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The Sociopolitical Ramifications Of Computer Gaming Essay (стр. 1 из 3)

, Research Paper

Since the dawning of civilization, when the first humans walked the earth, games have played an integral part in human society. Humanity has always had a passion for pastimes and has accordingly created an immense number of methods for achieving diversion. From the game of Senet, an ancient Egyptian game of royal appeal (and perhaps even the primogenitor of modern backgammon) that was discovered in the tombs of pharaohs; Hnefatafl, a Norse precursor to chess; and Calculi, a Roman game that strikingly resembled a later game commonly known as ?checkers?; to modern electronic games that are nearly omnipresent in our current day and age, the human race has continually striven for new and improved ways of amusing itself. So it is no surprise that, with the inception of computers during the era of World War II, computer gaming would shortly follow.

And how quickly it did follow. Historians avidly speak about the principle of quickening, a phenomenon which, as time ticks on, causes the development of new things to hasten. The development of computer games is nothing if not subject to this theory. In the early beginning of computer gaming, games (as well as new gaming technology) were few and far between. In fact, four years elapsed from the time the first computer game by William A. Higinbotham called Tennis For Two (a name that would later evolve into Pong), was created, until the completion of the second computer game, Spacewar! created by a cadre of students from MIT. Today, hardly a day passes in which a new computer game is not released and the technology used to create games advances at an increasingly rapid pace.

However, in order to fully understand the phenomenon that is computer gaming, we must first understand the culture that gave rise to it?

The Days When Pinball Wizards Walked the Earth

The mists of gaming yore are thick and shroud much. The 1930s in America was a decade of challenges. The Great Depression wracked the vast majority of Americans and the stormy clouds of war were rumbling over in Europe. Fortunately for them, they had pinball.

The pinball machines of the 1930s were quite different from the machines that we know today. They required hardly any skill to play, and resembled the simple toy games played by present-day children in which a ball must be shot with a metallic pinball-like plunger and land in special holes around the playing space to score points. Over time, the machines added features such as the back board, allowing the players to see their scores, flippers, allowing players to actually control some of the movements of the ball, and lights, which really did not functionally do very much, but added a significantly greater degree of visual appeal to the pinball machines.

The Pinball Age would have further reaching influences than immediately apparent from looking at that rather unsightly box with flippers. One of the influences of pinball came in the late 1950s with a man by the name of William A. Higinbotham.

The Event the World had Waited a ?Pong? Time for?

In the years following World War II, computers began to flourish. Formerly relegated to such inglorious positions as missile trajectory calculators and cryptographers during WWII, computers gained a new appreciation in the years following the war. ARPAnet, the early precursor to the internet, was begun in 1957 by Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). This set the stage for the modern information revolution and paved the way for the incredibly popular (and horrifically addictive) multiplayer games that would sweep the world in later years). While the advent of personal computers was still decades in the future (IBM would release the first modern personal computer in 1983, the TRS-80), giant mainframes were the rule of the day, occupying entire rooms with their sheer computing bulk and affordable only by major universities, huge businesses, and government-funded research laboratories. It was in one such laboratory that the first computer game was developed.

William Higinbotham was a mild-mannered gentleman of 47 in 1958. Quick to laugh and even quicker to reach for a pack of smokes (he was a prodigious chain smoker), Higinbotham was a researcher at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and an aficionado of pinball. His job description also included the task of tour guide for the myriad tours that visited the lab for a look at what their tax dollars were up to. During his tenure as tour guide, Higinbotham realized that the events that transpired in the lab were of little interest to the people undertaking the tours. Wouldn?t it be interesting, he thought, if the tourists had some sort of contraption to interact with during the tour? something like a game that could demonstrate to them what the hardware was capable of? To this end, Higinbotham worked away at a device that would change the way computers were viewed. Despite the fact that the first digital computers were produced around this time, Higinbotham?s device was entirely analog, utilizing variable voltages to represent information instead of the on/off (i.e. 1s and 0s) pulses that digital used. The device was set up using an oscilloscope for a screen that represented a tennis court and two controller boxes (forerunners to the ?paddles? of the Atari 2600 that would appear quite a few years later) that housed knobs with which the players could change the angle of their shots and buttons to be pressed when the player wished to make a shot.

It took three weeks of time to develop this game (compared with the 2-4 years that it takes modern development teams to create their games and the year and a half that it took the developers of Spacewar! to finish that game, but more on that later) and the assistance of Robert Dvorak, a coworker of Higinbotham?s, but in the end it all paid off. They revealed their finished product in the Brookhaven gymnasium during an open house of the lab in October of 1958 and it took off. People of high school age were especially interested in William Higinbotham?s new game, by now formally titled Tennis for Two, and people lined up from the day it was revealed to take part in the first computer game ever created.

