Gameology 2.0

In the first installment of this series, I looked at 3 books written in the late 70s or early 80s about video games and I quoted or summarized their various predictions about the future of the medium. I perhaps didn't go into much detail about why I think this topic is interesting and important, so before I get to today's offerings from the past, let me provide some context.

Video games are part of our past, but in a way they've always looked to the future. From the earliest days of Space War on through Space Invaders and Tron, there's a clear preference for Science Fiction narratives and themes. This may be, in part, because a black screen with traces of light make the emptiness of outer space a natural setting, but on a more immediate level, video game culture always seems to be looking around the corner for the next big thing, the next wave in technological advancement (HD, for example) that will make the experience sparkle even more.

An ad for the holographic tabletop system never released by Atari.

Looking back at what writers thought about that future 20+ years ago gives us a chance to reflect on what we think now about our future. As tempted as we may be to chuckle at what the authors I'll quote below "got wrong," the types of qualities they projected into the future reveal what they thought was important about their present. Likewise, we can use these lessons of the past to call into question the hyperbole of today. I wouldn't go as far as to say that High Definition gaming is today what the promise of holography in gaming was back in 1982, but if these excerpts from the past have anything to teach us, it's that so-called realism (usually used in the sense of "visual fidelity to actual objects") isn't necessarily that much fun.

Finally, reading these books and learning more about this early era in gaming is something like archeology for me. I can sort of remember the year the most recent of the books below was written (1985), but I certainly didn't know what an Atari VCS was. My first console was an NES which I probably acquired in 1987, so I've basically grown up with video games as something to take for granted. In other words, there was never a time for me when video games as a technology were "new" (except in the sense that everything in the world is new from a kid's point of view), so looking at these early, pre-crash days when the home video game market was cresting allows me to see into an odd and important moment in gaming history that I wasn't part of.

Rovin, Jeff. The Complete Guide to Conquering Video Games: How to Win Every Game in the Galaxy, 1982.

Rovin's Complete Guide is pretty much what it says it is: an encyclopedic guide to video games (divided into "home games," "arcade games," and "computer games") and detailed strategy and training tips for each, including ideas for creating your own variations on gameplay. Weighing in at over 400 pages, this volume really does seem to be complete, and flipping through it, I was not able to think of any game it didn't cover. It also provides a wealth of information about each system, how to care for your equipment, and how to keep records of your training. One interesting training tool Rovin provides is a series of "VideoGraphs" - different types of grids that can be used as overlays for different games' representations of space. The idea is that you can use these grids to record and memorize exact enemy movement patterns or plot out paths of least resistance for your avatar.

Some of Rovin's "Videographs."

Rovin begins his appendix on the future of video gaming with an interesting observation: "After a decade video games have become a flamboyant medium indeed. For the most part they are brightly and gaily colored with very realistic, pure, and resounding gamesounds" (375). I, for one, tend to think of the games he's writing about as sort of gracefully minimalist compared to what we have today, but certainly when comparing the output of an Intellivision to the first Odyssey, the improvement is quite remarkable and colorful. Rovin goes on to describe ways for players "now" to realize the future of immersive gaming with surround sound and projection screens, but his ideas for the future are surprisingly specific.

What Rovin seems to be talking about here, in other words, is game modding which has certainly achieved the level of customization and personalization that he's describing here. He goes on to talk about adding voice modules to gaming and converting consoles into programmable computers before moving into the obligatory discussion of holography, about which he is surprisingly cautious:

Rovin goes on to discuss the use of offset 3D (where you use the special glasses), but seems to be convinced that a simpler approach to 3D will win out. Finally, he concludes on a wonderfully optimistic note:

I don't know how "fair" that claim actually is, but it's interesting once again to note the "consumer-programmed" clause in Rovin's vision of the ideal future. On the one hand, it seems to be reflecting that extension of marketing logic which believes that consumers want content customized exactly for them (I'm not convinced they do, incidentally), but on the other hand, it seems to recognize the potential for homebrew and modding communities arising out of the DIY impulse surrounding gaming.

Sullivan, George. Screen play: the story of video games, 1983.

