—Erika Anderson for Guernica
Guernica: How would you describe the evolution of video games?
Clive Thompson: When games started out, they were very, very simple affairs, and that was partly just technical—you couldn’t do very much. They had like 4K of memory. And so the games started off really not needing instructions at all. The first Pong game had one instruction. It was, “Avoid missing ball for high score.” So it was literally just that: don’t fail to hit the ball. I remember when I read it, it was actually a confusing construction: avoid missing ball for high score. It’s weirdly phrased, as if it were being translated from Swedish or something, you know? But they didn’t know what they were doing.
But what started happening very early on was that if you were in the arcades as I was—I’m 44 in October, so I was right at that age when these games were coming out—the games were really quite hard in a way, and because they were taking a quarter from you, their goal was to have you stop playing quickly because they need more money. They ramped up in difficulty very quickly, like the next wave is harder, and the third wave is unbelievably harder. And so you had to learn how to play them by trial and error with yourself but you only had so much money. And so what you started doing was you started observing other people and you started talking to all the other people. What you saw when you went to a game was one person playing and a semi-circle of people around them and they were all talking about what was going on, to try to figure out how to play the game. And they would learn all sorts of interesting strategy.
So the early stuff was literally strategy, and they discovered some very clever things, like in Asteroids, there was this strategy called lurking, whereby if you parked, if you got rid of almost all the asteroids except for one little one that would be sort of soaring through the air, you could hide in the corner of the screen and it would take a long time for it to come anywhere close to hitting. You could use this strategy to hunt for hours. You would sit there for hours getting more and more points.
So there are all these little strategies like that. But there was also like weird little bugs inside the game that weren’t intentionally put there, that people would discover. Like there were certain situations when you were being chased by the red ghosts of Pac-Man, certain places on the board where you could suddenly go racing right through the ghost without being hit. That was not intentional, that’s just a bug, and there are little bugs like that. And these are incredibly difficult things to notice, I mean the designers didn’t notice them. But if you have tens of thousands of kids in these arcades talking and observing and sharing notes, it’s a little bit like a scientific process whereby everyone notices one little fact and you slowly compile them into a theory of gravity or a theory of how cell biology works.
What started happening is that the game designers began to intentionally put secrets inside the games. The first one was Adventure, it was a game on the Atari 2600, and back then you didn’t know who had made the game, there were no credits anywhere. The designers would be hired for six months to produce a game and they were dispatched and it was this freelance economy, and they didn’t like not having any credit, so this guy decided to hide the credits inside the game. And he made a secret room inside Adventure and the only way to find it if you’re like stumbling around, trying to find something and get out without getting killed by these dragons, there’s a single pixel on one room—you might not even notice it, right?—but if you picked it up, you could go through a wall—an unmarked area in a wall—and get to this room, and inside the room it would have his name spelled out. It was incredible. There were no clues at all, but somehow kids started finding this. Someone would blunder through the wall, and they’d tell someone else and it just went through the grapevine and that’s the first example of an intentional secret put inside a game that was discovered by this sort of groupthink process that kids all playing and talking in school about what’s going on.
And that was sort of the beginning of what became an arms race, because essentially, as more kids started talking to each other and sharing information, any secrets inside the game would get discovered very quickly. And so the game designers started responding by putting more stuff inside the game that was harder to find, because they knew that kids were not just playing the game by themselves but playing it collectively, and so they weren’t just designing a game for one player, but for a 100 or 1,000 networked players, and a 100 or 1,000 people talking to each other is much smarter than one person individually.
by Clive Thompson, Guernica | Read more:
Image from Flickr via billmcclair
