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Overview
The growth in popularity and complexity of video games has spurred new interest in how games are developed and in the research and technology behind them. David Heineman brings together some of the most iconic, influential, and interesting voices from across the gaming industry and asks them to weigh in on the past, present, and future of video games. Among them are legendary game designers Nolan Bushnell (Pong) and Eugene Jarvis (Defender), who talk about their history of innovations from the earliest days of the video game industry through to the present; contemporary trailblazers Kellee Santiago (Journey) and Casey Hudson (Mass Effect), who discuss contemporary relationships between those who create games and those who play them; and scholars Ian Bogost (How to Do Things With Videogames) and Edward Castronova (Exodus to the Virtual World), who discuss how to research and write about games in ways that engage a range of audiences. These experts and others offer fascinating perspectives on video games, game studies, gaming culture, and the game industry more broadly.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253017185 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/03/2015 |
| Series: | Digital Game Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
David S. Heineman is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.
Read an Excerpt
Thinking about Video Games
Interviews with the Experts
By David S. Heineman
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 David S. HeinemanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01718-5
CHAPTER 1
Nolan Bushnell
LEARNING FROM THE PAST
NOLAN BUSHNELL IS THE PERSON MOST OFTEN ASSOCIATED with the origins of video games as a commercial enterprise. His list of "firsts" in the industry reads like an outline for the study of early gaming history: he created both the first commercial arcade game (Computer Space) and the first commercially successful one (Pong); he was a founding partner of the first wildly successful video game company, Atari; and he was instrumental in developing and curating content for arcades in both its "golden age" and in its "Chuck E. Cheese era," named for the gaming-themed chain of family restaurants that he created. Though video games' earliest beginnings would predate the launch of Atari by almost thirty years, their migration out of university computer laboratories and student unions coincided with Bushnell's emergence as a shrewd evangelist of their potential to capture both a wider audience's attention and, importantly, their coins.
Bushnell's enthusiasm for games started early. He was one of the fortunate few who had the opportunity to play Spacewar! on the PDP-1 with the game's creator, Steve Russell, an experience that Bushnell recalls as "mesmerizing." "I spent every minute I could in that computer lab" (Bushnell in Melissinos and O'Rourke 24). He has been a longtime advocate of games that are centered on repayable, challenging mechanics over those that feature bloat, spectacle, and easy titillation. His influential perspective on game design was succinctly explained in 1971: "All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth." Recently, he has suggested that his "great hope" for such game design principles "is that video game methodology has an ability to communicate with young minds in an amazing way" (Bushnell in Melissinos and O'Rourke 25).
In the twenty-first century, Nolan Bushnell is in a unique position of being able to weigh in on how game history has been preserved, presented, and framed by those who write about it despite, in more and more cases, not having lived it directly. In addition, he is well suited to reflect on what elements of that history are especially important to carry forward into new game designs, game industry decisions, and, with his current focus, educational endeavors that involve games.
Given that Bushnell has spoken and written at length about his own time in the industry, this interview forgoes a recapitulation of that past and instead begins with his insights on the way that this history has been told and, specifically, his understanding of what has been underappreciated and underemphasized. The interview also includes Bushnell's thoughts on links between classic game design principles and human learning, links that he has emphasized in his own work to create games for lifelong education. He also shares his thoughts on game studies and on retrogaming fan culture.
* * *
HEINEMAN: You've commented previously about whether or not people have done a good job of thinking about and writing about video game history, and you've mentioned that journalists and historians often focus too much on individual programmers at the expense of teams or at the expense of projects. What are your thoughts on the status of recording game history as you're familiar with it?
BUSHNELL: Well, I think that the general flow of what's been recorded is pretty accurate. There's nuances that I disagree with, but nothing really big. I believe one of the areas that is often overlooked is how creativity is a driving force in game development and that, much like any entertainment media, it thrives on "different," and that the ability to provide "different" and to create games that are new and somewhat revolutionary has been part of the legacy of the game business. We've gotten some of the most creative people in the world as a result thereof.
The other issue is that with games, because of their tremendous use of graphics and real-time computations, we've actually forced an awful lot of growth in computation, graphics processing, and other things that have been very beneficial to other industries. We're really driven by the economics of the game business, so now, if you can see molecules and DNA and things like that, an awful lot of that computer power and algorithms were actually created by the game business. That emphasis has not been brought out [in gaming histories].
HEINEMAN: One way to think about the history of the game industry and how it's been successful economically is by tracing the ways in which it has responded to shifts in spatiality, both in terms of designed game space and in adapting to the spaces where we game (e.g., the arcade, the living room, mobile devices). From your perspective, is the understanding of space something that has driven success?
