this is pong on drugs

Jen-Luc Piquant has been urging me to indulge in a bit of meditation to calm my nerves as we head into the home stretch for the Big Nuptial Event this coming weekend. I suspect she was thinking of something a bit more New Age-y, such as communicating with my molecules of consciousness, but personally, I find playing endless games of Scrabble or Solitaire to be oddly soothing in times of stress. Jen-Luc has her way of meditating, and I have mine. (Some people find exercise meditative, but I tend to draft articles or blog posts in my head in those situations.) And in an earlier era, I could have turned to Pong. You remember Pong, don't you?  At least, you should if you were a kid in the 1970s. It was one of the first video arcade games ever developed, courtesy of Atari, and definitely the first to achieve widespread popularity, moving from the arcades to people's homes soon after it was introduced to the marketplace.

Pong was little more than a computer version of table tennis (or, as we called it growing up, "ping-pong"). It had simple monochromatic visuals and made a "pong" type sound whenever the "ball" (a little white dot) was hit by the "paddles" (two white rectangular bars at either end of the screen). It wasn't the first time someone thought of playing an electronic version of ping-pong: in 1958, a scientist at Brookhaven National Lab named William Higinbotham invented "Tennis for Two," played on an oscilloscope, but it failed to penetrate much further than the lab, perhaps because very few American homes had their very own oscilloscope.

Eight years later, a man named Ralph Baer working for Sanders Associates wrote a short paper describing a system for playing simple video games on a TV set, leading to his development of a computer version of ping-pong -- which he duly patented and licensed to Magnavox. In 1972, the company launched the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console, offering a dozen different games, including table tennis. Nolan Bushnell saw the system demonstrated at a trade show that year, and one month later co-founded Atari with Ted Dabney, each contributing $250 of starting capital. The original idea was to create a video car driving game for arcades, but Bushnell realized this was a pretty tall order, given the limited graphical capabilities available at the time, so he asked his electronic engineer, Al Alcorn, to create a ping-pong game. And thus, Pong was born.

The original arcade version had a coin-operated switch, and the instructions were simplicity itself: "Avoid missing ball for high score." Finally, an arcade game that even those in the most drunken of stupors could play! The system was field-tested at Andy Capp's tavern in Sunnyvale, California (not to be confused with the fictitious town of Sunnydale central to the Buffyverse), and within a day of its introduction, people were lined up outside the bar waiting for their turn. In fact, the machine broke down rather quickly: there was a milk carton placed inside to catch the inserted coins, and when it was overflowing with quarters, they jammed the switch. By March 1973, Atari had sold a whopping 10,000 systems. The home console version proved just as popular: it was the must-have Christmas gift for 1975.   Pong was even featured in several Saturday Night Live segments during the show's first season -- you know, back when it was truly ground-breaking and actually funny.

Pong seems to be riding the nostalgia wave of late, evidenced by last year's hugely popular American Express commercial featuring tennis player Andy Roddick (video clip is here). It's pretty funny. Warned by his trainer in advance that his opponent "returns everything," Roddick walks onto toe court to find himself facing the telltale rectangular white band -- rendered in 3D this time, thanks to our vastly improved graphical capabilities these days. Pong proves to be a formidable opponent, returning shot after shot until Roddick has an epiphany: he realizes Pong can only move side to side, not forward or back. So he jettisons his usual killer power serve and tips the ball neatly over the net in a simple drop shot so that it dribbles into his opponent's side of the court, winning the game -- because Pong can't move forward to return the ball. The commercial even spawned an interactive Web game called Stop Pong. (Try it! S'fun!)

The Roddick commercial serves to illustrate the chief weakness of Pong: as video games go, it was pretty mindless, and quickly got boring. I have dim memories of a Pong console in our home when I was growing up. If memory serves, our favorite thing to do was align the paddles in such a way that the little white "ball" was passed back and forth in a perfectly straight line. Neither side ever missed. We'd leave it like that, and go play a few real games of ping-pong, because we had a bona fide table in the garage, mounted on a couple of sawhorses. (When your grandfather, father, and brother are all in construction, there's always a sawhorse laying about the place.) Pong was an interesting novelty, but it just couldn't beat the real live game in terms of pulse-pounding excitement and unpredictability.

