Читать книгу Games | Game Design | Game Studies - Gundolf S. Freyermuth - Страница 10
Оглавление3 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 at artificial intelligence through competition with human players. Shannon wrote in 1950:
“Although perhaps of no practical importance, the question [of computer Chess] is of theoretical interest, and it is hoped that a satisfactory solution of this problem will act as a wedge in attacking other problems of a similar nature and of greater significance.”12
However, with its high potential of possible moves, CHESS proved to be too complicated at first for algorithmic representation, which requires decontextualizing abstraction. The matchstick game NIM was easier to algorithmatize; this process was made possible through a specially constructed computer, Nimrod.13 Its programmer, John Bennett, like Shannon, connected his digital game with greater hopes:
“It may appear that, in trying to make machines play games, we are wasting our time. This is not true as the theory of games is extremely complex and a machine that can play a complex game can also be programmed to carry out very complex practical problems.“14
Then in 1952, A.S. Douglas programmed NOUGHTS AND CROSSES, a digital version of TIC TAC TOE, as part of his doctoral thesis. In the same year IBM presented the first digital game of CHESS. By 1955 the program was so advanced that it learned from its own mistakes. In the 1960s chess programs started to win against amateurs. However, it would take another two decades until finally, in 1997, IBM’s Big Blue beat reigning world champion Garry Kasparow.
FLIGHT SIMULATION
The second area of research that led to digital games concerned military and civilian flight simulators, which were developed at great cost for training purposes. Analog simulators with limited capabilities existed since the First World War. Their digitalization began in the last months of World War II, when the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT received the contract to develop a “universal flight trainer,” a real-time flight simulator that, unlike previous ones, could simulate more than just a single, predetermined airplane model.15 Project Whirlwind was planned as a two-year endeavor. However, this first attempt at the construction of a—first analog, then digitally conceived—computer designated for real-time control of simulations ultimately failed. Only in the 1960s did regular mainframe and microcomputers become powerful enough for such an undertaking.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was the driving force behind this development. Flight training through simulation promised to provide long-term savings in exchange for large short-term investments. However, in the case of the planned moon mission, the only possibility for training was through realistic simulation.16 Already in 1967, General Electric delivered the first electronic real-time 3D simulator to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. David Evans, together with computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland, constructed another digital prototype in 1968. Their combination of optimized hard- and innovative software calculated new images from digital recordings of real scenes, which could change their perspectives to match the actions of the pilot or astronaut. With the virtual perspectival modeling of 3D images, the basic defining innovation of digital games had been realized.
The first commercial flight simulator, which generated markedly abstract virtual images in real-time, became available in 1971. During this time, after Intel had introduced the microprocessor in 1970, the social and technical construction of the personal computer began in the West Coast hacker-scene in the US. Two types of programs proved to be the most successful because they satisfied needs that were suppressed in the regulated-usage of the expensive mainframes found at universities, in management, and at large companies: the need for personal productivity and creativity as well as for entertainment. Among commercial software products, computer games earned the highest number of sales at the end of the 1970s. They were played both on hobbyist PCs and on consoles equipped with microprocessors. Thus digital games (and among them notably flight simulators) served as a ‘gateway drug’ for a new generation of computer enthusiasts.17
The first flight simulators for personal computers like the Apple II and the Tandy TRS-80 were released at the end of the 1970s. In 1981 one of the most popular Apple programs was FLIGHT SIMULATION by a company called SubLogic, which was later acquired by Microsoft. In 2001, MS FLIGHT SIMULATOR secured a place in the Guinness Book of Records for earning 21 million sales.18 During this time other successful digital simulations were created—most notably Will Wright’s SIM CITY (1989) and Peter Molyneux’s POPULOUS (1989), both of which generated complex situations and behavior patterns from relatively simple rules and thereby offered experiences of open play.
VIRTUALIZATION OF ANALOG GAMES
Playable simulations, both old and new, function through the virtualization and algorithmic automation of real-world processes and procedures. The digitalization of analog games occurred in the same way. In the beginning it affected board and sports games equally. Unlike the virtualizations programmed in the area of AI-research and under the auspices of academic insight, the motivation behind this third group of early digital games was focused on improving playability and the fun factor. Trailblazers of this movement were war games of the classical Prussian tradition and other types of strategy games. While the analog versions of these games demanded time-consuming calculations, sometimes requiring the aid of a sliding rule, desk or hand calculator, the digital versions drastically accelerated gameplay through the use of computers; in principle, they enabled real time play.