BUSHNELL: I think so. One of the things that I'm very fascinated with right now is augmented reality. There was artificial reality, which made everybody seasick, and fifteen years ago everybody thought that was going to be the big thing. But, unfortunately, if you make your customers sick, it tends to have limited commercial appeal. It turns out that there's some interesting things with that. Everyone thought that [the limited appeal] was because of lag time and lack of computing power. But the problems haven't gotten much better though some of those technical obstacles have been solved. There's some real interesting things going on in the brain that I don't think we totally understand in terms of that artificial reality push. Augmented reality, of course, really means that you can now start to have game dynamics in a physical space in which you essentially view the world through the porthole of your cell phone, but it's matrixed over a square, or a mall, or a physical location, and I think that's very interesting.
HEINEMAN: There have been attempts to characterize gaming history as an evolution in a medium (for example, as an "art form"). Given your previous answer about the history of games as one of technical innovation, do you think that these classifications (e.g., "art," "entertainment," "technology") are useful in informing our cultural understanding of games? Is there a danger in trying to look at them through the lens of another industry or another discipline?
BUSHNELL: No, it's always important to focus on the interstices or the links. I mean, clearly, game development is an art form. No matter what people say, it is.
Some wonderful music has been created. I don't know if you've ever been to a Video Game Live concert, but they're fantastic. They have full symphony orchestras and choirs that were used to create the soundtracks for video games. To bring it alive in a cultural, orchestral setting is really cool. The Smithsonian exhibit was wonderfully done. Clearly, there's some great art that's been created there.
HEINEMAN: Has your interest in augmented reality manifested itself in a particular project?
BUSHNELL: I'm not working personally on it, but my son is, and he's got a couple of interesting projects that are in that area. I'm right now primarily focusing on the gamification of learning. How do we use some of the brain science that we have used in making games viral and addictive in some ways to allow people to learn faster and have more fun? In some ways, every minute of boredom in a school robs a student of a certain amount of enthusiasm and curiosity, and I believe that we can, through game dynamics, bring academic subjects alive in a very interesting way.
HEINEMAN: What sparked your interest in that?
BUSHNELL: I have eight children, and it's very hard to have children without bumping up against the education establishment and seeing the fact that it's no longer doing a good job.
HEINEMAN: How do you approach design of a game differently when the intent is to use it in an educational setting, as opposed to one made strictly for fun or for commercial purposes?
BUSHNELL: There is some interesting research that was (pretty much) pioneered by a guy named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the concept of flow, and I would recommend you see his TED talk or read his book. The concept is quite simple. It's what we call the "Goldilocks Point," and that is you want a game to be hard enough to be difficult but easy enough that you can succeed, and that by staying right in the middle of those two constructs – not too hard, not too easy, but just right – you put yourself into a state of flow, which is sort of an ultimate happiness. You can do that with educational projects, and, when you do that, all of a sudden the learning becomes stickier. A student can be working on a project for a couple of hours and not blink, whereas most students tune out after fifteen minutes of lecture. We have some games right now that are accomplishing an awful lot of that.
HEINEMAN: Can you point to an example or two of a game that you see as exemplary of what you'd like to see in educational contexts?
BUSHNELL: Go into any of the anti-aging games on our site. If you go into Wordplay, which is our test alpha project for teaching Spanish vocabulary, you'll see that these are very simple games, but they're engaging, and they force the student to be an active learner as opposed to a passive recipient, and that is a big difference.
HEINEMAN: Is the application of these design principles any different for creating an educational game versus creating a game that doesn't have an educational purpose?
BUSHNELL: No, they are the same.
HEINEMAN: Do you see games having utility in a classroom from preschool all the way through to something like a doctoral degree, or is there a particular point at which one finds diminishing returns when using games in education?
BUSHNELL: Oh, I think that it's pre-K to post-gray. I used Putt-Putt and some of the Humongous Entertainment games with my kids, who sort of grew up with those things. I believe that in many ways it was extremely neurogenic.
HEINEMAN: Are you familiar with Neil Postman's work at all? He wrote a lot about television and its impact on the education system. Have you read any of his work?
BUSHNELL: I have not.
HEINEMAN: He was a student of Marshall McLuhan, if you're familiar with McLuhan, and his work.
BUSHNELL: Right.
HEINEMAN: He argued that television, when it was introduced in the classroom in the form of educational videos, was doing more to harm education by packaging education as entertainment, whereas, beforehand, education wasn't seen as something where kids were meant to necessarily enjoy it. They were meant to learn, benefit from it, and gain things from it.
BUSHNELL: I violently disagree with that.
HEINEMAN: Do you think there is any risk in packaging education as play, if that's what games do? Is there a point at which students aren't able to make a distinction between the two?
BUSHNELL: I believe that the principle is incorrect. The ideal life is one in which you can't tell the difference between work and play, and that's what I've always tried to focus on. It turns out that if you're playing and you're enjoying something, the only people who think that's a bad idea are the latent Calvinists who believe that without pain, there's no gain. I think that's absolute bullshit, and that a proper education should be fantastic, engaging, and highly enjoyable. Can you build a trashy game and put a label on it that says this is education? Of course you can, but our stuff is teaching ten times faster in the classroom, and kids are enjoying it, so I think that's a win-win.
