Host: Sophie Bémelmans (University of Lausanne)
Adrian Demleitner (Bern Academy of the Arts)
Programming and Becoming – Tracing video game programming practices in 1980 and -90ies’ Switzerland
Since the field’s initial inquiries (Aarseth 1997; Arsenault, Côté, and Larochelle 2015) little advance has been made in studying the structural aspects of video games – an amalgamation of computing and the creative expression of people, resulting in a unique medium. Programming was essential for the advent of video games in their early days, and closer to the technicalities of computing than in modern-day video game development (Kittler 1993). This proposal centres on the early adoption of programming for creative expression in the context of video game development.
The 1980ies marked the arrival of the home-computer. It was a time when computing systems became affordable and got marketed to private consumers. Early models, such as the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, or the Atari ST quickly became popular in Europe and opened the door for digitality to enter the home (Haddon 1988; Williams 1976). This period also marks a first step towards the democratization of digital creation (Blankenheim 2023; Navarro-Remesal and Pérez Latorre 2022). All of these systems came with various features to write code and software programs, possibly offering novel approaches for creative expression.
This proposal traces the honing of video game programming practices by reporting on two ongoing case studies: Robox (1986, Commodore 64) and Aldebaran (1992, Acorn Archimedes). Both video games were developed by young amateurs in Switzerland, who spent considerable amounts of their leisure-time doing so. This report centres on findings regarding the process of programming knowledge acquisition, possible motivations driving the development process, and argues how writing code can be an act of engaging with one’s lifeworld. This inquiry triangulates these findings through interviews with the developers, investigating source material of their programming knowledge, and lastly a critical reading of the games’ source code.
Written in Commodore BASIC, respectively ARM Assembly, Robox and Aldebaran were developed during a time when comparatively more code had to be developed to cover basic structural video game functionality. Whereas today programming frameworks and libraries aid in video game development, aspects like language parser or efficiently drawing triangles on screen demanded more engagement from the programmers in 1980ies and -90ies. While language parsers were essential for text-adventures, the optimized drawing of triangles was important for video games that used 3D graphics.
The initial bold statement about the structure of video games will guide this inquiry as a hypothesis. If programming really offered novel forms of expression enabled through computing, answers could be found when writing code was a necessity for video game development, and when it still had to deal with the specificities and pitfalls of hardware (Höltgen 2014; Höltgen 2020).
References
Aarseth, Espen J. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Arsenault, Dominic, Pierre-Marc Côté, and Audrey Larochelle. 2015. “The Game FAVR: A Framework for the Analysis of Visual Representation in Video Games.”
Blankenheim, Björn. 2023. Die Kunst des Computer Game Design: Zur Produktionsästhetik von Computerspielen (1982-1996) im Spiegel der historischen Kunstliteratur. 1st ed. Vol. 47. Design. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839448342.
Haddon, Leslie. 1988. “The Home Computer: The Making of a Consumer Electronic.” Science as Culture 1 (2): 7–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505438809526198.
Höltgen, Stefan, ed. 2014. Shift-Restore-Escape: Retrocomputing Und Computerarchäologie. Deutsche Erstausgabe, 1. Auflage. Retrotopia, Band 1. Winnenden: CSW-Verlag.
———. 2020. “OPEN HISTORY,” March. https://doi.org/10.18452/21165.
Kittler, Friedrich A. 1993. Draculas Vermächtnis: technische Schriften. 1. Aufl. Reclam-Bibliothek 1476. Leipzig: Reclam.
Navarro-Remesal, Víctor, and Óliver Pérez Latorre, eds. 2022. Perspectives on the European Videogame. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Williams, Richard. 1976. “Early Computers in Europe.” In Proceedings of the June 7-10, 1976, National Computer Conference and Exposition, 21–29. AFIPS ’76. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1499799.1499804.
