Bit by Bit

INTRODUCTION

the purpose of playing

The massive HDTV loomed in front of the windows and blocked the view of the beach. Two of my nephews, John and Logan, were watching cartoons at a volume that came to find me even after I retreated three rooms away. It was Christmas Day at my parents' house on the Jersey Shore. I heard sound effects but no dialogue to speak of. The background music seemed cheery at first, but the steady repetition of some sort of crunching noise called to mind a deranged celery-eating contest. The soundtrack was dominated by a Philip Glass-esque exercise in serialism: rapid crashes interrupted by bleating sheep that went on, full blast, for an hour. I was trying to read, but my noise-canceling headphones proved useless.

The headache kettle-drumming at my temples shot pinpricks into the backs of my eyes. My face burned bright red because I was wearing a new cashmere sweater the color of reflective bibs worn by highway work crews, and I'm allergic to wool. In the kitchen, my father was loading his Crock-Pot with the ingredients for his broccoli surprise, but it sounded like he was performing "Flight of the Bumblebee" using every metal pan and piece of flatware in the house. My wife Elivi, the smart one in the family, had gone out for a long run. Unfortunately, my sneakers were in the nephew-colonized living room. I closed the Inferno and then my eyes. The microwave started beeping and no one made it stop, so I took a breath and ventured out to the kitchen.

I found my running shoes buried in the living room amid the discarded wrapping paper and Legos and cardboard boxes. I planned to make a hasty exit and catch up with Elivi, but the TV grabbed my attention. The picture quality looked terrible, like a chunky 8-bit Atari game but in 3D. I sat on the rug between my nephews, who didn't notice my presence, and saw that John was tethered to the screen. In his hands was no simple joystick, but rather a plastic device shaped like a bat that had been squashed, taxidermied, and shellacked. The game was called Minecraft (2011) and I had never seen anything like it. I soon learned that it had sold over 100 million copies worldwide.

There existed no narrative structure—no story—to Minecraft, at least as far as I could tell. John toggled between pop-up boxes when he was not making his way among abstract trees and along poorly-rendered bodies of water. Block-like animals lumbered around. Though rudimentary, I found the action on screen enthralling. What I would have thought of as the camera didn't adhere to a stable or situated point of view. Instead, it flew around to capture the action from different angles. It was incomprehensible and yet I knew deep in my bones that it was a work of absolute genius, albeit one that I didn't understand.

Maybe every generation believes as much about their childhoods—or at least I hope they do—but the 1970s were the best imaginable time to grow up in America. We had the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, the first Star Wars movies, Dungeons & Dragons games, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and I, Claudius reruns on PBS—and emergent video game technology that every year matured and grew in sophistication right alongside us. I played my share of arcade and computer games growing up, and worked briefly as a video game designer in the 1990s for a Budapest-based startup. Later, I spent more hours of my life than might be reasonable playing World of Warcraft (2004). And yet, for some reason, I never thought of myself as a gamer.

I don't remember ever looking down on video games and the people who played them, but as a voracious reader, and eventually a graduate student in fiction writing, I naturally spent far more time with books than with video games. My interests leaned more toward the literary than the technological, but on that day down the shore I began to see how intertwined those two concerns could be. Although essential differences remain, and always will, literature and video games have more in common than I could have predicted.

Having been buried nose-first in books for so long, I had missed a fascinating cultural sea change. In my lifetime, video games have expanded from a small, geeky diversion to a mainstream phenomenon as popular in many regards as professional sports. I set out to write this book in order to learn what I had been missing. In doing so, I discovered that video games are not just games, but constitute a powerful storytelling medium, one that has provided startling new ways to think about my own life and the world in which I live.

The ways we interact with others have changed dramatically since Dr. William "Willy" A. Higinbotham first set up Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope in 1958. "Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen," Thomas Pynchon wrote in 1984, of all years, a full decade before Yahoo! and Geocities invited us online. Whereas computer scientists and video or computer gamers once constituted small subcultures of our society, relegated to government institutions and university labs, today a full 67% of American homes have video games of one sort or another. Many universities now offer MFA degrees in video game design, and the Museum of Modern Art has added games to its permanent collection. Instead of herding into noisy arcades or gluing ourselves to a single boxy TV in the den, we now hide our heads in mobile games like Angry Birds (2009), Canabalt (2009), and Pokémon Go (2016). The flows of data that Pynchon mentioned have indeed augmented our reality.

But who exactly is playing all these video games? Reliable statistics are tough to come by. As of 2010, the average gamer was thirty-four years old and spent eight hours each week gaming. That is equivalent, of course, to a full day of work. I find it particularly fascinating that at that time 40% of all gamers were women. A 2015 study revealed that 49% of American adults play video games; among those between the ages of 18 and 29, 77% of men and 57% of women played. It was also recently found that women over 35 made up half of the video-gaming demographic. Yet the gaming community is still widely—and unfortunately—perceived as a boys' club.

