by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “FEATURE: A Short History of Touch”.

A few years ago, Nintendo launched the DS with a vaguely unsettling catch phrase: “Touching is Good”. Their PR team sent disembodied plastic hands to everyone on their mailing list, in the process creeping out Penny Arcade. As creepy and forward as the campaign was, it had a point. Touching historically has been good, for the game industry.

On a whole, videogames are an awfully lonely set of affairs. They paint an alluring well, then give the player rocks to throw, to see what ripples. From Spacewar! to Pong, you’re always shooting or batting or throwing some kind of projectile, to prod the environment. Even in some of the most exploration-heavy games, like Metroid, the only way to progress is to shoot every surface in sight, with multiple weapons. Little wonder art games like Rez are based on the shooter template: it’s about as basic a videogame as you can get. See things, shoot things, you win. If things touch you, you lose. Except for food or possessions, generally you can only touch by proxy; toss coins into the well; ping things, to see how they respond. To see if they break.

A World Apart

What makes things lonelier is that all of this is going on in another world, on the other side of a TV screen, on the other side of the room, beyond a control interface. Fundamentally, there are two levels of abstraction between the player and the world presented to him: the gap between the player and the in-game avatar, and the gap between the avatar and the environment. Every effort to involve the player is a battle against that fundamental isolation.

Minimize or distract from the voids, and you have the player hooked. So long as the player understands and accepts his relationship with the gameworld, the spell remains woven. Once the player starts to question the interface between himself and the avatar, or the avatar and the gameworld, the spell unravels and the game turns into an arbitrary set of conditions.

Reaching Out

The popular growth of videogames has been more or less tied to a minimization of distance, and an increase in tangibility; making the player feel like he can touch the world, and that doing so will matter. It makes sense, right? Make people feel actively involved, and they will actively involve themselves. As developers have piled on the abstractions – more buttons, more unspoken conventions, a more confusing perspective – and reveled in the already-existing distance, videogames have passively sunk into their niche, to appeal only to those familiar enough to overlook and accept the abstractions.

When you look at the breakout hits – the developments that have driven and expanded the market, even briefly made it a positive part of the mainstream culture (beyond Hollywood and merchandise) – nearly everything is an exercise in stripping away the established standard of distance, all the better to touch.

Pong (1972)

Nolan Bushnell’s first game, Computer Space – indeed the first mass market videogame ever – was a flop. The controls were too convoluted, for one thing. The concept was also a little disorienting: 360-degree movement, physics, precision aiming. And of course few people had ever played a videogame before. Fielding complaints, Bushnell looked for a more intuitive template than Spacewar!, and found it in the Magnavox Odyssey. Player input was limited to the spin of a dial, moving a rectangle back and forth. All the player had to do was intercept a bouncing square and strike it past the opponent’s rectangle.

The game was self-contained, and more or less self-running. All there was to ping were the walls and the opponent’s side of the screen. The player did not initiate pings; he merely intercepted pongs. The entire game was hot potato with a single packet of information, and the only way to lose was to miss the transmission. Even an inebriated player had complete and immediate control, within his abilities.

Elimination of distance: comprehensible controls and scenario, encouraging people to take part

Space Invaders (1978)

Four years after Pong, Pre-Apple Steves Jobs and Wozniak would design a single-player version of Pong, called Breakout. It painted an actual environment, made of bricks; the player batted the ubiquitous ball against the bricks to clear them. Though it hardly set the outside world on fire – it was just a variation on Pong, and the mix of highly indirect action and highly specific targets was a little weird – the increased consequences to the player’s actions were to inspire greater things.

Take Breakout, remove the bouncing, give the player back a shoot button, make the tiles (instead of a gutterball) the threat, and draft a scenario to explain it all. All Tomohiro Nishikado did was strip out some of the abstraction in Breakout, left over from an unrelated game with its own specific demands. By shooting instead of bouncing, the player has direct secondary interaction with the gameworld. By drifting toward the player, the tiles (now characterized, naturally enough, as alien invaders) pose a direct threat. Clearing them serves both a dramatic and a pragmatic purpose, on top of its vaguer status as a win condition.

