Out of context, that part of the game makes very little sense, but 23 years later I discovered the exact scene that this concept of the game is based on:

Though it may have had something to do with me not being a fan of the Three Stooges, I never knew that the “Oyster & Cracker Eating Contest” in the game was based on an actual scene from a Three Stooges movie.  It is impressive that few details in the game are spared when compared to the scene in the film the idea is lifted from.  Had I known of that scene’s existence 23 years ago, it may have had a different affect on me.  In fact, I may have actually tried to grab the crackers from the snapping oysters and win the game, instead allowing the crackers to get eaten just so I could hear Curly squeal.  That being said, despite the attention to detail, there’s still no story being told by the game itself.  As the player, I am creating my own story, my own narrative, through the template that the game designer has provided.  Every time I play, I can tell a different story.

The same can be said about any game, whether it be an original concept like the Super Mario Brothers, or an adaption from another medium, like Star Wars (which Juul covers in the aforementioned article).  Certainly, there’s a backstory to Super Mario Brothers, but we get that backstory through the instruction manuals and other various pieces of literature published by Nintendo and other gaming publications.  The only thing constant about the story in the actual game is the beginning.  Once it starts, the player has the option (or skill) to tell the story on their own terms.  For example, if I want Super Mario Bros. 3 to end after Mario dies at the hands (or feet, as it were) of a Goomba three times in the first level of the first world, that is the tragic tale I can tell if I wish.  Perhaps that is preposterous, but as the gamer, I can do that.  The game designers can give the gamers an end goal, but nowhere does it ever say the gamer has to complete the game to finish the story.  I wish Juul would have explored that aspect a bit more in his article: That we, as players of the game, are the storytellers.

But I digress, because that view can be seen as an oversimplification for why we play video games.  And I’m certainly not saying all video games have storytelling capabilities.  Henry Jenkins’s analysis in “Game Design As Narrative Architecture,” takes my view in account, but explores it more from the perspective of a game designer.  ”Game designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces,” he writes.  I personally believe that that speaks to a division in the relationship between game designers and game players.  Regardless of the time and energy the designers pour into a game, ultimately it is the consumer who decides how they want to “tell the story.”  I have a hard time believing that the average gamer would balk at the word “narrative” and assume the worst connotations (“choose-your-own-adventure” books).  The worlds and spaces the designers create eliminate the “lifelessness and mechanical exposition” Jenkins mentions for those choose-your-own-adventure books and combine that with the players’ option to tell their own story through a game makes the video game one of the most exciting and, dare I say it, enlightening and enriching forms of media.

This Direct TV commercial tells us that “undesirables” are found at the video arcade.  I found this interesting for a current commercial.  We had a hard time just finding an arcade.  It’s an interesting choice by the people who made this ad.

There were also several points where I was disappointed that Huhtamo did not elaborate on certain issues he seemed to be raising. For example, on page 14ish (no page numbers) he mentions neurastenia, a resistance to work alleged to be connected to working with machines. He then addresses the notion that an “over-stimulated mind of a neurastenic is unable to relax, except by being drawn to another kind of machine.” This idea reminded me of Adorno, who wrote about the leisure activity of the masses being a sort of repetition of their work activities. However, it is unclear if Huhtamo is rejecting this idea, as he seems unsure if the comparison makes sense, or accepting it, as he looks for a modern day comparison. I would have liked to see him elaborate more on that point if he was going to bring it up.

Another point that I would have liked to see discussed further comes in the discussion of interactive versus passive. He asks “were the pleasures of ‘proto-interactivity’ really very different from those provided by the ‘passive’ sensations of the roller-coaster” and relates this to a comparison between interactive video games and “passive” movie or television watching. This is a topic I am particularly interested in but he doesn’t really try to pull it apart, only provides the question seemingly to provoke thought on the topic.

Pinball Wizard (I half suspect the footnote saying lyrics by Elton John is erroneous)

Also, because I was very curious as to what it looked like, here is a progeny-parent pair playing pinball’s peculiar parlor predecessor: Bagatelle.