HEINEMAN: What's the distinction between a "trashy game" that clearly is play and might "parade" as education without providing students with useful learning and something like what you're doing, which is still a game, still play, but does have educational value? What is the difference there? How do you tell?
BUSHNELL: Outcomes. Are you learning something? Is it demonstrable? I'm an engineer, and if you can't measure outcomes, then don't do it. If you're measuring outcomes, it's very easy to tell whether your stuff is working well or whether it's trash. So, the determination of success or failure is outcomes.
HEINEMAN: Expanding on this idea of play a little bit, you've spoken in the past about an element of fun being necessary in order for the game to be worthwhile. You and other well-known designers have also lamented that in the last ten or fifteen years, there seems to be a decrease of "pure fun" in the most mainstream, critically acclaimed, and biggest-selling games.
BUSHNELL: What I believe happens is there's an awful lot of games that are highly repetitive, and I think that repetitiveness in a game context can be okay, but it's not neurogenic and what you really want. The core principle of neurogenesis is different, and I think that by introducing more diversity of your game style and game play, you're actually treating your brain better and giving it a better opportunity to grow. I'm not sure if that's quite answering your question properly, but what I don't like is some of what I call negative social messages that happen in some of the games. I dislike that.
HEINEMAN: Meaning messages about violence or those kinds of things?
BUSHNELL: Yeah, I think Grand Theft Auto is a trashy game, and I don't see a lot of social benefit to taking on the role of a mugger and a car thief and a woman beater.
HEINEMAN: Well, then, how do you quantify "fun"? Many people enjoy those games, and they find them to be fun. So even if you believe they are sending negative messages, is there a way to hook that same population of players on games that are teaching them or making them do more productive things?
BUSHNELL: Well, I think that there's Fifty Shades of Grey and there's Hemingway, and are we going to be able to excise prurient interest out of a population? I don't think so. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't always try to illuminate positive aspects and create games that have substance and learning, and some people are going to enjoy them and some people aren't.
HEINEMAN: To what extent do you think the possibilities of games in education are due to the fact that gaming has now been a major industry for forty or fifty years? People who are teaching now grew up playing games that you were designing in the '70s or '80s. Do you think that it's a generational thing? Why do you think now is a good time to start seeing increased gaming in the classroom?
BUSHNELL: Mankind has always been in a contest for "How do we capture imagination?" and the answer is competition. If you have a world full of high-production-value video experiences, whether they be commercials or television or movies or games, and compare those to a teacher with a piece of chalk and blackboard, they're outgunned in a real way. People expect information to be coming at them at a very, very high rate of speed, and their brains have actually been modified to expect that kind of experience, and so the schools became increasingly antiquated.
When I was going to elementary school, school was the most interesting thing happening in town. The alternative was watching the river flow and the corn grow. That's not what our kids are involved in today. I mean, we didn't have a television set until I was in the fifth grade. So, really, we cannot view the golden age of schools in the '30s, '40s, and '50s as being anything that's useful today. It's just wrong. It's different, it's inappropriate, and all of these things have trained brains to actually be smarter and to be able to take data faster, and for us to not give data faster creates boredom and tune-outs.
HEINEMAN: Fans of games have created communities, conventions, and other activities around contemporary gaming but, increasingly, also around classic gaming. What is your thought on the ways in which that has grown over the past ten or fifteen years, especially the retrogaming scene?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thinking about Video Games by David S. Heineman. Copyright © 2015 David S. Heineman. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Section 1: Games and History
Introduction to Section 1
1. Nolan Bushnell: Learning from the Past
2. Chris Melissinos: Art and Video Games
3. Eugene Jarvis: Games and Design
4. Henry Lowood: Archiving and Games
Section 2: Games and Economy
Introduction to Section 2
5. Ed Fries: The Economics and Politics of a Launch
6. Kellee Santiago: Independent Game Development
7. Chris Grant: Games and Press
8. Edward Castronova: Games, Economics, and Policies
Section 3: Games and Culture
Introduction to Section 3
9. Jamie Dillion: Gamers, Community, and Charity
10. Casey Hudson: Games and Emotion
11. Ian Bogost: Anxieties, Procedures, and Game Studies
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Participants
Index
What People are Saying About This
"A collection of interviews with a who's who of video game authorities crackling with insight into the medium's past, present, and future...what a great book! David S. Heineman's conversations reveal the many dimensions of games as technology, industry, and popular art. This is sure to be essential reading to a wide audience of players, makers, and critics of one of our century's most defining forms of cultural expression. "
A collection of interviews with a who's who of video game authorities crackling with insight into the medium's past, present, and future...what a great book! David S. Heineman's conversations reveal the many dimensions of games as technology, industry, and popular art. This is sure to be essential reading to a wide audience of players, makers, and critics of one of our century's most defining forms of cultural expression.
A collection of interviews with a who's who of video game authorities crackling with insight into the medium's past, present, and future...what a great book! David S. Heineman's conversations reveal the many dimensions of games as technology, industry, and popular art. This is sure to be essential reading to a wide audience of players, makers, and critics of one of our century's most defining forms of cultural expression.