In many respects, video games have surpassed movies in terms of gross income and popularity. The World of Warcraft franchise (1994–present) has reportedly earned in excess of $10 billion for its developer, Blizzard Entertainment. In 2014 in the United States alone, sales of video games on disc reached $5.47 billion. That does not include downloaded software, and that staggering sum was actually down 14% from the previous year; we're downloading more and therefore relying less on physical storage objects like CD-ROMs or DVDs. In that same timeframe, sales of downloaded digital games (such as from Apple's App Store and Valve's Steam service) increased by 11% and reached $1.2 billion. In 2015 alone, American consumers alone spent $23.5 billion on video gaming. More than half of those sales—56%—were digital downloads. Baseball might be America's national pastime, but video games have become a global obsession. To call games like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014) or Madden NFL 16 (2015) big business would be the understatement of the millennium. Of course, video games are big business, but they are also more than that—or they can be.

Many more of us than ever before are now spending our commutes, our cubicle hours, and our free time enraptured by games, from the minor and mindless but irresistible (Bubble Breaker (2003) and Peggle Blast (2014)) to the magisterial and totalizing (Fallout 4 (2015) and No Man's Sky (2016)). Whereas once we might have visited with friends, written a letter, or gone to the movies, now we find entertainment—and genuine human connection—through our TVs, our computers, and our phones. That reality alone shows the impact of video games on our lives and culture.

Less remarked upon are the benefits games can offer. Witness the documented effect Minecraft has on children's problem-solving abilities. Or what in Reality Is Broken Jane McGonigal calls "stronger social connectivity." Or even the ability of Pokémon Go to prompt us to get outside and explore the natural (albeit digitally augmented) world around us. And yet it remains easy to think of video games as childish and the playing of them beneath the dignity of reasonable, mature adults, who should be spending their free hours on more socially acceptable leisure activities, like getting drunk on cheap beer and watching football. Many persistent prejudices about the medium derive from the—inaccurate, as it turns out—term "video game" itself. Yet even were video games only mere playthings, they would hold value. In his 1922 Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga likened play to sacred or religious rituals of the past: "Formally speaking, there is no distinction whatever between marking out a space for a sacred purpose and marking it out for purposes of sheer play," he wrote. "The turf, the tennis-court, the chessboard and pavement-hopscotch cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle."

Playtime can serve a purpose beyond entertainment, distraction, and edification; it is a valuable and necessary element of being human. Or, as Huizinga put it, "culture arises in the form of play, … it is played from the very beginning. Even those activities which aim at the immediate satisfaction of vital needs—hunting, for instance—tend, in archaic society, to take on the play-form." We are an innately play-oriented species. Play serves a valuable, ritualistic function. For us today, video games can provide a return to the rituals of that magic circle. The sociologist Roger Caillois's 1958 Man, Play and Games spoke to a "pure space" that we enter during playtime. "In effect, play is essentially a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life, and generally is engaged in with precise limits of time and place." The truly great video games, the ones of interest to this book, evoke that pure space and help us return to the magic circle of our human past. As Drexel University digital media scholar Frank J. Lee told me, "text-based games and current games are part of the larger storytelling and play that people have been doing since the beginning of time."

Because video games are intended to be fun, it does not necessarily follow that they are frivolous. Every new style of art has inspired the previous generation to bellyache, perhaps in part because change reminds us of our mortality. I've heard many laments about the time children and adults waste on video games, but since that day sitting agog in front of the TV with my nephews, I have understood that new technologies always meet with resistance and games are an important subject for cultural and artistic analysis. After all, the early Sumerian poets who once recited their epics at great length and from memory likely bemoaned the new-fangled clay tablets upon which the stories of Gilgamesh were suddenly being preserved.

In preparation for a recent transatlantic flight, I chose two video games to add to my iPad. I confirmed my password to pay for the downloads, which transferred a series of 1s and 0s representing funds I had never seen from my bank account to Apple's App Store. I waited all of thirty seconds for the games to download over my lousy Comcast home Wi-Fi network, and then there they were. One of my new apps—if it really belonged to me—allowed me to play Warren Robinett's Adventure (1979), or at least a version of it.

Not to be confused with the text-based Colossal Cave Adventure, Robinett's game was published by Atari, Inc. in 1979 for play on what we now think of as the Atari 2600 home console. It sold over one million copies, and remains one of the most important and iconic video games ever made. I was overjoyed to see it included in the Atari's Greatest Hits app and looked forward to mastering it 30,000 feet above Greenland. When the pilot finally announced that we were free to use electronic devices, I pulled out my iPad and discovered that the game looked great: the lines clean and straight, the colors bright, the movement responsive to the faintest swipe of my finger. Just seeing Adventure again after all those years—the geometric mazes and that pixel-dragon that looked a bit like a duck—brought back a flood of pleasant memories.