David Murphy (Staffordshire University)
Platforms, Portable Consumer Electronics, and the Making of Sony’s PSP
In an effort to account for the impact that portable technologies and informal economies (Keogh 2023; Swalwell 2021; Svelch 2018) have had on the development of gaming platforms, this paper will provide a critical, historiographical analysis of the Sony PlayStation Portable’s (2004) relationship with the legacy of consumer electronics on the one hand and the development of platform business models on the other. The paper will begin with a discussion of the political economic (Fairclough & Graham 2002), media archeologic (Huhtamo & Parikka 2011), and digital ethnographic (Barratt & Maddox 2016) theories and methods being used. Then, it will provide a political economic analysis of Sony’s relationship with the emergence of portable consumer electronics in general, focusing specifically on the role that postwar discourses of tinkering and international discourses of travel have played in imagining, mythologizing, and branding of the companies Japaneseness (Du Gay et.al 2013; Iwabuchi 1998) to western consumers and investors.
Following the political economic reading, the paper will draw on media archaeology theories and methods to describe how Sony’s entry into the gaming industry extends and complicates the ‘Japaneseness discourse’ , with the PlayStation Portable occupying a space in-between portable consumer electronics, platform business models (Poell, Nieborg and Duffy 2021; Van Dijck, Poell and De Waal 2018; Gillespie 2010), and an iterative approach to product design that integrated a file format (PSX) originally designed for the PlayStation One into a new ‘universal’ multimedia format. Finally, the paper will use multi-cited digital ethnography (Barratt & Maddox 2016) methods describe how the new ‘universal’ multimedia format failed when the platform’s security system was cracked, and how this failure trigged the formation of a homebrew software production scene which impacted how devices to the connected to the internet are managed and how the business models surrounding gaming platforms are conceived.
References
Barratt, M. J., & Maddox, A. (2016). Active engagement with stigmatised communities through digital ethnography. Qualitative research, 16(6), 701-719.
Du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Madsen, A. K., Mackay, H., & Negus, K. (2013). Doing cultural studies: The story of the Sony Walkman. Sage.
Fairclough, N. & Graham, P. (2002). Marx as a critical discourse analysis: Genesis of acritical method. Estudios de Sociolingüística, 3 (1), 185-230.
Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of ‘platforms’. New media & society, 12(3), 347-364.
Huhtamo, E., & Parikka, J. (Eds.). (2011). Media archaeology: Approaches, applications, and implications. Univ of California Press.
Iwabuchi, K. (1998). Marketing ‘Japan’: Japanese cultural presence under a global gaze. Japanese studies, 18(2), 165-180.
Keogh, B. (2023). The videogame industry does not exist: Why we should think beyond commercial game production. MIT Press.
Poell, T., Nieborg, D. B., & Duffy, B. E. (2021). Platforms and cultural production. John Wiley & Sons.
Svelch, J. (2018). Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. MIT Press.
Swalwell, M. (2021). Homebrew gaming and the beginnings of vernacular digitality. MIT Press.
Van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & De Waal, M. (2018). The platform society: Public values in a connective world. Oxford University Press.
Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman (University of California, Irvine)
From Toys to Technology: Mattel, Intellivision, and the Domestication of Videogames
Intellivision, sold by Mattel from 1979 to 1984, was the primary rival to the Atari VCS. With over three million consoles sold, Intellivision changed videogame history. Our ten-year study of Intellivision is based on 150 interviews with programmers, marketers, and executives, as well as the analysis of approximately 20,000 pages of archival documents (Boellstorff and Soderman 2024). Intellivision was a key second-generation system, when videogame software became separated from hardware in the form of cartridges. However, while language of “generations” can be analytically useful, it can also obscure broader social contexts in which videogames develop. In this analysis, we draw on our research to address such broader contexts, exploring how Intellivision arose in a context of leisure electronics and toys.
The fact that Mattel was based near Los Angeles, in Southern California, deeply shaped how Intellivision was designed, marketed, and played. California has played a pivotal role in the history of technology, shaping a “Californian Ideology” that “promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies” (Barbrook and Cameron 2001, 364). This ideology is typically associated with Silicon Valley, which is located in Northern California (Turner 2006). But there is not a single “Californian ideology,” and Southern California has played an important role in the emergence of videogames as a “local industrial system” (Saxenian 1944, 7). This local system included a pervasive military-industrial complex, with defense contracting companies like North American Aviation, Raytheon, Rockwell, and TRW alongside educational institutions like Caltech. Moreover, Southern California’s technological landscape in the 1970s and 1980s was deeply shaped by the entertainment industry. This was exemplified by Disney, based in Southern California, whose “imagineering” approach used innovative animation technology to deliver compelling narrative and sell products. Both the military-industrial complex and entertainment industries such as Hollywood and Disney shaped Mattel’s businesses surrounding play and leisure and their technologization.