In the fifties and sixties such digitalization was largely restricted to military training due to the high cost of digital technology. With the rise of the affordable personal computer, however, digital adaptations of analog games became one of the most successful areas of game production. A deciding factor of their success can be attributed to the performance enhancement enabled by virtualization and algorithmization. This boost motivated, for example, Chris Crawford already in 1977 to realize TANKTICS, a digital war game programmed on his university’s IBM mainframe: “I was playing board war games and I was acutely aware of the absence of the fog of war, which I consider to be crucial to simulation of warfare […] I considered that computers could solve the problem. I don’t think people fully appreciated just how big a leap this was.”19 The first commercial war games for PCs came out in the eighties, mostly as adaptations of board war games.20
Similarly around 1960 academic research began to strive for the algorithmization of sports games. Already in 1958 TENNIS FOR TWO, played on the screen of an oscilloscope, was created through the use of an analog computer at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Over a decade later, when the first digital game console became available for purchase, it included a table tennis game. Atari-founder Nolan Bushnell played a prototype of this console and then had a similar game programmed. With PONG in 1972, Bushnell brought the first digital game to the arcades and, three years later with the Atari console, into the living room as well. And thus began a long tradition of digital sports games as home entertainment. Today there is hardly a sport in existence, which does not have its virtual equivalent. In particular, licensed league games such as FIFA or MADDEN NFL comprise one of the most popular and lucrative game genres.
So it is true for the majority of digital games then, as Frans Mäyrä writes, that they are “in fact remediated, or ‘disguised’ versions of non-digital ones,”21 i.e., they remediate “activities or forms of representation that have originally appeared elsewhere.”22
PLAYFUL USE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
A rare exception from the 1960s is SPACEWAR! Instead of looking to board games or sports, SPACEWAR! designer and programmer Steve Russell was inspired by science fiction novels and movies, but especially by Edward Elmer Smith’s “Lensman” series.23 In its rudimentarily narrative orientation, SPACEWAR! thereby pointed to the hyper-epic future of the new medium, and in its graphical form it indicated a hyperrealistic future: The advanced vector-graphic monitor showed, on top of the mostly astronomically accurate night sky, two spaceships that shot torpedoes at each other and evaded each other per hyperspace jump, while taking care not to fall into deadly gravitational fields.
The game, programmed by MIT students in the sixties, spread throughout the computer labs of American universities. Computer manufacturer DEC finally included it with all $120,000 PDP-1 systems because it served to effectively demonstrate the machine’s capabilities. The future founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, was among the thousands of Computer Science students who were deeply influenced by SPACEWAR! In 1971, he produced COMPUTER SPACE, an arcade adaptation of SPACEWAR! and thereby initiated the transition from mechanical-electrical to digital arcade games. A further adaptation for the digital home console Atari 2600 followed in 1978 under the title SPACE WAR.
PROCEDURALITY
In the early stages of the digitalization of games, a categorical turn toward procedurality manifested itself among the virtual adaptations of board and sports games as well as simulations and other ludic creations. At the end of the 1990s, Janet H. Murray recognized procedurality as a special quality of digital narrations, which she called “cyberdrama”: “The most important element the new medium adds to our repertoire of representational powers is its procedural nature, its ability to capture experience as systems of interrelated actions.”24 Ian Bogost later introduced procedurality into Game Studies as a term describing the medial affordance for the construction of dynamic models of real-world processes: “This ability to execute a series of rules fundamentally separates computers from other media.”25 Digital games use procedurality as their “core representational model.”26 They possess then, in contradistinction to both their analog predecessors and to linear audiovisual media, a new systemic modus of representation. Because of their medial characteristics they do not simply—as is the case with literature—describe systems, or merely—as is the case with visual arts and photography, theater, film, television—represent them visually or audiovisually. Rather digital games are able to simulate how systems function and thereby they enable players to experience these systems.
Until now, the procedurality of digital games has primarily resulted from individual design and human programming. It is, so to speak, produced by heads and hands, through knowledge-work and manual labor. Only recently have attempts been made to automate these processes, i.e., to procedurally generate procedurality; for example, in the production of central elements of game worlds like the galaxies of ELITE: DANGEROUS (2014), the planets of NO MAN’S SKY (2015, in development) and STAR CITIZEN (2015, in development) or even procedurally-generated quests like in the MMO EVERQUEST NEXT (2015, in development).27
Such automation seems to be the telos of procedural narration. From simple rules, algorithms allow for the creation and manipulation of complex game situations in real time; a feat which could never be matched by human calculation and deduction. This could lead to emergent and truly surprising storylines, both unplanned and unanticipated in nature; an imminent narratological phenomenon far beyond what is possible in analog games, and of course linear audiovisions as well.28
When one looks at early digital games—even the truly innovative SPACEWAR!—it seems hardly imaginable that, only a few decades later, their descendants would challenge cinema and television. This competition arose from two more qualitative developmental advancements that would radically change the digital medium once again.