I also liked Turkle’s chapter. Though I disagree with the description of D&D as strictly “rule-governed” as she makes it out to be, I liked the idea of “total concentration” that came up in relation to the video game experience. The way some of the interviewees described their experience made me think of Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance and the escape element of romance novels. However, it was interesting that escape in this case was not through a story, but by literally occupying the mind to a degree that real world problems could not be considered during play.

I thought her points about identification were intriguing: “In pinball you act on the ball. In Pac-Man you are the mouth.” Referring to the avatar in the first person does seem to be a unique quality of video games and one which I think is an important part of the experience.

Bernstein’s piece, “Play It Again, Pac-Man” at times had some interesting things to say. I found his description of the “visceral click” (39) in a player’s brain when the game comes online or at a System Ready screen to be interesting. Though I know the experience he is talking about, he says it is unlike any experience with other media, which I am not sure I find convincing. Is there not also a visceral click when the lights dim in a movie theatre? Doesn’t reading “chapter one” at the top of a page produce a particular response from a reader?

I found his discussion of computers as a medium interesting as well. This quote in particular stood out to me: “computers provide a different definition of a medium: not a physical support but an operating environment.” The idea that this medium is not the particular physical elements (like bound paper, celluloid, microprocessors) but a system of standard operations and ways of interaction was interesting.

Brand underlines multiple times that the men and women working on the computer projects did not fit into the stereotypes of the scientist or the white-collar worker. Virtually all of them were young, between 19 and 30, and had little-to-no formal training. They were “child prodigies” and “virtuosos.” More importantly, they work on significant projects like ARPA – projects that many of the “established” scientists and bureaucrats could have dreamt of being part of, – while retaining their “freedom and weirdness,” defying the stereotypes of the boring 9-to-5 white-collar job.

On the other hand, Brand brands (pun intended) the “hackers” as “freaks” and as people who are often detached from the reality, staring at cathode-ray tube displays, ruining their eyes, mashing buttons in a frenzy, and wasting their employer’s computer time. In this way, Brand creates the picture of the group of people that would later be known as “geeks” – the bright but poorly socialized young men and women, who escaped the grayness of the reality into the dreamy realm of the cyberworld – an exciting place, a place more real than life. While he remains fascinated with the “hackers,” he is nevertheless somewhat patronizing and often derogatory.

To me, the importance of this article lays not so much in describing the first computer game, but in describing (and setting the stereotypes of) the early computer and gaming cultures. Space War is important and interesting (you can see a demo of the game bellow), but I find Brand’s attitude to be a reflection of how the popular culture, of which Rolling Stone is certainly a major part, would see the computer world in the following decades. We have movies like War Games (1983), Sneakers (1992), Hackers (1995), The Net (1995), and 23 (1998), which represent the same stereotypical portrayal of those who use computers for something different than electronic typewriters. Movies like those romanticize the “hackers” and make it clear that the audience is fascinated with them. In the same time they are treated as outcasts, as freaks who are too weird to find their place in society.

The fascination with hackers:


In the first couple of decades of the computer game history, to own a game meant at least to copy the code of it onto one’s home computer. This undoubtedly allowed them to identify with the hackers’ culture. From computer experts who became branded as outcasts, we saw a switch to people who willingly desired to be associated with the “freak” culture of the “hackers.” Today, modding and cracking of games is often associated with the same paradoxical culture of geeks that Brand describes – both fascinating and shunned upon. Is that how we see the gaming culture today?

Space War:

Something tells me the crash of ’83 could have been avoided with a little more PR support…

People, May 31, 1982

Two of the readings for this week are by authors interviewed in People magazine in its May 31, 1982 issue, which included a section on video games (the People archives are freely available online). These interviews might help establish a context for understanding the readings:

-David Sudnow (author of Pilgrim in the Microworld).

-Sherry Turkle (author of The Second Self).

This I felt was helped by the initial spark of Satoru Iwata’s intuition in 2002 when rethinking the way people approached gaming. Indeed, how can you rule a market when its prevailing attitude is nihil novi sub sole. This fatalistic attitude was described by Rob Fulop, the creator of Night Trap and eventually the Dogz series. Thought he describes it as a personal philosophy, I think he has a point. Video games for awhile did seem to convey a ‘whatever you do you’re going to lose’ philosophy, at least from my perspective. In the nineties it all seemed like Mortal Kombat to me. Mash the buttons and stuff happens, fun, but lacking a sense of purpose.