After five minutes I turned it off. By the time I arrived in Stockholm, I had deleted the app. Fortunately, the other game I had downloaded, Monument Valley (2014), turned out to be an incredible piece of digital storytelling and, as I discuss later in the book, one of the most affecting video games I have played. The re-developers of Adventure had created a lovely reproduction of the original, but the "aura," as Walter Benjamin would have put it, had vanished. It felt wrong to play such a brilliant game on such a mundane device, to see Adventure so polished and shiny but also sanitized and voided of personality.

That sense of being transported back to the 1970s lingered, however, so when I got home to Philadelphia a few weeks later I dusted off my fake wood-grained Atari 2600 and purchased a copy of Adventure on eBay so I could play the game as it was meant to be played. Instead of waiting thirty seconds, I had an entire week to contemplate the extent to which I've come to expect instant gratification. Then the game showed up, a strip of old circuitry embedded in a casement of mass-produced, molded plastic: a perfect combination of digital and analog technologies. I powered up the console, popped in the cartridge, and the game looked awful—which was exactly what I had hoped for.

The original version of Adventure—as it appeared on my old Dell-manufactured flat screen TV, after extensive finagling with different adaptors and wires—was blurry and clunky and not remotely as polished as the app. The resolution was hideous yet beautiful, in much the same way that hearing the pops and cracks of an old LP is beautiful. I loved playing Adventure that way like I love hearing Ben Webster on a scratchy old record instead of on remastered and lifeless CDs. The scratches and crackle, or in this case the pixelated blurs and wonky motion, are essential to my enjoyment.

In writing this book, I have whenever feasible played the original incarnation of each game under discussion. I dropped quarters into arcade cabinets, loaded 5 1/2" floppy diskettes into buzzing C=64 drives, and spun tiny 3" CDs in a Nintendo GameCube. Without a single peep of complaint from Elivi, I installed a full-sized and obscenely loud Donkey Kong (1981) machine in our basement. However, with video games, and digital media in general, locating an original of a program can be futile. Newer games in particular are infinitely reproducible. It makes little sense to adhere to some false notions, rooted in nostalgia, for an authenticity that never existed. For that reason, I did not lose sleep over my inability to play Spacewar! (1962) on a PDP-1 computer or Pong (1972) on an original arcade cabinet. I tried to be respectful of Benjamin's aura without being inexorably tied to it.

I have also focused my attention on the games that advanced the medium in creative ways. No work of history can be truly comprehensive, and this one is not. What you hold in your hands consists of a selective and ultimately subjective—and hopefully still corrective—survey. The contributions of women to video game history have been overlooked for too long, for instance. Margaret Atwood has written that, "In most conventional histories, women simply aren't there. Or they're there as footnotes. Their absence is like the shadowy corner in a painting where there's something going on that you can't quite see." Make no mistake: this is no conventional history. I have tried to celebrate some of the many brilliant contributions, otherwise often ignored, that women programmers and designers have made to the field of video games.

When I set off to write the book, I quickly and unexpectedly found myself learning about the origins of video games in the time of World War II and their parallel growth alongside and within the military-industrial complex. My research took me to a government laboratory and dusty junk shops, to design studios and arcades, to universities, and to museums that had recently added games to their collections. I met professors and professional gamers, scientists and hobbyists, critics and game makers themselves. I designed a university course about video games and taught it online, holding virtual student conferences inside World of Warcraft. And, yes, with the help of my nephews I even learned how to play Minecraft. In fact, I played enough to suffer from Minecraft Syndrome, the effect of seeing the objects around me in real life as constituted of component blocks.

As Warren Robinett, the mind behind Adventure, has put it, "If you accept the idea that a new artform is emerging, then interviewing the genre-creators is equivalent, for a Classicist, to interviewing Homer; for an English professor, to interviewing Shakespeare." Self-aggrandizement aside, I could not agree more. I was fortunate, in a way, that many of the most important people behind games are still alive; my conversations with Robinett and Tim Schafer and other video game designers enlivened and complicated this book. Few of the people I met would agree on what makes video games important, or if they are art or not, but every last one shared an abiding—and contagious—passion for playing games.

And what is it exactly that I came to love about video games? The works of art I value the most—Inferno and Moby-Dick, Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" and Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra—always and necessarily resist definition; they allow me to question my own tastes and beliefs and values. Art cannot be pinned down like a butterfly to a taxonomist's board. Art helps me enter Huizinga's magic circle of ritual, where cordoned off from the workaday world I can find the mental and emotional bandwidth to better mediate my relationship between the real and the mystical or extra-real. My favorite video games do precisely that.

Before we hit START, I would like to thank you, the reader who has put down the controller long enough to pick up this book. You might find that I have ignored some popular games that you're excited about and that I've devoted what may feel like excessive attention to lesser-known games that I love. Please bear with me. Fortunately, as I discovered, there are enough video games, and enough kinds of video games, for everyone. The diversity of video games—and of video gamers—can be the medium's greatest strength. The gaming community we build together is entirely up to us. Let's play, shall we?