The Space Race Was Nothing Compared to the American Spacewar!

If Higinbotham?s Tennis for Two is known as the first video game, then Spacewar!, a game developed by a determined cadre of MIT geeks, Wayne Witanen, J. Martin Graetz, and Steve Russell, who called themselves ?The Tech Model Railroad Club,? is the first real computer game. The difference between the two is a subtle one on first glance, but a difference that, in later years, would cause a large crevasse to appear between the aficionados of computer gaming and those of video gaming. Console games (games played through a system hooked up to a TV set, on one hand) are more often than not a test of quick twitch reflexes, while computer games (games played on a computer system entirely separate from a TV) often require a bit more thinking to be appreciated. This paper, for brevity?s sake, will not attempt to delve into this merry war between computers and consoles, however.

A product of years of inspiration from the likes of science fiction author Edward E. ?Doc? Smith and Toho (a Japanese movie company responsible for Godzilla and countless other cheesy old sci-fi movies), the groundwork for Spacewar! was laid in the early 60s over a period of a year or so in the apartment of the three MIT fellows. They would sit for hours on end, presenting to each other their ideas for movie versions of ?Doc? Smith?s sci-fi novels. While these ideas never made their way onto the silver screen, they did provide an excellent basis for Spacewar!. Once MIT invested in a shiny new PDP-1 computer, eschewing its clumsy TK-0 mainframe in favor of something more personal (and yet, a great deal more powerful), the Club had the medium on which it would make history.

A committee was formed with the intent of creating a game to run on the new computer. Of course, this committee consisted of the troika of the Railroad Club, but also added Alan Kotok, Peter Samson and Dan Edwards to be responsible for different aspects of the game. Kotok created a sine-cosine routine, Samson created a program to render a star field for the background called ?Expensive Planetarium,? while Edwards programmed the code for the gravity of the large sun that served as a focal point for the battles. Thus was assembled the very first development team in the history of computer gaming. Unlike with Higinbotham?s Tennis for Two, Spacewar! had an entire crew of people behind it providing various services to further the creation of their game. Instead of relying on a sole designer to create the entire program, the Spacewar! team could receive input from several different people and make adjustments according to their tastes and interests instead of being controlled by a single entity. This collaboration also allowed for an entirely new concept in gaming that still has not been perfected to this day: quality assurance.

The development team for Spacewar! spent hours on end playtesting their creation and perfecting it, something that Higinbotham could not do on his own. The result? A hugely successful, widely distributed free game that launched a billion dollar industry. The extensive ?research? (if one could call sitting around in an apartment, talking about science fiction research) that the group had undertaken over the years finally paid off. Spacewar! was debuted at the annual MIT open house in the spring of 1962 to tremendous success. Like with Tennis for Two, people lined up to get a chance to play the game and a scoring system had to be added to the program to limit peoples? time playing the game. Spacewar! eventually made it onto ARPAnet, the internet?s forefather, and found itself on the mainframes of countless other colleges and universities around the country. Quite a monumental feat for a program that was only 9k in size?

Of Text Parsers and Hungry Grues

The period of 1962 to 1972 in computer game history was relatively dry. Of course, that was around the time of the humongous arcade boom, but gaming on computers had entered a sort of dark age. Spacewar! was still around, circulating throughout the country on ARPAnet, but one can only blow up an opponent?s ship so many times without becoming bored of doing so. And so it was with computer games. The craze over Spacewar! had all but died out by the time that 1972 rolled around. But the nascent online community, teased by the success of Spacewar! on ARPAnet, was hungry for more.

Out of this hunger came a game that would lend its name to an entire genre of games in years to come: Adventure. Or, as the program itself was called (as filenames in those days were limited to a maximum of 6 characters), ADVENT. This simple game, created in 1972 by Willie Crowther, turned out to be a mild success. But it was the expanded version, modified heavily by Don Woods, that caused a stir throughout ARPAnet.

A text-only game that relied on a piece of coding known as a ?parser? to interpret the commands of the player (Adventure?s particular parser was only capable of deciphering two word commands while later parsers were capable of understanding entire sentences), Adventure was quite a hit on ARPAnet and the genre of ?adventure? games that would follow derived their name from it. Unfortunately for the game, it suffered from a slew of frustrating puzzles that forced many of its users to resort to cracking into the code in order to beat the game. It was a nice start for the world of text-based games, but far from adequate. As is constant with human nature, people wanted more. Enter, in 1976, Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling.

