Fun Inc. (3 page)

In the best video games, all this can happen to an unprecedented degree, and at an unprecedented rate. From the simplest of parameters, video games conjure engagements that echo the evolving, multi-factorial complexities of difficulties that humanity has been engaging with for millennia. The part of us that the best video games satisfy, then, is one of the oldest there is. And yet, as the next chapter explores their own brief history represents an evolution of incredible rapidity and scope: one that has from the beginning lain at the cutting edge of the computer revolution, and that is now beginning to remould our actions everywhere from the classroom to the boardroom to the arenas of twenty-first century warfare.

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Technology and magic

‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ wrote the science fiction novelist Arthur C Clarke in 1973, giving the computer age one of its most memorable maxims. Had Clarke, who died in 2008, lived just a year longer, he would have been able to see a piece of technology being demonstrated at a 2009 Expo in Los Angeles that looked, to many in the audience, very close to magic indeed.

The machine, perched on a black conical stand, looked like nothing so much as an oversized television remote control. It was a tracking box, and it combined the functions of a video camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone and custom processor – meaning that it was able to follow the movements of up to four people standing in front of it while also recognising each individual’s face and voice. It did this by constructing a visual map of each person, based on forty-eight points identified on their bodies according to shape and skeletal structure. This also meant that it could, as was demonstrated, continue to follow people’s movements and differentiate between them even when they walked in front of one another. ‘Use your own gear,’ a demonstration video boasted, showing a woman using the sensor to try out clothes onscreen on a virtual reproduction of her body, followed by a boy holding up his skateboard so that its appearance could be scanned in and reproduced on a virtual counterpart.

The tracking box is known as a Natal, and it represents some of the most sophisticated hardware and software ever created in the field of motion capture and wireless control. The Natal is also a device built primarily for play. Specifically, it is an addon for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 games console, and is due to be released in late 2010 into the mass market. The Natal project, Steven Spielberg declared after the Los Angeles demonstration, represents ‘a wave of change, the ripples of which will reach far beyond video games’. He was probably right: the potential of such a system for transforming the way people interact with technology within their own homes is immense. Already, there’s talk of social networking involving full-body projections, of
Minority Report-style
virtual screens, of integration with true three-dimensional displays, virtual reality applications and much else besides. The device itself is likely to cost no more than $100, offering an affordability that’s almost as startling as its capabilities.

While it may mean a wave of change for the world at large, the kind of advance that the Natal represents has long been the exception rather than the rule for the video games industry. Since its birth, video gaming has been a business devoted to miracles. As Arthur C Clarke also wrote, ‘The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.’ Video games represent a perpetual pressure on these limits: since the very beginning, they have been one of the most astounding engines the world possesses for creative and technological change.

In 1961, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology purchased one of the most advanced computing machines on the planet, a PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor,). MIT’s model cost over $100,000 and was the size of a small telephone booth – impressively compact by the standards of the day. At a time when the world contained only a few thousand computers, most of which still filled entire rooms, this unit with a primitive keyboard and monitor display was about as personal as computing got.

The PDP-1 was, like every early computer, dauntingly difficult to approach. Programming it was a task intended to be undertaken only by experts working in the higher realms of logic and computational maths. It was the province of an intellectual elite, and it remained so right up to the point at which a small group of science fiction-obsessed students decided that there had to be more that a machine this powerful could do than simply crunch patterns of numbers. There had to be, they reasoned, a way of showing anyone who cared to find out just how great its potential truly was.

The leader of this group was Stephen ‘Slug’ Russell and, as he later described it, they formulated three criteria for an ‘ultimate’ program: something that would reveal the true potential of the machine sitting in their university. The program should ‘demonstrate as many of the computer’s resources as possible, and tax those resources to the limit’. It should ‘be interesting, which means every run should be different’. And, most important of all, ‘It should involve the onlooker in a pleasurable and active way.’

The future of computing, they had intuited, lay not just in the calculational prowess of ever more powerful machines, but in the far more uncertain field of human-machine interactions. Russell and his friends had worked out, in other words, that just about the most interesting and impressive thing it was possible to do with a computer was to create a game within it.

One year and 200 hours of programming later, the world’s first true computer game was born. There had been primitive demonstration ‘games’ on earlier machines before, but this was the first time that any genuinely interactive play had been achieved; and it went by the name of
Spacewar!
In accordance with Russell’s design criteria, its aim could be grasped within moments, although the actual mechanics were tricky to master. The PDP-l’s monitor represented space, lightly dusted with stars (one MIT student later programmed in a real star map to make the effect as convincing as possible). Against this background, two human players entered into combat, each controlling their own spaceship – one shaped like a needle, the other like a wedge. At the centre of the screen pulsed a deadly star whose gravity constantly attempted to suck the players in. They could assault each other by firing tiny missiles out of the front of their ships, while limited fuel supplies gave the proceedings an element of urgency and a scoring system kept track of victories. Fifteen years before
Star Wars
, computerised space combat had come to the world’s screens.

Spacewar!
was the first miracle in gaming: it took one of the most complex machines ever created and instantly showed any user exactly why computing was so powerful a field. Here was a portal to a new destination in human experience, a space where people could interact in real time within an entirely simulated environment – as if a work of fiction had suddenly become real. Here, too, was one of the very first examples of a graphical interface on a computer. Long before the invention of the mouse, when ticker tape was still the standard input method for computers,
Spacewar!
offered its users interactive objects that they could freely move around a screen. It required no expert knowledge or training. This was computing as it had never been seen before: intuitive, exciting, universal.