Elimination of distance: simple design and scenario that compels the player to actively reach out

Pac-Man (1979)

A year later, the Japanese game industry has exploded. Space Invaders has become the archetypal videogame. Bigger than Pong, even. Now instead of making Pong clones and variations, everyone is making Space Invaders clones. A young Namco employee named Toru Iwatani noticed that all of these games catered to pretty much the same demographic: obsessive young men. What about the women, Iwatani wondered.

After a couple of brain storms, Iwatani decided that two things will invariably draw women: food and fashion. Therefore he designed a brightly-colored game where the goal is to eat everything in sight. Instead of tiles there are dots (or “cookies”, as Iwatani conceived them). Instead of bouncing something at them or shooting them, the player physically steers her representation up to them and devours them.

To provide a threat, monsters would chase the player’s character around the screen – sort of the way that Nishikado’s aliens advance toward the player, except adapted to the player’s expanded motion. The player’s only defense? Eating, of course. All she need do is ingest a “super cookie”, to turn the tables – probably the most clever and significant addition.

Overnight, videogames had more than a new archetype; they had an icon. Everyone loved Pac-Man: women, children. He got his own TV show. He got hit singles. He became a cultural sensation. Cue the next wave of clones.

Elimination of distance: physically exploring the level, physically interacting with every element in it

Super Mario Bros. (1985)

Pac-Man – with its overt story, high concept, colorful and family-friendly visuals, memorable characters, exploration, simple controls, and direct physical interaction – led naturally enough to Donkey Kong. All Miyamoto needed to do was lay in a few more restrictions; make the story more explicit, and build the game around it. That was enough to put Nintendo on the map, and set a template for its house style.

A few revisions later, Miyamoto greatly expanded his ideas. In place of Donkey Kong‘s four repeating levels, there would be eight “worlds” of four levels apiece. At the end of every world, the player would almost rescue the girl – yet he would have to complete all eight to find her for real. Each level would be far larger than the screen; it would scroll to the right, continually revealing new obstacles to leap. Taking a greater note from Pac-Man, Miyamoto replaced Donkey Kong‘s hammer with a Lewis Carroll-inspired mushroom, allowing the player to physically smash up the tile-based environment. Enemies would generally be managed by running up and leaping onto them or leaping up and bashing them from below, ensuring that, like Pac-Man, “jumpman’s” interaction came mostly out of his defining characteristic.

And indeed, the gameworld is maneuvered almost entirely by touch. Only a second power up, the fire flower, puts a bit of distance back into the picture, for dealing with those enemies too dangerous to tackle physically. Super Mario Bros. is significant not just for the scope and detail of its world, or its honed level design, or satisfying controls. It is significant in that the player is told to go out and freely, boldly, bodily explore all of this. And what do you know, once again it changed everything that followed.

Elimination of distance: As above, except on conceptual steroids, plus some liberty in exploration

Tetris (1989)

I say 1989 instead of 1985, because that’s when the Game Boy hit and the world really found out about the game – causing, yes, another mainstream sensation far outside the normal market for videogames.

Here we take a big leap of faith. Not only is there no bouncing or shooting; there’s not even an avatar. There’s just an empty studio apartment, and two truckloads of furniture to fit into it. Everything in the game is gameworld; all the player does is manipulate and organize it – directly, through the abstraction of the control interface. It is a simple and straightforward interface, at least.

In its own abstraction, Tetris is in a sense the most pure and direct design yet. Very little sits between the player and the gameworld. It is Breakout without the paddle, Space Invaders without the gun. Furthermore, in the Game Boy version, the entire experience takes place within the player’s own personal space. Of course, it is also a highly introverted experience; in Tetris the world is only ever precisely what you make of it. Still, hey.

