Only a Game

Multiplayer

Gauntlet changed the arcade forever, and the moral implications of this shift has both positive and negative implications. From the early forays into co-operative play brought about by player two, the arcade began to discover a whole new realm of play: multiplayer. It meant more money for arcade operators – and indeed, was designed for that very purpose. But it also meant greater emphasis on co-operation, and most of the great commercial successes in the waning years of the arcade's heyday were four player co-op like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons.

It was not the first four player cabinet – Atari had a four player version of Warlords in 1980, for instance – but it was the first game to have co-operation baked into the design. Inspired by Dungeons & Dragons (via John Palevich's Dandy, which had been distributed on the Atari Program Exchange), the game was designed exclusively for players to work together. Yet a lingering competitiveness remained: there was not enough food to keep four players going (after all, for the coins to flow, players must die) so even in a game expressly designed for players to work together, a tension remained.

As such, the moral effects of multiplayer were a distorted Prisoner's Dilemma where no matter how much players wanted to work together, there was always an ever-present temptation to defect. Yet this clouds the core behavioural effect of Gauntlet, one shared by Sega's novel spin on it, Quartet: it made players actively want to play together like nothing before. If pinball always felt co-operative to me, multiplayer co-op removed the metaphor. We sought out new friends to join us in the game – nothing else broke the introverted ice of the early arcade quite as effectively, or as extensively. If there was a commercial motive behind this from the point of view of Atari and the arcade, it did not change the positive impact it had in the lives of those who came together because of its.

Yet even the commercial aspect of Gauntlet's success is arguably more laudable in the context of the arcade multiplayer than online multiplayer today. For Atari's Gauntlet kept alive multiple small businesses (the arcades themselves), providing shared spaces for players to meet and engage socially. Whatever might be said of League of Legends and its ilk today, they are not a socially co-operative endeavour that shares wealth with tens of thousands of local partners, and creates new spaces for play and friendship, but merely a digital funnel leading to yet another giant corporate maw...

A Hundred Cyborgs, #60, the final part of a ten part mini-serial on Arcade Cyborgs.

Player Two

What happens when you add a second player to a game? For most of the twentieth century, arcade games were single player experiences. Yet they still offered, for almost all of that time, the choice to add a second player. The idea that player two would co-operate was not an option in pinball games, and I know of no electro-mechanical coin ops that supported it. Right up until 1980, the purpose of player two was to compete with player one, and if a game supported more than two players it was only to increase the number of competitors.

When co-operative play arrived, it did so against the background of competition. Wizard of Wor in 1980 was a shooting dungeon bash that allowed two simultaneous players, while Williams' astonishing Joust in 1982 was a wild game about knights flying on birds and defeating each other by having the highest lance in the collision. Both allowed players the option to work together while still permitting them to turn on each other and do battle if they so desired. The schizophrenia of this situation was acutely felt by Joust players, who were awarded bonus points for not killing each other in Survival Waves, and points for slaying player two in Gladiator waves. But this was nonsense: I know of no player who enjoyed Joust competitively, nor were the rewards for defection large enough to offset the benefits of continued co-operation.

Joust was, in effect, a failed Prisoner's Dilemma. In the famous thought experiment, the benefits of co-operation are less than defecting, but only if the other person does not also defect. If everyone turns traitor, nobody gets anything. In Joust, the benefits of co-operation outstripped those of defection in all circumstances. What's more, Joust is a better model of co-operation in life than the Prisoner's Dilemma, which is inherently contrived. The lesson of billions year of biology, as Lynn Margulis always stressed, was that co-operation is a more powerful force than competition: a purely competitive world would have resulted solely in specialised bacteria. It was co-operation that brought cells together to make multi-cellular colonies like us – and it was only on a bedrock of such widespread cooperation that competition of the kind player two embodied prior to 1980 could even become intelligible. After all, it is our metaphors that project human competitiveness onto bacteria.

Joust is one of my favourite games of all time. I love it in single player, but in two player it became something even greater: an object lesson in the benefits of working together. Yes, that co-operation is framed in terms of violent competition – you must defeat the enemy knights – and that is true of the vast majority of videogames. But how often do we become cyborgs that are reminded of the value of working together? Every game that achieves this moves far beyond the simple cutthroat rhetoric of player two.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #59, part of a ten part mini-serial on Arcade Cyborgs.

Underground Gamers

Over on ihobo today, I wrote something about gamers. I know, I know, the word now makes some people cringe, but I'm not one of them. I never think the way to deal with a community problem is to pretend that the community doesn't exist any more or (worse) that is shouldn't exist any more. I really don't know why anyone could ever think this would work, and communities - all communities - are something too valuable to trash indiscriminately.