Mattel was founded by Ruth and Elliot Handler in 1944 in Southern California, and from its beginnings was a leader in integrating toys with technology. In some cases, like the Optigan organ and the Charmin Chatty Cathy doll, this integration included interchangeable audio disks, such that the toy acted as a platform. In another instance, Mattel pioneered advertising through the domestic technology of television. Partnering with Disney in 1955, Mattel became the first toy company to advertise on television, which “revolutionized the industry” (Stern and Schoenhaus 1990, 55). Mattel “began to see toys as concepts that could be depicted or demonstrated in television commercials… Presenting the product on television became part of the product” (Schneider 1989, 22–23). Thus, high-tech toys (and eventually Intellivision itself) could be explained via marketing and advertising, thus fueling technological experimentation with toys.
Mattel’s enormous success with toys like Barbie and Hot Wheels provided the financial base for their mid-1970s move into electronics, which was anticipated by their embrace of technological experimentation in the previous decades. The company already had a long history of conceptualizing products imbricated with the television, a domestic technology associated with leisure electronics and the space of play within the home. Along with this history, a Southern California ideology centered on entertainment, fun, technical exploration and R&D, also shaped Mattel’s organizational culture. Mattel’s Preliminary Design department (which arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s) was famous as a laboratory of experimentation, where engineers often hired from military contracting companies developed toy ideas with less regard for markets or budgets.
It was in this mix of toy design, marketing, technological innovation, and creative experimentation that eventually gave rise to the idea for Intellivision. In January 1976, the Mattel engineer David James wrote a memo, “Electronic Game Concepts,” summarizing two types of game products under discussion within Preliminary Design. The first, “Category 1—Video (CRT) Type w/Microprocessor Programming,” described a videogame system using a television: specifically, the cathode-ray television (CRT) sets used in homes at the time. The second, “Category 2—Calculator Type Games,” would be based on chips that the military contractor Rockwell had developed for calculators.
Because home videogame systems were complex and expensive to develop, Preliminary Design developed the “Category 2” concept first. Mattel thus ended up pioneering what became known as “handheld” games, beginning with the wildly successful Football and Auto Race. These games were portable electronic devices that used LED lights for simple game mechanics such as obstacle avoidance. With no background in the arcade game market, it was the success of these handhelds that laid the technological and organizational foundation for the development of Intellivision by 1979–1980. Indeed, the handheld games would also connect Mattel with APh Technological Consulting, a startup founded and staffed by Caltech graduates that would become key to the development of Intellivision and its initial programming culture.
Despite relative scholarly neglect, Intellivision illustrates how videogame history is not only a story of generational breaks, but continuities with broader sociotechnical contexts concerning toys, marketing, design and local technology industries. Within these contexts, our analysis of Intellivision contributes to scholarship arguing for the importance of toys to the emergence of videogames (Lauwaert 2009). At first glance, it might seem odd that a toy company well-versed in producing cheap products for children would pivot to develop a sophisticated and expensive leisure product such as Intellivision. However, closer scrutiny allows us to understand the rise of videogames within a complex consumer technology industry which drew on histories and social contexts of domestic leisure and toys, entertainment and fun, and technological experimentation and collaboration.
References
Barbrook, Richard and Andy Cameron. 2001. “Californian Ideology.” In Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, edited by Peter Ludlow, 363–387. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Boellstorff, Tom, and Braxton Soderman. 2024. Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie®. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gerber, Robin. 2009. Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her. New York: HarperBusiness.
Lauwaert, Maaike. 2009. The Place of Play: Toys and Digital Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Saxenian, AnnaLee. 1994. Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schneider, Cy. 1989. Children’s Television: How It Works and Its Influence on Children. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books.
Stern, Sydney Ladensohn, and Ted Schoenhaus. 1990. Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry. Chicago: Contemporary Books.
Turner, Fred. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.