Sullivan's predictions for the future are bit more mundane, but Screen play should be a valuable resource for anyone interested in this period. The well-illustrated (black and white) volume seems to be written for a juvenile audience with a journalistic style, but it addresses topics like the controversy over video game addiction and the now-perennial debate over whether games promote violence. There are also relatively detailed overviews of the industry and how key advances in processor technology make each wave of advancement possible. A chapter on game design includes a simple Apple program for Pong, and each chapter includes nice photographs of important figures in gaming's history like Nolan Bushnell, Dona Bailey, Ralph Baer, Ronnie Lamm (anti-game crusader) and Stan Lee. Stan Lee enjoys a new Marvel licensed title with some friends.

The chapter on the future of gaming focuses mainly on improved realism in graphics and sound and spends a good deal of time discussing the Subroc 3D viewing system developed by Sega. The key for Sullivan seems to be that "the future will bring much more interaction between the player and whatever game he or she happens to be playing:"

Sullivan goes on to discuss virtual reality (without using that term) and the promise "video disks" hold for the future in terms of delivering live action video within a game experience. He concludes on a cautionary note:

Finally, it is ironic to note that, writing apparently on the eve of what would become known as the great video game crash of 83 - 84, Sullivan interrupts the section on gaming's future with an image from E.T., noting glumly in the caption that "The E.T. game based on the movie was not a big success" (81). The irony, of course, is that E.T. has become a sort of metonym for the crash, but it is doubly ironic, then, that Sullivan's predictions have more or less come true - CGI and laser disks really were the future of video gaming and the descendants of those technologies are essentially what we're still working with today. According to Sullivan, "The E.T. game based on the movie was not a big success."

Clark, James I. A Look Inside Video Games, 1985.

The last of today's group, Look Inside is the most recent, but even though its copyright is 1985, it doesn't mention the Famicom or allude to the crash. Of course, it could have been written any time before '85 and taken some time to get to press. It's an impressive little book that packs a lot of information, color photographs and illustrations into 48 pages, and as its title promise, there's a good deal about the insides of video games. The writing explicitly addresses a younger audience and even uses the term "video game generation" to describe kids in the 80s (that would include me, I guess).

Its look at the future is pretty standard, and as usual, it foregrounds the promise of games that can be "more and more like real life" through the power of lasers and, of course, holograms:

I'm not sure that's actually how holograms work (or perhaps this is something different than the holography produced by the Cosmos), but again the promise of three-dimensional shapes drawn in space by lasers is being touted as the ideal, realistic games of the future. Interestingly, one of the games Clark describes as an actual hologram game bears a striking resemblance to Rovin's account of a hypothetical football game (quoted above):

I don't know about you, but my real-life is all about tracking down dragons, so this sounds like a game that would appeal to me. Seriously, though, Clark is once again deploying the idea of realism, but in this case it's not clear how we would evaluate the fidelity to actual experience. In other words, I can't tell if he's talking about graphics or if the complexity of the tasks mirror real life somehow.

Like the Usborne guide, Clark predicts networked games, but has a more realistic plan than the Usborne guide, which used radio signals:

Finally, in a nod to a non-graphical advancements, Clark mentions the future of AI:

Even though all of these authors seem to be infatuated with the promise of graphical enhancements, its nice to see a mention of the underlying intelligence of the programming - something that I think we'd all agree does make for better games most of the time.

In looking back at all of these examples, a few things stand out - lasers, holograms, and realism. The latter of those three is really the most interesting because in it we can see that thinking about video games really has been dominated by the lure of interactive visual representation. When we think today about gaming and the modes of interaction and representation they possess, I often find it tempting to isolate or even ignore the graphics because these do not seem to be the essence of gameness that we're after. There are lots of ways to study and talk about images, but the reason most of us are interested in games is that they are far more than moving images. I'm not sure what the lesson here is, but since these authors' predictions about a future of better, more "real" graphics have pretty much come true, we do need to have ways to think critically about visual representation in gaming and the actual aesthetics of the images game designers create.

This series will probably continue into a third installment - if I can find some more source material - so stay tuned for more. I think I'd like to do one on Sci Fi movies or comics that actually depict someone in the future playing a video game. A few examples come to mind (e.g., Tron, Back to the Future II), but please do let me know what you can think of.