It’s Game On, Man, Game On

Flickr photo by Gullybogan.

Dear Reader,

What you see here is a simulacrum of the world’s first video game.

In 1961, DEC gifted a PDP-1 (Programmable Data Processor Number One) to MIT, with the express hope that the students there would use it for something productive and enriching to mankind.

So a dude called Steve Russell and his mates used it to write Spacewar, a video game in which a pair of free-floating space ships strive to annihilate each other, in typical Cold War fashion.

Spacewar led to the snappily titled Computer War, the first commercially viable video game.

The graphics were pretty stunning. One ship looked pretty much like a capital letter A, and the other looked more or less like the digit 8.

I know. I’ve played the game.

ACMI currently has (for the next fortnight, ending July 13th 2008 ) an exhibition tracing and providing a narrative of the development of video games throughout human history.

Well, dating back to 1961, anyway.

Before that, things in the realm of video games were pretty sketchy.

Space Invaders, Asteroids, Galaga

When i was a teenbogan, i occasionally used to sneak away from high school and travel to my nearest ’spacies parlour’, where i’d convert my meagre income into twenty cent pieces and feed it coin by coin into a Taito Space Invaders cabinet.

Back then it was all about holding back the invaders, and their infernal machines.

At the exhibition i got the chance to actually look at the cabinet for the first time, without being distracted by impending global invasion.

It’s a beautiful thing.

There’s an intimate little diorama in there, with the B&W screen reflecting luminescently off a tilted sheet of glass, a curved sheet of cardboard behind which provides the space context for the conflagration.

The Green Zone (Earth) is – as i’ve known for a while but rather enjoyed confirming for myself – made green by a strip of transparent adhesive stuck to the horizontally-set B&W monitor.

Galaga was its same old impudent self, with wave after pinwheeling wave of cocky aliens, and the laser charges of Asteroids were as brilliant as i remember them, back in the day when Asteroids was the high risk cabinet to step up to – if you failed on that, every Sharpie in the place would have something to say about it.

It’s real do-your-head-in stuff, seeing these battlefields of your youth, still exactly as they were then, and as they are now still, living on in your memory.

Linux for PS2

The exhibition narrative took us from the arcade games through the games consoles to how the culture of video games developed and how it continues to evolve. It explained to us that, according to the Le Diberder brothers in their seminal work L’Univers des Jeux Video, there are only three basic types of games: thought games (puzzles and adventure); action games (platforms and shoot-em-ups); simulation games (flight sims and the sims).

It also told us about the extraordinary experiments and advances that were made in the interest of entertaining ppl who prefer their interactions to be on a screen. Like, did you know that there was a Linux kit that turned your PS2 into a proper computer, with a hard drive, keyboard, mouse and all?

I didn’t.

Personal Rumpus Room Contenders

Poly Play was a Soviet Bloc cabinet that looked like something your dad may have built in his shed from bits of an old cupboard. It used an in-built East German TV set and a Russian-pirated chip to simulate Deer Hunting games which involved lining a crosshairs up on an immobile deer and pressing the fire button. The idea of feeding coins into it was so confrontingly capitalist that they needed special permission from the state to build them.

Go By Train 3 was far more compelling than its predecessors GBT2 and the original GBT. An Only-Available-In-Japan genre, the train driving simulator involves holding down the special controller to power up the train, and then moving the controller to the brake position when you come into a station. One family spent the whole afternoon playing this game, only grudgingly letting others have the occasional turn.

Tokimeki Memorial is another contender from Japan, and is a dating simulator. Designed to allow time-poor male Japanese students to delude themselves they have a sex life, the dating sim involves stalking a group of girls, using their friends to get the low-down on them, and finally, once all your conniving pays off, screwing the ‘winning’ girl’s brains out while she wears one of those sailorscout school uniforms and struggles gamely against her bonds. Wacky.

The Video Game is a Serious Art Form… No, Really

This exhibition is part of an on-going movement to have video games recognised as serious art.

They’re not, of course. They’re much more important than art.

They’re life.

And, like life, they’re precious, and fragile, and ultimately doomed.

You don’t lose Wuthering Heights when an irreplaceable chip burns out in the last ever WH circuit board.

Sure, there are simulators and emulators, but – if you remember when Mario was called ‘Jumpman’ and Donkey Kong was evil – you need to get to ACMI in Melbourne right now, because you may never again get the chance to play with your loved one the games of your youth on the original hardware.

And that matters.

Yours,
Gullybogan