Games | Game Design | Game Studies. Gundolf S. Freyermuth
34 N. N.: “Crown Soccer Special,” The International Arcade Museum at Museum of the Game o.J.; http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=16047
35 N. N.: “EA Sports FIFA Soccer Franchise Sales Top 100 Million Units Lifetime,” Business Wire, November 4, 2010; http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101104006782/en - .VH8zdIs2JVo
36 A good example of the Industrial path from activity to passivity can be seen in the radio, which was originally developed as a medium with two-way channels (radio, after all, means a device that sends and receives radio signals) and only mutated after the First World War in the process of its popularization into a receiver. On the evolution of the broadcast medium radio from the amateur radio movement, see Campbell-Kelly, Martin/Aspray, William: Computer: A History of the Information Machine, New York: Basic Books 1996, p. 234 ff.
37 The digital as a quaternary medium has already been addressed by Fassler, Manfred: Was ist Kommunikation?, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 1997, p. 117.
38 The following game engines have been and continue to be of particular importance for the history of games: the Unreal Engine (Epic Games, since 1998), the CryEngine (Crytek, since 2004) and the Unity Engine (Unity, since 2005).
39 See for example: Friedberg, Anne: Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley: University of California Press 1993.
40 See for the term Knowledge Worker: Drucker, Peter F.: Post-Capitalist Society, New York NY: HarperBusiness 1993. And to the term Symbolic Analyst: Reich, Robert B.: The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-century Capitalism, New York: A.A. Knopf 1991.
41 Pross: Medienforschung, p. 104.
42 Turkle, Sherry: Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York: Simon & Schuster 1995, p. 22.
3 Procedural Turn (since the 1950s)
“In the historical blink of an eye, video games have colonized our minds and invaded our screens.”
SIMON EGENFELDT-NIELSEN ET AL.1
QUADRUPLICATE ORIGIN OF DIGITAL GAMES
An affinity between games and digital computers had been noted many times before Eric Zimmerman’s landmark ludic manifesto of 2013.2 Jesper Juul, for example, argued that both share several qualities, in particular transmediality and regularity: “[G]ames are not tied to a specific set of material devices, but to the processing of rules.”3 The use of computers for the execution of those rules, however, enables the creation of games that follow “rules more complex than humans can handle.”4 The very same observation—at first, merely a hope—was made at the dawn of digital games. Their origin in the mid-20th century is marked by the convergence of four different interests:
1 the scientific pursuit of artificial intelligence;
2 the military-economic desire for the simulation of real events in order to develop risk-free, affordable training, particularly in air and space travel;
3 the player’s wish for acceleration and facilitation of the complicated and lengthy processes associated with analog games, specifically so-called War Games and other strategy games;
4 the wish to use the new universal machine, the computer, in a playful manner, i.e., to create new forms of play impossible in older analog media.
The common thread among all four of these efforts was the virtualization and algorithmic automation of processes, which previously had to be managed in the real world through material processes.
The theoretical foundation of such virtualization as the basic innovation of digital technology was laid in three steps. First in 1936, Alan Touring conceived the theoretical model of a digital computer as the universal machine.5 Then in 1945, John von Neumann invented the technical model for such a universal machine, which is still valid today.6 Its novel characteristic was the categorical separation of material equipment from the control system. This separation provided the basis for what we now refer to as hardware and software, or more precisely, the software which we refer to as programs.7 The third fundamental innovation occurred in 1948, when Claude Elwood Shannon proposed a method to digitize all communicative processes and artifacts of civilization: the adequate transfer of analog qualities and functions into mathematical values.8 Thereby he provided the universal machine with its universal bit-material: texts, sounds, pictures, etc.; the software which we call files.
DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
The technical realization of these concepts proceeded in two phases early in the digitalization process. By the middle of the 1950s, ca. 500 digital mainframe-computers had been built worldwide. They used cathode rays, required large teams for their maintenance and operation, and, with the exception of a few experimental situations, they lacked any sort of interactive in- and output capabilities, such as keyboards or screens. With the advent of microcomputers at the end of the 1950s—the result of transistors and, by the 1960s, of semiconductors as well—, the second phase began, during which procedures for digital sound and image production developed in the fields of telephony, television, and air and space travel. At the same time the first theoretical as well as practical resistance against the industrial-collaborative use of computing power arose. In 1960, J.C.R. Licklider proposed the concept of interactive use of digital computers under the buzzword “man-computer-symbiosis.”9
One year later, at a time when approximately 9,000 computers were running worldwide, about 1,000 of which were mid-sized computers used by individuals,10 MIT students set the standard for ‘rebel computing’ when they programmed the game SPACEWAR! With their deliberate ‘waste’ of expensive processing power, these students replaced work-ethic with play-ethic.11 Thus, the economic efficiency principal of collective organization was displaced by the luxurious pleasure principle of the individual.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
SPACEWAR! was, however, by no means the first digital game. Already in the 1940s the thought had circulated in leading-edge research, originating from Alan Turing’s and Claude Elwood Shannon’s deliberations that computer games in general, but specifically digital versions of CHESS, could eventually demonstrate an attempt