If only we'd had access to today's advanced home computers (never mind graphic-heavy, interactive game consoles like PlayStation and X-Box). Then we could have indulged in the groovy psychedelic permutations of Plasma Pong, described by PC World as "Pong on acid," and recently named one of the top five indie games by Wired.com. The Website (launched earlier this year) has already surpassed one million hits. Plasma Pong has even warranted mention in the hallowed pages of the Washington Post. It's not the first time someone's re-invented Pong; apparently there was a version that featured former president Bill Clinton's head as the ball, and a demo prototype of a system that used body sensors to control the paddles. But Plasma Pong is just whacked-out enough to have the same broad popular appeal as the original. The WaPo reporter described is as being "like playing ping-pong while floating in melted lollipops.... It's over the top, freaky, high-speed, and mellow all at once." What could be better than that? (You can see an actual game of Plasma Pong being played here.)

Plasma Pong is the brainchild of George Mason University student Stephen Taylor, who got bored during a winter break spent at his parents' house (we hear ya, buddy!), and started writing code for a revamped version of Pong. He didn't bother tweaking the basic rules: he re-invented the visuals and added some interesting 2D physics simulations in the form of liquid plasmas. A simple mouse click sends a jet of liquid across the "court" -- or, alternatively, creates a suction effect to draw the ball toward you. The bright colors constantly pulsate and change, occasionally sending particles flying around the screen.

There's also a "sandbox function," to alter the viscosity of the "liquid," for example, to indulge those who can't resist doing their own tweaking. "You can toggle all the controls, turn it into a giant bowl of Jell-O if you want to," Taylor told the Washington Post. The game was an instant success: when Taylor first posted it online, the GMU serve slowed to a crawl because the game had been downloaded 50,000 times.

Kids today. Sheesh. I don't know what Taylor's majoring in, but it's pretty clear he's well-versed in math and science, not to mention being extraordinarily creative: his game required him to create algorithms for such advanced calculations as viscosity, gravity, vorticity, and other physical forces that affect the movement of a liquid. And trust me, that's no small feat. That's because plasmas -- ionized gases that technically make up a fourth state of matter because the ionization gives what would otherwise be a gas distinct fluid properties -- are extremely difficult physical systems to model. (I wrote about lab-based simulations of space plasmas in a post last year.)

There's an entire field of physics (fluid dynamics) devoted to gaining better understanding, and developing better predictive models, for complex fluids (plasmas, smoke, fire, or typical liquids). There are so many variables, and the systems can change so rapidly in response to the tiniest variation in just a single variable, that it's extremely difficult to predict a fluid's behavior beyond the near-term, or effectively manipulate it to one's advantage. Taylor, it turns out, relied on a research paper written by Jos Stam, a well-known scientist in the gaming industry, to develop Plasma Pong.

The complexity of fluid behavior is what makes Plasma Pong so much fun: not only do you get bright pretty psychedelic colors, but the addition of fluid dynamics means the system creates sudden, unpredictable movements: the ball can easily get caught in eddies and currents. Sometimes you can use this to your advantage. For example, firing a plasma into your opponent's playfield can create an eddy, enabling you to score. But it's not 100% controllable -- some players might find that frustrating. I think it's a great introduction to the unpredictability of Nature.

Still, Taylor's already moved on to the next version of the game. First, he'll graduate from college. Then, he'll launch his own company to market a new version of Plasma Pong under a different name (to avoid trademark infringement concerns). He's working on making a multi-player version of the game to enable a GMU student to play someone in Tokyo, for example. And he'd love to upgrade the graphics to 3D, rather than 2D, plasma simulations -- an even more difficult feat than what he's already accomplished. If he succeeds, it'll be like playing Pong inside a lava lamp. Jen-Luc can't wait...

Comments

[Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer]

Heh. I downloaded plasma pong a few months ago after Chris Pirillo wrote about it on his site. It's amazing, and the music is hawesome. I've been meaning to mention it on my blog as well. :-)

[stephanSCF]

I enjoyed plasma pong very much; i downladed it about one year ago.
I think it's incredibly additive..i can spend hours in sandbox mode.

[Allyson]

Your turn.

[nell]

Very good Blog

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