Tag Archives: Stephen Kline

“Rock Stars” in Video Games

Although Kline had a lot of good observations, I think what interested me the most in the reading had to do with the parallels he drew between the video game industry and the industries of music and film, and what these parallels say about the roles of the various parties involved in video games.

In 1982, Kline tells us, Trip Hawkins modeled his company’s marketing approach after that of the music industry, by “packaging its games with album-like artwork and liner notes, and promoting its developers like rock stars in game magazines” (97).

Perhaps this is merely because I haven’t really spent much time studying the video game industry, but it seems to me that there is no clear parallel to a “rock star” in a video game, or, if there is, it is not the developer but rather a character from within the game itself. While musicians make music and Hollywood stars underlie the characters in films, the primary hero, name, and face behind Pac-Man is Pac-Man. And considering that by 1982, “revenue from the game Pac-Man alone probably exceeded the box-office success of Star Wars,” and the arcade game business grossed double the international sales of the pop music industry (103-104), I am really intrigued. A yellow circle with eyes and a mouth, existing only as an animated visual in a 2-D virtual reality, somehow made a greater impression than the combined forces of George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and a bunch of ridiculous (in a good way) special effects.

I guess what I’m really trying to get at is this: What made/makes the influence of video games, particularly in their appeal to consumers, so different from that of films and music? Is that influence centralized in a name, be it a developer or a character (like Pac-Man)? Or does the interactive nature of games, the “play” we’re so fond of discussing, cause players to view themselves as the “rock stars”? Also, where do designers (such as Warren Robinett, who created the first ‘Easter Egg’ to garner individual credit outside of the corporation) fall in our perception of video games today, and how has this perception changed from what it was 30 years ago?

The Origin of “Play”

As we have been discussing “play” and what it means for something to actually be classified as “play,” I found it very interesting that video games, according to Stephen Kline, essentially started out from military research. As these “hackers” began to experiment with video games, they turned something that in no way could be considered “play” (wars, fighting, military research, etc…) into the very essence of “play.” There seems to be nothing as serious as fighting a war, and yet, this is how “play” came to be. What if the origin of video games had come from something different entirely? So many of the first video games were “war” themed (shooter games). Would these games have developed differently if the creators of some of the first board games had learned to create video games instead?

Also – as video games really began to develop, I found it interesting how the creation of these games became so competitive so quickly. It was as if the creators knew that video games were not going to die out. Kline mentions that many people thought that the video game fad would not last, but the creators seemed to know they would grow more and more popular. As the video game creators switched companies, made their own companies, re-made games, this “fad” grew more and more until it has become what it is today. My question is, why? Why did people latch onto this craze so quickly and so readily? Why have video games held the interest of people for this long? Perhaps it really is just because we all want to play. But somehow I don’t think the answer could be that simple. Perhaps it has become imbedded in our culture, but I guess I want to know how it came to be imbedded.

The Creativity Factor

When I read this week’s reading by Stephen Kline, what struck me most was the moment of transition from Military to Hacker.  I wish he had spent more probing the circumstances that caused a military study of main-frame computers and the Programmable Data Processor-1, the purpose of which was to beat the Soviets in an arms race, to produce Spacewar (Kline 84-85).

However, though I would have loved a whole chapter about just that moment, Kline did a pretty good job describing the shift: “Hacking was a way of dealing with the tedium of long hours spent in the presence of unforgiving machines and the mind-numbing programming problems of massive main frame computers (87).”  Hacking was born from putting intelligent, creative people together and telling them to solve really, really hard problems.  They solved the problems, but they also started exploring the machines.  This is where Steven Levy’s “Hand-On Imperative” was created- taking things apart and putting them back together in new ways (87).  And as this physically led to new products like video games, it was also the birth of a Hacker Culture, and they had their own code of ethics. (http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/hacker_ethics.html)

  1. Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works – should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On imperative!
  2. All information should be free.
  3. Mistrust authority – promote decentralization.
  4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
  5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.
  6. Computers can change your life for the better.

Kline says the most famous of these is number 2- All information should be free (86).  And a paragraph later Kline says this: “It is in fact the promotion of creativity and the ‘play ethic’ that engineering designers now celebrate when they promote ‘divergent thinking’ as a means of accelerating radical innovation through creativity (87).”

We would never have gotten Spacewar if it wasn’t for that ‘play ethic’- if the problem solvers hadn’t become intensely fascinated with their work and their materials and the possibilities therein, or if they hadn’t been allowed to play.  I think this is why Levy believed that all information should be free.  Essentially, innovation, creativity, and the free flow of ideas go hand in hand in hand.  A flow of ideas will always lead to innovation, and innovation won’t be true without a flow of ideas at its root.  Suppress any of these, and the others will suffer.

We can see the negative effects of restricting creativity at the end of the article, where it describes the period of time where the game industry was in the hands of “the suits” who didn’t fully understand the creative process and pushed for a product- any product- which they then introduced into the market before it was really good. This was the singular cause of the video game crash in 1983 and 1984.  There wasn’t time for new ideas or the “play” that leads to innovation.  The market was flooded with about 200 versions of the same four games, and consumers stopped paying money for them (105).

This leads to me throw out a couple things that I’ve been wanting to discuss in class, although perhaps they’re not as relevant as I think: SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, and this whole idea of internet pirating, if it should really be illegal, and what the limiting of information sharing might lead to.