What I'm interested in exploring in this piece is the relationship between those gamers who are committed to the AAA industry, and those that are just as interested (or more interested) in the oddities on the fringes. Here's an extract:

The players of the underground are free range gamers – they won't be stuck in AAA cages, they have to wander through the entire landscape of games, searching for interesting, novel, unusual, and undiscovered oddities. Without them, we'd all miss out on so many of the fascinating curiosities that are hidden away in a market now so impossibly varied in its niches that nobody will ever again be able to claim to have played everything.

The piece ends with an offer to share anything interesting written on obscure games. I doubt anyone will take this up, but the offer is there! You can read the entirety of Underground Gamers over at ihobo.com.

Game Over

Is there anything that says videogame more than the immortal phrase 'Game Over'? Odd, then, that some early video games did not include it – the 1979 Tail Gunner cabinet, for instance, simply returned to the title screen when you let too many enemy ships get past. The phrase originated in 1950s and 60s pinball tables, which lit up the words with a lightbulb inside the cabinet to confirm that no more balls remained, but even then a light showing 'balls remaining' was more common.

It is quite sobering to think that before the mid-1980s, it was entirely impossible to continue playing a game after either your lives or the timer ran out. For Space Invaders, Pac-man, and Galaga, the last life meant quite definitively 'game over'. Vanguard and Fantasy in 1981 offered the choice, as did the more successful Moon Patrol in 1982, but it did not become standard until Atari's 1985 hit Gauntlet heralded the end of the era of 'one credit, one game' and the beginning of the 'pump and play' era, which let you funnel as many coins as you liked into a single game – the onset and ancestry of microtransactions in games.

To ask about the moral or behavioural effects of 'Game Over' sounds strange – but Gauntlet puts the issue into perspective. Early arcade players such as myself learned to master the cabinets through repetition – and we got extremely adept in the process. By contrast, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Simpsons games in 1987 and 1991 respectively were typically (but not exclusively) played by players once, in one expensive, coin dropping session. The arcades did alright out of this arrangement. But lost was that tenacious persistence in the pursuit of mastery that had, for myself and others like me, characterised the arcade experience.

When I worked in house at Perfect Entertainment in the 1990s, we had a close relationship with Sega and there was a House of the Dead lightgun cabinet in our kitchen. A co-worker was surprised that I declined the option to continue, given that we were given infinite credits. I explained that I wanted to get good at the game, and you didn't achieve that by just papering over your mistakes with a continue. Intrigued, he began to play that way, and eventually surpassed my skill with the machine. It may not seem it, but Game Over sculpted a positive approach to the mastery of skills, one I might gainfully compare to the persistence of the skateboarder. Game Over didn't just end the play session: it made better players.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #58, part of a ten part mini-serial on Arcade Cyborgs.

High Score

What would the arcade be without the concept of the high score? Striving to beat a target had long been a part of the funfair sideshow, and pre-1940s pinball tables (which did not have flippers, and were more like Victorian Bagatelle) often had target scores to win drinks and the like. Then came the high scores. At first, games like 1976's Sea Wolf (a videogame descendent of Sega's 1966 electro-mechanical game Periscope) offered extra play time for hitting a 'high score', which was a set target. Then, with 1979's Space Invaders, the high score could be saved. By the 1980s, every arcade game – pinball included – offered you the chance to "knock" the previous player off the high score or, as soon came after, off the top of the high score table.

Sometimes, our relationship with technology is so subtle we cannot even recognise that there is a cyborg relationship at all. Even when we engage with games with high scores we might not notice any effect on our behaviour. Yet the high score significantly alters the way we act whenever it makes itself felt – it inflames our natural competitive desires, and focuses us towards a purpose, a goal: to claim the high score. It moves us from mastering a game to undertaking a specific mode of engagement. The high score was the gateway drug to the Achievement system that dominates commercial game platforms today.

When Microsoft first announced Xbox Online at a conference I was attending, I was surprised that they made online ranking such an enormous part of their presentation. It left me cold. When I think back through my own episodes of high score chasing, I was always avoiding directly challenging someone else's high score: I preferred finding those machines with only a daily table and setting the score for that day. I was still being influenced by the high score, I just wasn't letting it draw too deeply upon my competitive side. Even now, when a game gives me a choice to opt in to an online high score, I always decline. I have no wish to reduce my play experiences to mere competition.

For many, the desire to compete is central to their aesthetic appreciation of videogames: for me, there is a negative connotation here, a bad memory of whenever my competitive streak burst through to ruin my enjoyment of a game – or indeed, someone else's. If high scores are a design feature so subtle that their influence is mostly unfelt, or is only a tremor foreshadowing the behaviour-distorting Achievement earthquake to come, there is still a worrying sense, for me at least, that the high score cyborg risks narrowing the rich experience of videogame play to the mere pursuit of victory.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #57, part of a ten part mini-serial on Arcade Cyborgs.

