Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part Two: Brick-A-Break

  • Reading time:2 mins read

By [redacted]

Though Pong, which we covered last time, opened the window to a new world, that world was a void. You had some basic physical rules, and you had a packet of information bouncing around in a box.

The bulk of communication was supplied by a second player. Pong exists in a weird medium that offers the player the vaguest hint of another reality — a persistent, active set of laws that react upon the player’s every stimulus — then anchors that experience back in reality. It’s sort of like shaking hands through a curtain of water.

You pass through, and get a fleeting sense of, this alternative medium. That’s nice, and it gives you a sense of the basic laws of water. But compare to snorkeling along a coral reef, and the whole alien world that water opens up by virtue of those laws.

For about four years, no one significantly built on Pong. You saw things like four-player Pong, and Pong with two paddles, and a vertically-oriented Pong that passed itself off as a Volleyball sim.

Atari did experiment a bit with Gran Trak 10 and Tank!, but somehow it took until 1976 for Bushnell and Bristow to hit on a one-player version of Pong. And that pretty much was the missing piece that gave us two distinct schools of design, the home PC, and thereby the information revolution that allows a person to research articles such as this.

As these things go, Breakout was pretty well-named.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )

Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part One: Echolocation

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

We are all inhabitants of our own reality. On the one hand we’re kind of like sponges, absorbing everything around us and integrating it, whether we care to or not. On the other hand, deliberately or not we shape our worlds to reflect our own inner structures.

Whatever we may carry into a situation, experiences physically change our neural pathways. Repetition, familiarity, reinforces a link, like sketching over a line again and again until it becomes solid. Likewise, the way we position furniture, leave piles of papers or empty cans, what we choose to clean and how, what projects we leave unfinished, what we ruin, what we fix, what we wear down; how we choose to break up and break in and use the space given to us, it all imprints our environments just as emotions crease our aging faces.

In effect, our inner and outer worlds build up a feedback loop. As we carve out our place in the world, we settle into the spaces we carve, reassuring ourselves with their familiarity while we use those bold lines, so often scribbled over, to brand ourselves inside and out. This, we tell ourselves, is how the world works.

This is why videogames are so interesting; they are, in effect, bottled external worlds, into which we can momentarily plug our inner worlds to see what happens. Each game is a little feedback loop, allowing the player both to imprint his actions into a world, to leave his little mark — even if only in a high score table — and to absorb, from a simplified sketch with no social or practical consequences, a new way of being, a new way of doing things.

Some people are more concerned with leaving their mark, others more with expanding their horizons. Some give more, some take more. The point is that in their essence, videogames encapsulate this dynamic between the two. They are a study in cause and effect; the easier those worlds are to affect, the more useful a response they give, the more the player owns actions and consequences alike, the more satisfying the experience.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )

Baer, Alcorn Talk ‘Brown Box’ Beginnings, Industry Birth

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Baer started off by leaping back to the late ‘30s, the time before “electronics” was a noun. Back then, it was all about radio. Radio enthusiasts were radio hobbyists, and radios were simpler to build than a model Gundam. They were also a cultural phenomenon. Baer showed off an advertisement that read “Big Money in Radio – become a Radio Serviceman!” “Hey,” the young Baer realized. “I think this could be me.” So he spent the next few years dangling off roofs, installing wires through people’s windows.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

The New Generation – Part One: Design

  • Reading time:15 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

An idea is healthy only so long as people question it. All too often, what an idea seems to communicate – especially years and iterations down the line – was not its original intention. Context shifts; nuance is lost. To hear adherents espouse an idea, measureless years and Spackle later, is to understand less about the idea itself than about the people who profess it, and the cultural context in which they do so.

In 1985, an obscure Japanese illustrator slotted together a bunch of ideas that made sense to him that morning, and inadvertently steered the whole videogame industry out of the darkest pit in its history. Since that man’s ideas also seemed to solve everyone else’s problems, they became lasting, universal truths that it was eventually ridiculous – even heresy – to question.

So for twenty years, skilled artisans kept building on this foundation, not really curious what it meant; that it worked was enough. They were simply exercising their proven craft, in a successful industry. Result: even as technology allowed those designers to express more and more complex ideas, those ideas became no more eloquent. The resulting videogames became more and more entrenched in their gestures, and eventually spoke to few aside from the faithful – and not even them so well. Nobody new was playing, and the existing audience was finding better uses for its time. A term was coined: “gamer drift”.

Touch Generations

  • Reading time:13 mins read

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.

NextGen’s Top Ten Years In Gaming History

  • Reading time:30 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published in some form by Next Generation. I was asked not to include 1999 or 2000, because the Dreamcast was perceived as a low mark in the industry rather than a high one. I was also asked to include the previous year, to suggest that we were in the middle of an upswing. So… that explains some of the selections.

In videogames, as in life, we tend to get things right about a third of the time. There’s one decent Sonic game for every two disasters; one out of every three consoles can be considered an unqualified success; the Game Boy remake of Mother 1 + 2 was released in one out of three major territories. With the same level of scientific accuracy, one can easily say that, out of the thirty years that videogames have acted as a consumer product, there are maybe ten really excellent milestones, spaced out by your 1984s and your 1994s – years maybe we were all better off doing something out-of-doors.

It kind of makes sense, intuitively: you’ve got the new-hardware years and the innovative-software years, spaced out by years of futzing around with the new hardware introduced a few months back, or copying that amazing new game that was released last summer. We grow enthusiastic, we get bored. Just as we’re about to write off videogames forever, we get slapped in the face with a Wii, or a Sega Genesis – and then the magic starts up all over again, allowing us to coast until the next checkpoint.