Or Granddad’s Guide to Computer Games Part 3 (Part 1, Part 2).
I’ve recently left the games industry, off to focus on eLearning for the foreseeable future, so this may be the last of my curmudgeonly rants on how ‘Computer Games’ were so much better back in my day. My first post on this subject, a love letter to Braben and Bell’s Elite, which mourned the death of the creative ambition of the early computer games, has been one of the most widely read pieces I’ve ever written, so perhaps I’m not alone. But if you want to want to continue reading about computer games, without the nostalgic grumpiness, I recommend Si’s excellent chewing pixels blog, he’s the main man when it comes to the modern crap.
It’s probably a generational thing. I’m of the ZX Spectrum generation, turned on to programming through experimenting with one of Clive Sinclair’s babies – the ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum. This is why I understand the allure of the blinking cursor.
In 1983 we didn’t have desktop metaphors, we didn’t have mice, all we had was a blinking cursor. There wasn’t something to click to open a document or load a game, your mysterious machine just blinked uncomprehendingly at you, waiting for you to type a command. This is why I am a great fan of a dimly remembered genre of computer game called the text based adventure. Advances in computing graphics capabilities have meant the text based adventure is now regarded as a relic of computer game history. I think this is a mistake. The text based adventure is one of those genres that transcends medium – it is midway between a book and a game. It is a narrative in the form of a conversation, but not as a passive reading experience; you are responsible for one side of the dialogue, and to progress you need to keep up your end of the conversation.
If you’ve never played one of these games I’ll give you an example. The HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy game, inspired by the 80s books, and written by Douglas Adams himself (who was a great evangelist for text based multi-media in the 80s), is one of the best examples of the form. It starts like this:
You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can’t.
It is pitch black.
And that’s it. Just that and a blinking cursor. It’s now up to you to try and communicate with the game and unlock the narrative. Your first command might be “turn on light”, “go downstairs” etc, but as the scene is being constructed in your head, rather than onscreen, it is only when you are arrested after leaving the house that you realise you have forgotten to put any clothes on.
It is a wonderfully absorbing way of playing. There is a version of the game on the BBC site, which will alarm the purists by its addition of graphics, but give it a try, see how far it sucks you in.
Another of the finest examples of the genre was ID, a game by Mel Croucher, one of most imaginative creators of the 80s for whom the modern games market would have no room. He didn’t create many games, but every one he did was pretty much a genre in itself.
ID had no graphics, just a percentage in the corner of the screen. There was also no opening message, just a blinking cursor. You had to start the conversation, with no clues as to what you were meant to be doing. Without giving too much away, it unraveled to be a dialogue with an entity living within your machine, who had experienced several previous lives. Your progress was marked by how much you could discover about this entity, by winning its trust and getting it to open up to you. The modern equivalent might be chat room grooming.
No-one is making these games anymore because nowadays we can create amazing graphical environments, so we don’t need text based adventures. This is illogical thinking; just because on film we can now create a CGI Spaceship it doesn’t mean every film has to have CGI spaceships in them. Not every game needs a realistic graphical environment to be compelling. Just look at the recent success of Sudoku. I think there is still a place in the world for the text based adventure.
I’ve recently seen someone has mashed the Hitchhikers game with Jabber, so it can be played as an instant messager conversation. With the popularity of text messaging, and the limited low bandwidth communications of mobile phones, I think there could still be a market there.
And before you ask, yes, I did try and suggest this to LittleLoud during my time there. I was laughed out the room.
So someone please, write a text based adventure for 2007, market it to the kids who love their AIM/text messaging, and make a million off it. You can buy me lunch as a thank you.
These days, much of my web browsing and video gaming is done with a two year old sitting on my knee.
We are very strict on the amount of TV he is allowed to watch, but as a father I’m much more liberal towards more interactive forms of media. I’m happy for Rudy to suggest what he would like to see and for us both to sit together at the laptop and try to find it. This is why I have to credit him with finding the fantastic Spoon / Keepon collaboration below, as he was the one who suggested we search for “dancing robots” today. You should see him dancing along to this.