Elimination of distance: Elimination of proxy; now, only control interface between player and world

Myst (1993)

Although PC games have been around as long as personal computers, historically and practically they have always been something of a niche interest – far more so than even arcade or console games. Then for a while, Myst launched the platform solidly into the mainstream. It not only sold CD-ROM drives; it drew in old and young players, men and women, and stayed on top of the charts for around a decade. It was a sensation the way that no PC game had ever been.

Part of that came from the hype of optical storage, and all of the associated sensory flash and bang. A bigger part came from the lush world design and mythology. Most important, though, was the player’s relationship with this lush gameworld.

The world is rendered in a series of surreal snapshots, breaking up a consistent space into individual moments, all depicted in the first person, separated by a brief, fading, jumping transition and tied together by a persistent soundscape. The player can wander at will. There is no threat, no pressure. There are few ways to fail. The overall impression is of an idealized dream space; a safe, if melancholy, retreat.

In the legacy of classic text adventures, there is no avatar; the player literally takes the role of protagonist. From the first-person view, the player explores solely by gesture and touch. The mouse cursor takes the form of a disembodied hand. Point and click to be drawn toward something. Reach out and click to touch it, manipulate it. That is the entire game: be immersed in the world, and reach out to it, through the screen. That Myst plays out like a dream only seals the deal, somehow rationalizing the divide between the player and the world that could never really exist.

Elimination of distance: Elimination of proxy; an alluring world worth touching; design completely based on reaching out and touching it; use of an analog interface, to capture the player’s gestures

Dropping Off

In the early ’90s, Nintendo got distracted by its own success; a few years later, Sony took over with its own workmanlike approach. Now here is a question to ponder: has the medium had a truly breakout hit since the early ’90s? Super Mario 64, although certainly a nuanced, touchy-feely game, and certainly influential on most 3D games that followed, hardly made a splash outside of videogame circles. Arguably, Lara Croft’s breasts made a bigger impression – though its cultural cachet was sort of a gimmick from the onset. Although Doom has become synonymous with PC games, it was aimed at a savvy, hardcore audience from the outset. Pokemon‘s success is one part licensing, one part brilliant use of an under-exploited platform. I am also unsure if legions of under-tens constitute a true breakout audience.

The best examples are all on the PC: The Sims, EverQuest, World of Warcraft. All are pretty laid-back experiences, largely navigated and manipulated through a point-and-click interface. All are deliberately geared toward non-traditional audiences at least as much as gamers. Although all have succeeded wildly, and two have far outsold Myst, their cultural impact has been more drawn out and matter-of-fact than it has been dramatic. Hype aside, none of these games appeared with thunder and lightning. Instead of an isolated, brain-changing event, each takes more the form of a trendy new hobby. People generally don’t go into these games expecting an experience, and they don’t come out the other end wondering what else there is to play. People play World of Warcraft or EverQuest the way they collect stamps or go to a book club.

And here comes Nintendo, to bring this article full circle. From Gunpei Yokoi on, Nintendo at its healthiest has always been about exploring and expanding the notion of touch. Likewise, if Nintendo has one true skill, it is breaking down barriers and fears, and involving an uncertain audience. Curiously, as mere pieces of hardware, the DS and Wii are amongst the biggest breakout hits in the history of the medium – yet despite a solid DS library, not a lot of software really exploits either system. Nintendo is selling the systems on raw potential, and the world seems to have adopted them on raw principle, knowing beyond all doubt that they will soon be justified by The Hit of all breakout hits. What that generational touchstone might be, or if it will ever come, is the big cloud hanging over the industry right now. It’s a pretty weird situation to be in. We have the tools to make videogames relevant again; now what do we do with them?

Touching is good indeed. It is what videogames promise: the chance to touch a virgin world, and make a difference. They are a chance of reaching out; of feeling important, accomplished; of learning a world’s ways and becoming capable. The less that stands in the way of touching that world, the less that stands in the way of videogames as an institution.