At least as significant as its technical achievement was
Spacewar!’
s effect on other computer users. The program was so effective a use of the PDP-l’s abilities that the computer’s manufacturers began incorporating a version of
Spacewar!
as standard in the core memory of new models in order to test them. The game proved not only an effective test, but also a tutor of the most inspirational kind for students, staff and visitors alike. As MIT faculty member Albert W Kufeld, writing in July 1971, recalled, ‘The first few years of
Spacewar!
at MIT were the best. The game was in a rough state, students were working their hearts out improving it, and the faculty was nodding benignly as they watched. The students were learning computer theory faster and more painlessly than they’d ever done before.’ Around the world, clones, modifications and expansions of
Spacewar!
began to crop up in what could be described as the first viral spread of a computing meme. Students who had never shown any interest in mathematics were being drawn in, competing to push newer machines still further and to build a better game. The abstract had become enthrallingly human.

It was only a matter of time before people began to realise that
Spacewar!
represented not only a demonstration of computer technology’s power, but also an unprecedented opportunity to make money. And perhaps the most significant of these people was another MIT student, Nolan Bushnell, who in 1971 collaborated with programmer Ted Dabney on an innovation that would finally transfer electronic gaming from hugely expensive institutional computers into the realm of the general public. Along the way, too, they would give many people their very first taste of computing as an affordable and even an accessible technology.

Bushnell and Dabney realised that, although building a programmable mainframe computer was well beyond any domestic budget, it was possible to construct a single-purpose circuit board into which the mechanics of a game were hardwired. This could then be mass-produced for relatively little money, and consumers charged to take turns in playing. Their first collaboration, based on
Spacewar!
, was a poorly designed flop. But they regrouped, founded a new company by the name of Atari, and released their second title: a ping-pong simulator involving two white bats, one at each side of the screen, bouncing a ball between them. It was called
Pong
, and it appeared at the end of 1972 in the form of a hulking wooden cabinet equipped with a screen, two primitive control ‘paddles’ and a slot for users to push coins through. The arcade machine had arrived.

Pong
was neither the first commercial video game nor even an original idea. In fact it was based on an almost identical game that had appeared earlier that year on the world’s first home gaming machine, the Magnavox Odyssey (whose inventor, Ralph Baer, is remembered today as the inventor of the first commercial video game, and the originator of the key insight that a television set hooked up to the right machine could be used for more than merely watching television programmes). In a sign of things to come, however, poor marketing decisions meant that the Magnavox Odyssey struggled to make an impression on public consciousness, and it was Atari’s arcade version of
Pong
that claimed the title of the world’s first video gaming hit.

‘Avoid missing ball for high score’ was the sole instruction
Pong
offered. Actuality had been boiled down to its simplest imaginable form – into an almost Platonic exercise in reaction times and spatial reasoning. Nevertheless it was enough and, virtually single-handedly,
Pong
transformed the world’s relationship with computing technology. Here was something advanced and yet absolutely accessible. If a computer could be taught to do this, what else might it be able to conjure? By 1973, demand was such that
Pong
machines were being shipped internationally – and imitated endlessly. An industry had been born.

Over the next decade, successors to
Pong
in the arcades and the Magnavox Odyssey in homes would sell tens of millions of copies, with games like
Space Invaders
(1978) and
Pac-Man
(1980) becoming the first icons of the gaming world. Long before the personal computer was a household fixture, an entire generation had been given a glimpse of the future – where there was an interactive screen in every household, and the most triumphant business strategy of all would be to get consumers playing.

Today, a video game can be either a casual or a deeply immersive business; a free slice of online fun, or a thousand-hour epic of intense skill and concentration. In each case, though, it remains locked to the promise of those early days – that, within a programmable machine, it is possible to create a uniquely engaged, compelling kind of interactive experience.

Having been born in a technology institute, gaming began its commercial life in a related but rather junior social niche, as a pursuit for teenage males. Both radio and television had started out in the living room, listened to and watched by families. The rise of mass print media was driven by public education and the universal demand for information; the cinema was from the beginning a mass entertainment for all ages; the possibilities for sound recording were self-evident even in its first decade. Video games, however, arrived looking at first glance like nothing so much as an extremely clever toy. And the story of their development and nature is one of incremental progress towards wider recognition, and of the gradual realisation of a promise that – for those who knew where to look – was there from the very beginning.

Over the course of the 1970s, Atari grew into a dominant force both at home and in the arcades. In the early 1980s, however, a number of commercial missteps and the low quality of many new games left the market in crisis, with critics claiming that video gaming had been little more than a passing fad. The industry, it seemed, was collapsing under the weight of its own amateurism. Yet it was at this point that gaming crossed one of its early watersheds, with the arrival of two Japanese companies – Nintendo and Sega – into what was about to become a truly international market place.

The Japanese firms were different from everything that had come before. They brought with them a new level of specialisation and quality, coupled to the principle of strictly controlling who was and wasn’t allowed to develop products for their home gaming machines (known, increasingly, as consoles). It was a recipe for growing professionalism, production values and profits, as well as for a technological arms race that would see the graphical and processing capacities of consoles pushed forward at an increasingly startling rate.