Sugary sweet and dripping with sarcasm it might have been, Dogz, like the Tamagotchi,  gave new gamers a sense of accomplishment, where you could train the creature, provide it with food and exercise, and make it happy. If you didn’t it would cry, become inconsolable and die, and who could really kill a puppy? This sense of accomplishment was also brought up in regards to the gaming industries effort to make games that were marketed to girls but in the context of Barbie Fashion Designer which, as pointed out “perpetuated a version of femininity that was fundamentally lame”.

So what are the options of an industry that is content on out doing itself in gore, shoot ‘em ups and ever more complex controllers? I watched my friends and relatives play Wolfenstein, Golden Eye, and Mario Kart 64. I heard about lan-parties in high school. It wasn’t until I saw a Nintendo DS that I even wanted a game device outside of a normal PC gaming experience.

The Sims was great because of a few reasons: It did not provoke anxiety, barring one of your Sims does not light itself on fire using the BBQ there was very little that could go wrong that was out of one’s control; and it could be played by yourself, something that may seem like selfishness but is really more in tune with not having your game flow disrupted than missing out on off screen interactivity. Then there was Wii.

For those of us who did not grow up on video games but always watched them being played from the sidelines this was an invitation to the gaming world. The Wii nicely leveled the playing field, and for somebody who’d always seen Mario but never been able to play with him, to finally kick someone’s (anyone’s)  ass in Mario Party was a glorious experience. It’s like Revenge of the Nerds for a different generation.

“A Plane to Moscow” satisfied my desire to know more about these markets (although I’d love to see more about the reception of console gaming during this time). Donovan’s journey through the creation and international expansion of Tetris in communist Russia was brilliant. Seeing how communist Russia affected video game development was a process that I did not consider when thinking about that region’s industry. While Donovan quickly goes over the legislation of Russian leaders, this chapter is pushing me to search out the specifics behind the political maneuverings that allowed the video game industry to finally get a foothold in the country.

Also, finding more information about how people played and shared video games during communist Russia would be fascinating. How much has changed since the fall of communism? Have attitudes changed since the video game industry and capitalism joined together? After thoroughly enjoying two of the Eastern European developed games Donovan speaks about in this chapter, Operation Flashpoint and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., I agree with the idea that the video games developed from this region have a certain hard to articulate quality to them that makes them incredibly unique. How are these games different from American and Japanese developed games, and why are they developed this way?

Moving away from Russia, Donovan’s chapter about the battle between Sega and Nintendo during the early 90s concludes with ideas relevant to my interests. Donovan cites this industry battle as the beginning of rising development costs due to higher expectations from video gamers. David Perry, quoted in the book, says that this period was when video games became more business orientated. Perry seems to suggest that growing business involvement led to creativity being driven away. His reaction to middle management reveals a lot about how creative producers in the video game industry might have felt during this time. While I challenge Perry’s idea that video games were more creative back then, I wonder if this is the moment in time when consumers (and producers) saw video gaming as moving away from the hobbyist realm and into the business world.

Also, Earthworm Jim 2 deserves a revisit just to see corporate rebellion in video game form.

Now, I mentioned in class that I remember my Mom really liking Tetris (my Dad was more partial to Chess Master), but apart spending a few odd hours on a Sunday afternoon playing these strategical games that lacked any sort of heroic Italian plumber, it seemed that most adults I knew back then (all 8 of them) could’ve cared less about Nintendo.

Tonight, however, my Mom reminded of the “Game Nights” she and my Dad used to host for their friend-couples on a bi-weekly basis.  While my brother and I were sent to bed at 9pm on a Saturday, the adults would all gather around the 27″ Sony television set in the living room and play games on the NES into the wee hours of the morning. They played everything from Super Mario Bros. to WWF Wrestlemania, to a game that I had completely forgotten about until today, Anticipation, a video board game of sorts that also happens to be in the running for the whitest NES cover art.  Turns out these events were, according to my Mom, a regular thing for many adults who owned NES consoles in the 1980′s between the ages of 25-40ish.  I suspect a lot of Bartles & James was involved, too.  I also doubt that my parents and company ever had the courage to move the coffee table and use the Power Pad…Body Power!