50 years of getting yer (video) game on

*Raises right hand* I am not now, nor have I ever been, a gamer. A horrible confession for any geek to make, I know, but most video games bore and frustrate me. I tried Myst early on and got totally fed up; it felt too much like taking the logic section of my GREs: I've tried everything I can think of and I can't get anything to work! What do you people want from me? I have a vivid enough imagination, thanks, that I don't need a game to experience being another character. Books will do just fine for that, and writing fanfic takes care of the interaction part without having to fend off other pesky players trying to kill my character and then camping it so it can't respawn (although I would probably do that if I were a gamer. reee reeee reeee).

Well, it's not entirely true that I'm not a gamer. I'm not keen on First Person Shooters (FPS), Massively Multiplayer (MMP) games, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) (like World of Warcraft; or Years of Yarncraft as the webcomic Sluggy Freelance spoofed it.), Multi-User Dungeons (MUD), or Real-Time Strategy (RTS)  (Civilization) games (and yes, I realize a lot of these categories overlap). I'm fascinated by the whole online avatar creation thing, but  MUDs actually make me a little queasy, and Second Life just seems, well, silly, unless it involves something like Sean Carroll's talk on the arrow of time given at Second Life's Galaxy Dome in Spaceport Bravo. The educational potential for those kinds of activities makes the teacher in me salivate. Otherwise, not so much.

I do, however, confess to an unhealthy love of Tetris, Solitaire, online pinball, and Snood. (In fact, is there a twelve-step program for Snood?  I really need that; I've got it open right now, in fact and am Alt-Tabbing between my browser and the game. What a loser.) The attraction of these games for me, especially Tetris, is the spatial element. I've always liked the kind of puzzles were you fit things together, or which take the calculation of angles to score points. I loved geometry in high school (at least the constructing part) and liked playing pool and air hockey for the same reason.

And once upon a time, I was totally hooked on Pong, the arcade version of Atari's popular electronic tennis game that first came out in 1972. We had one pizza parlor in my town and whenever my friends and I headed there after our high school's Friday night football or basketball game, we'd play the arcade version while waiting for our pie. I was killah. Developing all that excellent hand-eye coordination from playing air hockey and old fashioned table pinpall totally paid off.

If you're a regular, long-time gamer, you may or may not know that one of the first video games—a forerunner of Pong called "Tennis for Two"—was developed not at Atari, but at Brookhaven National Laboratory. On an oscilloscope screen. Brookhaven's then-Chief of the Instrumentation Division, William A. Higinbotham, and Robert Dvorak, Sr., built the game as an exhibit for an open house, which proved to be so wildly popular that it threatened to overshadow Brookhaven's real mission and its six Nobel Prizes. Brookhaven has their own little synopsis of how the game came to be, and why it was never patented, but there's another video of a couple of people playing the recreation of the game, called "The Second Ever Video Game."

As with most firsts, there's a little disagreement about which game actually was the first videogame. And whether Tennis for Two was really a video game or not depends in part on how picky you are about nomenclature. The image produced on the oscilloscope's CRT screen did not use video's graphics rastering, in which a shape is converted to pixels for display, a process that gives contemporary video games their 3-D quality. Although the images in Tennis for Two are projected onto a CRT screen with an electron gun like any other video image, the CRT oscilloscope (unlike most contemporary oscilloscopes which use LED displays) only displays fluctuations in voltage, and the image reflects the vector or geometric shape of those fluctuations rather than a relative sampling of the shapes mapped onto a grid of pixels. Rasterization allows faster display time and changes in those displays than vector graphics do, hence their use in contemporary videogames. That's why the capacity and speed of graphics cards is so important in gaming; the more powerful your graphics card is (i.e., the more capacity it has for processing position and shape algorithms), the quicker your display changes. And that matters when you're gaming in real time. Display time is part of what made Tennis for Two so innovative:

“The real innovation in this game is the use of those ‘new-fangled’ germanium transistors that were just becoming commercially available in the late 1950s,” said Peter Takacs of Brookhaven Lab’s Instrumentation Division, who is currently working to rebuild a playable Tennis for Two. “Higinbotham used the transistors to build a fast-switching circuit that would take the three outputs from the computer and display them alternately on the oscilloscope screen at a ‘blazing’ fast speed of 36 Hertz. At that display rate, the eye sees the ball, the net, and the court as one image, rather than as three separate images.”