Like many other game developers around this time, these four gentlemen that created Zork had an MIT education. They were avid Adventure players, as well as fanatics of the recently-released tabletop Dungeons & Dragons game, and wanted to merge the excitement and, well, adventure of Adventure with the character and the concept of an entire persistent, interactive world that D&D contained. Out of this union was created Zork, a text-based adventure game that had begun as a four room Adventure-clone, and ended up as one of the best loved computer games ever. Equally loved was the ravenous Grue, a large creature with big teeth that lurked in the basement of the ramshackle white house, which formed the centerpoint of Zork, and ate adventurers that loitered there too long. The saying ?It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue? exists to this day as one of the most repeated lines from any computer game (behind perhaps ?All your base are belong to us? from the poorly translated Japanese console game Zero Wing, but that saying is simply a passing fad in the gaming world these days).

Like Adventure and Spacewar! before it, Zork was distributed throughout ARPAnet to widespread success. A large community built around the game (calling itself the ?Great Underground Empire?), showering the developers with ideas on how to expand the game and what puzzles to include. The game eventually hit the megabyte mark and was translated from its original language to the Fortran language, a move that allowed the game to be played on a wide variety of different mainframe types beyond the PDP-10 (a descendant of Spacewar!?s PDP-1).

With graduation nearing, however, the four creators of Zork had a decision ahead of them: what they wanted to do with their lives. Realizing that they could profit from Zork, they considered several potential publishers for the game and made the decision to produce Zork for the newfangled personal computers that seemed to be sprouting up everywhere. One of these publishers was a young entrepreneur by the name of William ?Bill? Gates, Jr., a young Zork fan who was starting up a small company by the name of Microsoft. Alas, they decided against signing with the future software giant and opted to give the publishing rights to Personal Software, Inc. Zork was published in 1979, distributed in a plastic bag containing the manual for the game and a 5.25? floppy disk (remember those?) with the game itself. The four lads? sales gambit paid off and Zork became one of the first commercial successes of the computer gaming world.

Personal Software dropped the Zork product line shortly after the first installment of the series was released, leaving Infocom, the company that the four Zork-men of the apocalypse had created to develop Zork, to buy back the rights and publish the game on its own. This proved to be no setback for Infocom, and they released two sequels to Zork, aptly titled Zork 2 and Zork 3, in addition to many other text adventure games and became the foremost publisher of text adventures during the genre?s glory days.

MUD, Sweat, and Tears

The end of the 70s in the computing world brought with it the invention of a gaming principle still alive and kicking to these days. This principle was online gaming.

Near the end of the mainframe/terminal days, in 1979, a student at the University of Essex in the UK by the name of Roy Trubshaw developed a system with several compatriots that would enable a large number of users to interact with one another in an Adventure-like send up of the Dungeons & Dragons system. This system, or more correctly, paradigm, would later be christened ?MUD?, an acronym standing for ?Multi-User Dungeon? and a paradigm that would be applicable in later years to a large number of other persistent online worlds. Unlike traditional computer/role-playing games, however, MUDs did not have a set goal. Of course, they included the prerequisite quests, monsters, and treasure, but the focus was more on interacting with fellow players than completing a set goal such as save the kingdom or kill the villain. Says Trubshaw about the early days of meeting up with other users in the early MUDs (in an interview with GameSpy.com): ?Even without puzzles and a rubbish parser, the joy of meeting other people and seeing them arrive and leave, whilst just standing around was just indescribable (we were easily pleased).?

The concept of MUDs took off and people began creating their own MUDs using a variety of different MUD languages. Also, other forms of MUDs began to spring up all over the place, taking on new acronyms of their own such as MUSH, MOO, MUCK, etc. So many different acronyms appeared that the online world began referring to what they had previously called MUDs as MU*s, sort of a catch all term for all persistent online worlds that fit the multiplayer Adventure- meets-D&D motif.

In the years since the creation of the MUD, there have been no real improvements on the basic structure. MUDs exist today in the same format in which they have existed in for the past two decades: find treasure (sometimes with other players), kill monsters, repeat. However, there have been inheritors of sorts to the MUD tradition. These inheritors have added graphics to their repertoire of features and have broadened their coding to allow for literally thousands of players to interact with one another in real time over even the slowest of connections. Games like Meridian 59, Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron?s Call gained tremendous popularity in the late half of the 1990s and spawned a large variety of imitators as the century drew to a close.

These games became arguably the most popular games of all times, which poses the question: does the escapism provided by computer gaming beget an entirely new world in and of itself? Before MUDs and the later MMOPRPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game , revolution that caused large communities of people to come together and create worlds of their own, that extent of interaction between a group of people through gaming could only be had by discussing the game or, in the case of a video game machine, playing head to head with one other person in the same room. Now, someone in Paducah, KY can log onto EverQuest and play his gnomish paladin alongside a friend from Escondido, CA whom he has never met before in his life but with whom he feels a strange sort of companionship. Contrary to the widespread opinion that people are being alienated and separated from one another by technology, it is, through computer games, bringing people together. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in the world (much less, the country) are not connected to the internet, the way things are going, before long the entire world is going to have access to computers and, consequently, computer games.