I’m quite comfortable letting my boy explore YouTube. He’s not capable of doing it unsupervised yet anyway, but I think it is important to get him used to the idea of content on demand, because this is how his generation will be consuming their media. It is only us old farts who expect media to be something that is dished out to us, to be enjoyed passively. Old media is slowly realigning itself to this new way of consumption; television, radio and news in particular will be very different media when Rudy is in his thirties. This is a good thing, it’s called progress.
I’m one of the sinclair generation, the first generation to have been raised on computer games, back in a time when the right-wing press were declaring them the end of civilisation as we know it. We had some kind of games machine in our house from as far back as I can remember, starting with Pong on an Atari video console in the 70s, moving on to Donkey Kong on a TRS-80 model III and later wasting the majority of my pre-teen years trying to get past the rank of ‘deadly’ in Elite on my ZX Spectrum. I believe I have become a better member of society because of this. Rather than damage me, these interactive problem solving exercises, unconceivable by any generation earlier than my own, have made me and my contemporaries particularly attuned to our modern techno times. While it is the Daily Mail readers of the eighties who are the ones struggling to understand the changing zeitgeist.
As Marcus Brigstoke says, “If Pacman had affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.”
I want to make sure that my son is on the leading edge of the next generation, the one that will bewilder me, which is why I allow him to browse YouTube and play the XBox, but limit his TV consumption. The crucial difference is the interactivity. Television teaches little more than passivity, obedience and blind consumption. Whereas computer games and content on demand are cognitively challenging, they teach interactivity, co-ordination and problem solving, which are all essential skills. For a more detailed reinforcement of this argument, you can google the research of Steven Johnson, he writes very eloquently on the subject.
With the exponentially increasing rate of technological change we are experiencing, the only thing I can predict with confidence is that the world my son will inherit will be simply unimaginable to us now. But I’m confident it will contain technological marvels even more exciting than those of today. By 2030 I’d expect we’ll all be dancing with robots.
Growing up in the Midlands in the 80s, most children had to endure copious trips to Dudley Zoo. The only highlight of these visits, the dangled carrot that got you past the sleeping hippos, bored lions and the seemingly empty reptile house, was the arcade, which featured the original Star Wars arcade machine.
This machine was a classic. It had two killer features. First was the design of the cabinet; a reclined seated position, speakers behind your head, an X-wing style controller in your hands, and the glass panel behind you which all your mates clambered over while they awaited their turn. At the age of 10 this was the nearest I’ve ever been to experiencing deep space combat.
Second killer feature – the vector graphics. They looked stunning at the time, and have aged really well. There’s something about the austere simplicity of those lines, which I’m sure must somehow tie in to my love of comics books on an aesthetic level.
So after playing on one of these machines for the first time in 20 years at GameOn, as well as Elite, Asteroids and the more recent shareware game Warning Forever, I left the exhibition demanding the return of the vector game. When even shoe-gazing is getting it’s second time around, surely vector graphics are overdue their revival.
Keys for the Spectrum version of Elite: Front View/Launch (1); Back View/ Buy (2); Left View/Sell (3); Right View/Equip (4); Escape Pod (Q); Energy Bomb (W): ECM (E); Find Planet (R); Fire Missile (F) Target (T); Unarm (U); Galactic Chart (I); Local Chart (0); Data on System (P); Fire Laser (A); Dive/Cursor Up (5); Climb/ Cursor Down (X); Anti-clockwise Roll/Cursor Left (N); Clockwise Roll/Cursor Right (M); Distance (D); Hyperspace/ Intergalactic Jump (H); Torus Jump Drive (J); Prices (K); Status (L); Inventory (ENTER); Freeze (SHIFT); Docking Computer (C); Home Cursor (B); Save/Decelerate (SYMBOL SHIFT); Continue/Accelerate (BREAK); click here for full manual
Considering I make my living from writing games these days, I can’t say I’m a great fan of the current state of electronic gaming. For the last ten years at least, particularly in the eyes of Sony and Microsoft, computer games have been all about higher fidelity – better and better graphics and sound, an arms race for a more “realistic’ gaming experience. But perhaps this whole approach to the concept of the simulated reality is missing the point somewhat.
