The Mass Impact of Videogame Technology
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The Mass Impact of Videogame Technology THOMAS A. DEFANTI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, Illinois 1 . Introduction . 93 2. History of Videogames and"Related Developments . , , . 98 2.1 Coin-Operated Games. , , , , , , . 98 2.2 Videotex, Cable Television, and Videogames . , , . , 99 2.3 Educational Use of.Videogames . , , , . 100 ' 2.4 Summary . 101 3. Coin-Op Game Manufacturers . , . , . 101 4. Types of Games . , , , , , , , , . 103 5. Market Considerations . , , , , , , . 108 6. Videogame Hardware . , , , , , . , . 111 6.1 Physical Considerations . , , . 112 6.2 Inside the Cabinet . , , , . , , , , 115 6.3 Computer Graphics Display Hardware . , . 116 6.4 16-Bit Microprocessors . , , , , , 121 ' 6.5 Summary . 121 7. Videogame Software . , . , , , , , , , . 122 .7.1 Game Design . 122 7.2 The Player . , . 124 7.3 Strategy . 125 7.4 Animation . , , . , . 125 7.5 Language and Deveftipment Systems . , , , 129 7.6 Development Systems and Artist Work Stations . 130 7.7 Sound in Videogames . , , , , , , . 132 7.8 . Summary . , . 133 8. Legal Issues . 133 9. Future Developments . , , . , , . 136 10. Conclusions. , . , . , , . 139 References . , . , , , , , , , , . , . 139 1. Introduction The art and science of computer graphics are barely 20 years old . In the past 5 years, a mass-produced form of interactive color graphics has 93 Copyright O 1984 by Academic Press. Inc. ADVANCES IN COMPUTERS. VOL 23 All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN 0-12-012123-9 94 THOMAS A. DEFANTI appeared and touched our lives. It has largely eliminated people's fears of computers, has bypassed language, cultural, and age barriers, and has made participatory fantasy available to anyone with twenty-five cents. When measured by traditional entertainment industry methods, the box office take of this form, the videogame, has ranged between $5 and $12 billion a year, depending on whose figures you trust and how much in- come goes unreported . Assuming $10 billion a year, and throwing in the $3 billion home videogame business, this new use of interactive comput- ing generates income three times that of the music (record) business, three times Hollywood, and exceeds the commercial billing of all the major television networks combined. Thus, the economic force behind videogames is greater than that behind the dominant form of communica- tion in our culture, the form which elects presidents and dictates our desires. This force thrives on new entertainment ideas and is mercilessly pushing the state of the art in hardware, software, and interaction tech- niques. Because it is reasonable to assume people will be communicating with computers through inexpensive interactive graphics screens, it makes sense to study technological progress and the conceptual implications of the videogame past, present, and future. This discussion will focus on the hardware, software, marketing, legal aspects, and future of coin-operated arcade videogames ("coin-op" or "arcade" games). Anyone interested in teaching, technology, interaction, nonverbal or postverbal communica- tion, or hardware or software should be developing an awareness of the underlying design of these machines. Given the extreme market pressures to come up with "hit" games, this is a very special time for creative people in low-end computer graphics . Increasingly larger development budgets are accelerating the creation processes of very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuit custom and semi- custom chips and specially configured bit-slice processors. The growing awareness of the importance of aesthetics and software is providing great opportunities to the creative game designers. Interactive graphics has been accepted into our lives considerably faster than was interactive au- dio (the telephone), which, like graphics, was initially envisioned as a tool primarily for business use. About 12 million home games are attached to television sets and well over a million arcade games are available to the public in Various locations. The home game is a phenomenon somewhat different from the coin-op game . Many"of the home games can be upgraded to simple home com- puters with tlYe, addition of a keyboard and a BASIC language module. So far, at least, the games on home machines are almost completely deriva- tive of the coin-op games in every way but marketing. Many game pro- MASS IMPACT OF VIDEOGAME TECHNOLOGY 95 grammers prefer designing the home game because cartridge development is suited more to small companies and individual authorship than is the design of an entire machine, and because the home game (as compared with coin-op games) has much more educational potential . This discus- sion, however, will concentrate on coin-op games because, costing 10-20 times as much as home games, they continue to define the state of the art in personal interactive graphics. Coin-op videogames are not much like the computers found in the office. They are not used as a condition of employment, but for entertain- ment. They do not emulate a former activity