One unintentional innovation in this game was the satisfying little click players heard when they "hit" the "ball" back to the other player across the screen. This was the result of the physical movement of the switches mentioned above, but it may have had a role in the game's popularity by actually making it easier to play. Sound plays a significant role in our perception of speed and motion, with both inputs processed more or less together in the brain. Different areas of the brain process visual, auditory, and touch input, but new studies show that the boundaries between those areas are pretty blurry, with neurons from one area encroaching on the territory of the others. This means that perception of one stimulus may affect the perception of another without involving higher brain functions—one of the reasons that gamers' reflexes can be so quick. Sight and sound work in tandem with each other and with touch in a feedback loop that grows smoother with practice.

This same feedback loop is part of what helps people learn to type. Typewriter keyboards, especially the electric or early electronic ones had a satisfying clicking sound and "touch" with some resistance to reinforce what typing felt and sounded like. People who learned to type on these keyboards often still have strong preferences for how their computer keyboards sound and feel. We like a little resistance and noise, rather than silence and a perfectly smooth touch. (Blackberry's new Storm has actually added a tactile touch screen that depresses when you touch the buttons for this reason.) But the rhythm and sound of your typing can actually be extremely revealing. "Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a way to turn the clicks and clacks of typing on a computer keyboard into a startlingly accurate transcript of what exactly is being typed." So much of the text can be recovered through sound alone that it may actually be possible to "recover" someone's password just from a sound recording of their typing.

Hmm, I guess someone playing Tetris with the arrow keys would kinda foil that.  And of course playing Snood with my trackball. And if it weren't for Pong, I'd would never have gotten hooked on either of them in the first place. Pong, the Gateway Drug. Who knew? And to think it all started with a harmless desire to make science exciting!

Comments

[justcorbly]

I'm with you re: games.

I'm old enough to have been old enough in 1972 to have been in a bar playing Pong. Talk about boring.

Maybe if you actually won something tangible. But the "thrill of victory and agony of defeat" still doesn't cut it for me.

[melancholic]

I would like to know more about your experience with first person shooters.
How many titles did you get your hands on?
Have you tried Half-Life 2 and Quake III?
I personally think that FPS is by far most immersive video game genre once you allow yourself a few weeks to get accustomed with mouse keyboard handling. Also check out team-based first person shooters like Team Fortress 2 or Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (which you can get free, here: http://www.splashdamage.com/node/57 + best mod for it here: http://etpro.anime.net/)

[Juan Nunez-Iglesias]

I'm surprised no one's jumped on you yet for calling Civilization a real-time strategy game. (First!) It's turn-based strategy. Real-time strategy games include Command and Conquer and Starcraft.

I would suggest that you ignore melancholic's comment, which appears to be targeted at a hardcore gaming audience, and instead try out Portal. Please don't miss the humorous trailer for the game ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluRVBhmf8w ). On top of the ingenious puzzle mechanics, the AI voice that eggs you on is full of dark humor, and the ending is fast reaching legendary status.

Best part? The game can be beaten in less than 3h, so you can just sit with a gamer friend and enjoy the fantastic puzzles and narrative, without having to be a game guru.

If you do decide to ignore the game, at the very least enjoy the ending ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RthZgszykLs ), though it will lose some of its effect without having first gone through the game.

[Lee Kottner]

Thanks for the recs everyone. Actually, one of the reasons I'm not a gamer is not that I don't like them, but that I'm afraid I'll get sucked into the vortex and never come out. You should see the time I waste just with Snood. I've tried FPS games at friends' houses and they've nearly had to pry the controllers outta my cold, dead hands. I have the same problem with TV, and as a writer, I've found I don't get any writing done when I have TV or videogames around. Compared to writing, they're easy. See, that "the game can be beaten in less than 3h" is 3 hours I could get writing done in. So I'm a sucker at least for FPS games. The others, not so much.