1 Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games, loc. 213.—My portrayal of the history of digital games is based on Donovan, Tristan: Replay; Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games; Kent, Steve L.: The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond: The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, Roseville, Calif.: Prima Pub. 2001; Mäyrä: An Introduction to Game Studies; Wolf, Mark J. P.: The Medium of the Video Game, Austin: University of Texas Press 2002.
3 Juul: Half-Real, loc. 575.
4 Ibid., loc. 580.
5 Turing, Alan: “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, ser. 2. vol. 42 (1936-7). http://www.abelard.org/turpap2/tp2-ie.asp
6 Neumann, John von: “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” (1945). http://www.virtualtravelog.net/wp/wp-content/media/2003-08-TheFirstDraft.pdf
7 The term ‘software’ itself was coined 13 years later. See Leonhardt, David: “John Tukey, 85, Statistician; Coined the Word ‘Software’,” The New York Times, July 28, 2000; http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/28/us/john-tukey-85-statistician-coined-the-word-software.html
8 Shannon, Claude Elwood: “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” The Bell System Technical Journal Vol. 27, July / October (1948), republished with corrections from The Bell System Technical Journal; http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html.—Even the basic technical invention of digitalization, Bill Shockley’s transistor, dates to 1948. With it began the steady process of performance optimization, miniaturization, and reduction in price, which transformed the computer from large-scale technology—still part of Industrialization—to a private machine for the first time. In this way, the computer developed into a means for individual empowerment.
9 Licklider, J. C. R.: “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1 (1960); http://www.memex.org/licklider.pdf
10 See Friedewald, Michael: Der Computer als Werkzeug und Medium: Die geistigen und technischen Wurzeln des Personal Computers, Berlin: GNT-Verlag 1999, p. 16. Also Carlson, David E., “David Carlson's Online Timeline [Carlson's New Media Timeline] (1960 to present). Interactive Media Lab., University of Florida,” (since 1998).
11 See Stone, Allucquere Rosanne.: The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1995, p. 13f.
12 Cited from Donovan: Replay, loc. 112.
13 The 1951 presented Nimrod-Computer defeated headline-grabbing German Secretary of Commerce, and later Federal Chancellor, Ludwig Erhard.
14 Cited from Donovan: Replay, loc. 136.
15 See Campbell-Kelly et al.: Computer, p. 157ff.
16 See Rolfe, J. M./Staples, K. J.: Flight Simulation, Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press 1986, p. 234.: “The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions were supported by a wide variety of training simulators.”
17 See Campbell-Kelly/Aspray: Computer, p. 249.
18 Guinness Buch der Rekorde, Hamburg: Guinness Verlag GmbH 2001, p. 113. Sales figures from the year 1999 were used.
19 Cited from Donovan: Replay, loc. 1372.—With EASTERN FRONT 1941 (1981) Chris Crawford later wrote Atari’s first War Game, whose conflicts played out in real time.
20 See Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games, loc. 1812. This has to do with Ralph Baer’s conceptualization of the Magnovox Odyssee.
21 Mäyrä: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 811.
22 Ibid., loc. 539.
23 Smith, E. E.: First Lensman, Reading, Pa.: Fantasy Press 1950; Gray Lensman, Reading, Pa.,: Fantasy Press 1951; Second Stage Lensmen, Reading, Pa.,: Fantasy Press 1953; Children of the Lens, Reading, Pa.,: Fantasy Press 1954.—These novels were originally published in installments between 1934 and 1948.
24 Murray, Janet Horowitz: Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, New York: Free Press 1997, p. 274.
25 Bogost, Ian: Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Cambridge, MA: MIT (Kindle edition) Press 2007, loc. 125.—Bogost himself points out that Janet H. Murray, already in 1996, recognized procedurality as a central characteristic of the digital transmedium, from which its special storytelling capabilities result. See ibid., loc. 119.
26 Ibid., loc. 36.
27 See Lauro, Christina: “MMO Mechanics: Procedural Generation is the Future,” in: Massively by joystiq, February 26, 2014; http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/02/26/mmo-mechanics-procedural-generation-is-the-future/
28 See “Emergent gameplay is usually taken to be situations where a game is played in a way that the game designer did not predict.” (Juul: Half-Real, loc. 837)