in a cost-effective way, normally a prerequisite for justifying computer use. Videogames do not have rotating magnetic media storage such as disks or tapes because they do not store user-supplied information. They have no keyboards and no printers because they are nonverbal . They are, however, extremely user friendly. Another crucial difference is that coin-op games are intended to disposable be . The videogame industry is currently structured to depend on obsolescence, as is any entertainment or consumer industry, and is now suffering from a reluctance on the part ofowner/operators (those who buy games and/or operate arcades) to dispose of a $3000 machine whose only problem is being out of vogue. The life of a videogame is measured in months . Good games pay back their purchase price in under 6 weeks, the rest of the lifespan representing pure profit for the owner/operator . Poor games do about as well as poor movies, and the same is true ofold games, with the exception that there is no equivalent to television reruns. The hardware of a videogame will continue to operate for 10 years, at least, but no one supposes PAC-MAN will play in 1991, nor will pepple put quarters into two-dimensional, low- resolution, 16-color machines no matter what the game. (Contrast with this the fondness accorded to old pinball machines!) This is one in industry which the end user (not the manager or vice-president) votes directly, a first for the hardware/software world . Videogames could not have satisfied the voracious and capricious appe- tites of game players without the amazing advances in microprocessor technology and the reductions in memory costs . At one point, Atari more used read-only memory (ROM) than all other companies in the world combined (Tekla an¢ Wallich, 1983 ; Tekla et al., 1982) . Williams' SINIS- TAR (Fig. 1) has 68K (K = 1024) bytes of random-access memory (RAM) and over 52K bytes of ROM. In 1973, RAM slower than that today's used in microprocessors cost about $100/kilobyte in large quantities rent . Cur- prices for dynamia .RAMs are about $700/megabyte, with ROMs about half as expensive, better than two orders ofmagnitude in cost. Such 96 THOMAS A. DEFANTI Fio . 1. Williams' SINISTAR . a change in magnitude, let us not forget, exceeds the difference between the speed of walking across the country and flying, with all that this implies, yet it has come upon us miich more rapidly . The computing power of microprocessors and custom logic have under- gone similar improvement and cost reductions. Ten years ago there sim- ply did not exist commercially available equipment which could put out real-time gnimation on a color television set. Now, of course, such de- vices with -built-in joysticks and keypads are available for under $100, with softwatc, included. The entire '*,videogame industry, until now, has acted quite indepen- dently from the mainstream computer trade . There has been no formal MASS IMPACT OF VIDEOGAME TECHNOLOGY 97 involvement with professional and educational societies such as IEEE or ACM. The Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Project (ICOT) has many computer industry supporters, none of which is a coin-op videogame manufacturer . Trade secrecy is heavily enforced and publishing by re- searchers is not considered relevant to the health of the arcade game. Videogame conferences have mainly concerned social effects and the problems of programmer/artists and management, not the technology. Another unusual aspect of the coin-op business is the conspicuous absence of advertising. Coin-op games, of course, are quite generically different from print or even television, thus successful communication of the desirable aspects is difficult. The few promotion attempts so far, and the ads for home videogames, give truly new meaning to the term "decep- tive advertising." Interactive play is by far the most important aspect of videogames, and it is communicated by completely nonverbal means in the arcades. The print ads stress still graphics, usually artists' interpreta- tions of the game scenes; and are interpreted by the very sophisticated game-playing people as being completely irrelevant . It is easy, on the other hand, for someone who has not played videogames to dismiss them on the basis of the advertising. An unfortunate result of all this is the nearly complete lack of marketing analysis which usually comes as part of the ad campaign planning and follow-up. However, videogames have seriously and irreversibly affected the computer industry. Game players (mostly adolescents and people in their twenties) are unlikely to react favorably to a half-million-dollar office automation system that does not have joysticks, is not user friendly, and does not offer the simple high-level programmability offered by the sim- plest home game with BASIC. Color animation, which allows a much closer matching of human and computer bandwidths, is now expected from computing devices. Availability of intense, nonverbal, two-way communication is now taken for granted, spelling an early end to com- plete reliance on the unpleasant exercise of reading all day from a video display terminal.