And truthfully, I'm already running so many graphics heavy programs (PhotoShop, InDesign, Illustrator) that upgrading for gaming is just impractical. I'm secretly in love with the Alienware boxes though. Why do most PC makers not understand that half the appeal of Macs is the box design?

[Wilson]

Lee, I'm with you on game types. I too, much prefer the puzzle-type games than the shooters or any of the other categories you mentioned. I thought I was alone in the world on this, so I'm glad you came out about it.

[Rob Knop]

Sean Carroll's talk in Second Life was part of a series called "Dr. Knop Talks Astronomy", biweekly public astronomy lectures given usually by me, sometimes by guest luminaries such as Sean.

There's actually all sorts of stuff going on in Second Life that is pretty far from what you'd call a "game". I've acted in Shakespearian plays in-world as well....

Check out http://www.mica-vw.org if you're interested in public astronomy outreach talks and other activities associated with a group of professional (and other) astronomers in Second Life.

Also note that the Second Life client and a Second Life account are free....

[BobP]

Oh, wow! I played Tennis for Two at Brookhaven -- either late middle school or high school -- at an open house. Timing is about right, since I graduated from high school in '64...

[Michael Jones]

I'd always liked Asteroids in my early Uni years. Now I'm hooked on online Billiards (which I'm playing right now and reading your blog between shots!) But there's an online Pinball?! Time to Google up a link...

[Daily Physics]

Hey, I'm Logan. I really liked this post, as I have been an intense gamer in past years. One thing I'm interested in is the relationship between technology and games ... especially how technology influences traditional (board) games. Computers have made Dungeons and Dragons style games so much easier, for example (Baldur's Gate was really fun). Another good example is being able to play Chess or Go with people from around the world whenever you want! Have you ever played Go?

Hahaha I just noticed your physics cocktails on the sidebar, nice.

[Jonathan Vos Post]

Nolan Bushnell beta-tested "Pong" and "Computer Space" (later retitled "Asteroids") at Caltech. We students owned the campus vending machine cartel -- soda, candy, hot food, pinball, and the like. The cartel was called "E. S. Nesnon" (read it backwards) and sold shares between students. I owned, at the peak, 11% of E. S. Nesnon. Today I tell my dubious students that I was once the world champion at both "Pong" and "Computer Space." Worst decision of my life: Nolan Bushnell was starting up Atari, and selling Friends & Family shares. He offered me 0.5% of Atari for $1,000.00 which I didn't have, but could have by merely selling my E. S. Nesnon. Two years later he sold Atari for $400,000,000 -- so I blew a chance to have a couple of megabucks while still a teenager. You might say something about "Spacewar" running at MIT, whose champs were Marvin Minsky's twins. My son carries on the grand tradition by being world championship of something or other he beta-tested at a gaming con, and he's been a "professional" badgeholder at San Diego Comic Con for years. Smart lad, started university at age 13 (yes, thirteen) and is halfway through his law degree at USC's law school, specializing in Intellectual property. That JD (when he's 21) will go well with his double B.S. in Math and Computer Science. I guess that he takes after his mom, my wife, a Physics professor. They're both smarter than me. But I'm not at the bottom, because I'm smarter than my dog. I can beat my dog at Chess 2 out of 3.

Thanks for the walk down the videogame nostalgia highway.

[Mobius]

I guess age plays a huge role in "liking" video games. Just like you, my parents don't like video games at all, well except again like you, Tetris or the sort.

Oh a side note, thanks for sharing the oscilloscope tennis game that really opened my eyes. o.O" Who would have thought oscilloscope would play a part in game development!

[Rohini]

I'd take the vanilla puzzle games over the strategy games any day. The oscilloscope bit is priceless.

[Warren]

Still playing pacman ;D and before I've played duke nukem and galaga. Since there's a lot of good games with high end graphics, I'm now hooked with wow game and I think it's the best game I've ever played in my life. Plus, some sites are offering freebies just like wowgoldpig.blogspot.com/ which giving me a chance to Win 500,000 World of Warcraft Gold! You may want to visit their site for more details.