Firstly, games are about escapism. We have quite enough reality – it is in plentiful supply. The appeal of gaming is in exploring abstracted systems that are more logical and structured than the chaos of ordinary life, systems we can master easier than we can the complexity of reality. As a core principle this is the appeal of all games from Sudoku to World of Warcraft.
Secondly, creating a believable and absorbing game environment is about more than just the quality of graphics and sound. Let me explain …
We (Littleloud) payed a visit to the Game On exhibition at the Science Museum before xmas, which charted the history of computer games from Pong to PS3. Experiencing some tangible artifacts of the old days – BBC Micros, Ataris, Commodores and Spectrums – made me very nostalgic for the early days of computer games, when the field was so much more interesting and experimental than it is today. In the eighties, when I was an eager young consumer of the new home computing revolution, the hardware was very limited, but the originality and creativity of the programmers, forced to wring every last drop of performance out of their primitive kit, more than made up for it. It was this spirit that built the industry, yet this now seems completely forgotten.
Today games often have budgets exceeding Hollywood films, assembled by huge teams of graphic artists, story-boarders, voice talent and programmers. Their aim is to create cinematic experiences on our home systems, with believable worlds we can explore as if they were real places. But still, somehow, not one of these multi-million pound developed worlds has managed to capture the feeling of infinite possibility that you got wandering the mathematically generated universe of Elite; the product of two geeks exploring the limits of the 32k BBC Model B back in the early eighties.
Everything that made up the universe of Elite, the names of planets, their descriptions, commodities, politics etc, was generated procedurally using the Fibonacci sequence (explained in more detail here). This isn’t the same as being randomly generated, this universe was a fully defined and predicable place – predictable because the rules that generated it were reproducible, so a star with a certain name and location would always be in that same location and have the same name. But, by creating the universe using a mathematical formula, it meant it was both predictable, yet still surprising – it was so large that players of the game could easily explore places that were essentially uncharted, even by its creators.
In 1984 Ian Bell and David Braben, the creators of Elite, had produced a game that was capable of defining a thoroughly believable universe containing 2 to the power of 48 galaxies – that’s 282,000,000,000,000 possible destinations to fly to, all within the 22k available memory of the BBC Model B computer. The final release of Elite had this number substantially reduced – 8 galaxies of 256 stars each – on the insistence of publishers Acornsoft, because a universe of such a size would be too daunting, and would likely induce a minor existential crisis in the player, making them question how such a place had been created.
Basing an artificial reality upon the Fibonacci sequence was a piece of simple brilliance, born out of the necessity of the tools they were working with. But it is a trick that can’t easily be applied to the graphically sophisticated environments of modern games (although I would love to see it tried). Today’s worlds are designed, rather than programmed, so their features cannot be allowed such a degree of chaos.
So is this ‘realistic’? Only a religious fool would ever describe our world using the concept of ‘design’. If you were to ask a cosmologist about the nature of reality, she would probably begin by outlining a few essential mathematical principles and constants on which our universe is based, just as the universe of Elite was created. Perhaps only Braben/Bell have had the right idea so far. Perhaps the mathematically generated universe of Elite is actually the most ‘realistic’ simulated world ever created in a computer game.
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ID had no graphics, just a percentage in the corner of the screen. There was also no opening message, just a blinking cursor. You had to start the conversation, with no clues as to what you were meant to be doing. Without giving too much away, it unraveled to be a dialogue with an entity living within your machine, who had experienced several previous lives. Your progress was marked by how much you could discover about this entity, by winning its trust and getting it to open up to you. The modern equivalent might be chat room grooming.
Growing up in the Midlands in the 80s, most children had to endure copious trips to 
Everything that made up the universe of Elite, the names of planets, their descriptions, commodities, politics etc, was generated procedurally using the Fibonacci sequence (explained in more detail 