: 46). As for computer games, the first commercial instance was Computer Space (1971), a simplified version of Steve Rus- sell's Space War built into an arcade cabinet. Like Edison's Kinetoscope, it was fitted with a coin-operating slot and placed in public places like bars or amusement parks. Computer Space was not a large commercial success, however, prob- ably because it intimidated potential players by its complexity. This did not dis- courage its creator, Nolan Bushnell, however, who started his own company and together with Alan Alcorn built a simpler, tennis-like game. Pong (1972) was an instant hit and Bushnell's company, Atari, would dominate the computer game industry for more than a decade. HOME TOGETHER In the second half of the 1970s, as computer equipment grew smaller and less expensive with the invention of microchips and cheaper production methods, computer games, like the moving image through television, migrated from the arcades to the living room, a shift which would not only change computer gaming from an economic and social point of view, but which would also have an impact on the technology and its content. Whilst Edison's Kinetoscope would play a short, fixed sequence, usually some 15 seconds of moving images for a coin, arcade computer games, like pinball, did not explicitly limit the playing time but allowed the player to continue until she made a fatal mistake. Hence they needed to be at the same time difficult enough so as to prevent advanced players from playing forever and easy enough for novice players to get started without having to go through pages of instructions and without being killed after only a few seconds of play. Moreover, for both categories there needed to be an incentive to play again and again so that another quarter would be inser- 10 UNDERSTANDING COMPUTER GAME CULTURE ted. Typically, arcade game developers solved these issues by making their games simple at the start, but after a minute or so strongly increasing difficulty, usually by raising speed and

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