Press Pause

Away at Develop this week presenting The Narrative Design Survival Guide, so I'm pausing Arcade Cyborgs for a week. I hope to get some blogging in at ihobo.com while I'm in Brighton, but we'll have to see how it goes.

Buttons

The thing about buttons is the immense variation in what they can cause to happen. Push a button to start a game, push another to jump, or to throw shuriken, or to select a power up, or to teleport wildly to some unknown and potentially fatal position on screen. The joystick may have given us control, but the button gave us choices, tactics, possibilities... the button slowly and imperceptibly transformed games from boards and levels to worlds and universes.

I vividly remember how early arcade coin ops used a different kind of button – sometimes a small red plastic wart – for One or Two Player start, and another, sturdier, spring-loaded concave button for game actions. We had the buttons before the videogames, of course: pinball tables had the robust springy buttons for flipper controls decades before silicon chips, but the meaning of the button exploded in the 1980s.

Coin ops began with a wild mix of buttons – one for Space Invaders, none for Pac-man, five for Asteroids and Defender. Then two became standard, and stock cabinets were manufactured on that basis. Then, the stock cabinets moved to six buttons, even though most games used only half of them. Finally, as videogame revenue for the home outstripped that of the arcade, buttons became part of specialised hardware – triggers on guns, accelerators on driving coin ops, eight giant foot-operated buttons for Dance Dance Revolution and its brethren.

The moral impact of the push button world and its ever-changing configurations was far from constrained to the arcade. Vending machines, telephones, and more besides absorbed the button cybernetics, until touchscreens supplanted the mechanical joy of the button with infinitely configurable simulated buttons, like the ones on my phone I am stabling with my thumb to type this. With buttons come expectations. Push a button, something happens, automatically. A world away from the skill of the pinball plunger, or indeed the use of the button to control flippers, which was deeply analogue and sensitive to more than just timing. The human-button cyborg expects things to happen in that moment of pressing, and from the cascade of many-presses that arcade games required.

It is not that we children of the arcades did not learn skill or precision from our love affair with button mashing, and those that followed us are similarly equipped with newly learned reflexes. Mastery of buttons has indeed become purer: Crossy Road turns Frogger's four way control to just one button. But in the expectation of results the button engendered, did we not also learn to expect instantaneous gratification? The arcade, ironically, used the button to allow us to learn new skills. Elsewhere, the button is perhaps more emblematic of a replacement of competence with the expectation of immediate results.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #56, part of a ten part mini-serial on Arcade Cyborgs.

Change Machine

There are few more specialised robots than the change machine, a staple of arcades my entire life. It has exactly one purpose: to change a note or coin into smaller denominations. In the UK, typically into 10p coins or tuppences, in the US almost exclusively into quarters. You can find them in certain other places (coin-operated laundromats for instance) but whatever the venue, the role is the same: to convert one kind of money into another, to feed into the hungry mouths of other robots.

We only form a cyborg with a change machine for under a minute – long enough for it to 'thunk' out coins (almost always with a slower rhythm than a fruit machine jackpot). But then we are bound up in its cybernetic network for however long it takes to spend the coins; perhaps an hour in an arcade if we are lucky or skilled enough. The money it dispenses is the same value as what we put in, but in a way the coins are almost 'spent' the moment they are delivered since they are destined for the coin slots of other machines nearby. Considering the technology of the change machine is nearly identical to that in the fruit machine, the experience is radically different, and never comes close to touching the rush of the win that is mechanical cousin offers. 

How could we even begin to make a moral judgement about the qualities of the change machine-human cyborg? It does not seem very likely that this technological configuration could encourage positive qualities in us. Yet recall the risks of contactless payment, the backgrounding of the exchange of money. The change machine has the opposite tenor: it brings into abundant clarity the money we are about to spend. When I feed one a five dollar bill and walk off with twenty quarters I know I am about to spend five dollars on videogames, or pinball, or laundry. When the coins are gone, I have to make a conscious decision to get more. There is a positive value here, that of mindful prudence with respect to money, that is inherent in the cybernetic network of the change machine. It is a most curious situation to reflect upon, since who in their most abstract moment would suspect that such a device could be seen in such a positive light?

A Hundred Cyborgs, #55, part of a ten part mini-serial on Arcade Cyborgs.

Fourteen Today

Today is Only a Game's fourteenth birthday! I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported my blogging, both here and over at ihobo.com, as well as my book and game projects, over the many years that have passed since I first threw myself out here. It is no exaggeration to say there would be no point to anything I do if there were not readers and players to engage with it. For this, my unlimited thanks to you all!