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Death Race [1976]

(Content warning: Vehicular homicide.)

Cliche when it comes to the game is to sensibly chuckle at the quaint moral outrage that made it infamous: all this over some crudely-drawn stick figures! This condescending ahistorical reaction doesn't just sell short humanity's ability to read abstraction and process media, and thus really the medium of video games as a whole, even the ones with Good Graphics, but Death Race in particular. Death Race is ooky-spooky, a power that I think has only been accentuated with time as its graphics age and it gets removed from the hustle and bustle of an arcade. It feels downright haunted. Something is wrong, not with its morality so much as it feels jarringly like it shouldn't exist in playable form. It should be an urban legend like Polybius, or a creepypasta like sonic.exe, or a plot point in a horror movie like the cursed TV broadcast in Halloween III [1982].

The sound design is perhaps the most vital part of evoking this atmosphere. There's a constant low hum straight out of Eraserhead [1977], which clashes with the mid-range overtones provided by the car engine's revving when you move. The high end is filled out with the piercing cry of distress that follows every thud as you ram into people, littering the playing field with the cross-marked graves of innocence and persecution. These pedestrians are absolutely defenseless against the grill of your automobile, and they scramble around frantically changing directions at random, so terrified out of clear thinking are they. This time, it's not the game world that is hostile: it's YOU. You're the villain, animate raw malice in car form, the Heavy Metal cabinet depicting the driver character as nothing shy of the gleeful Angel of Death that you will become for the low price of a quarter and your eternal soul. It's Hatred [2015] [1976], stripped of all pretension. There's not a win state, only a score and a time limit. It's engrossing and addictive and emotionally-involving and and even cathartic. There's a fanmade port out I recommend, keep in mind though that it changes the graphics a bit, such as replacing the stick figure sprites with something that looks more like gremlins, and I'm not sure if the original had its wraparound canvas or not.

It's known that Death Race is a quick-and-dirty reskin of Exidy's earlier Demolition Derby game in the face of business dealings gone awry, but they could have made it a game about, I don't know, garbage pick-up or animal control or something. Completely abstract blocks. It would have been just as much fun, the tank-control game mechanics here are tight but operating them is suitably challenging enough to engage, and every run is fresh. Instead, they put together a horror game where you are a spree killer. Bold! They backpedalled from this precipice of tastelessness, with the concept that the pedestrians you ruthlessly mow down aren't human beings, but they're gremlins, and you are the literal (not metaphorical) Grim Reaper, helpfully sending them back home. Oh, how nice! How completely vacated of any punch at all. It's a paper-thin veil, basically a condescending lie, that asks us to believe ass-covering newspaper quotes and one word on the cabinet over what is plainly obvious to everyone who looks at the game. (The concept of the gremlin, this archetypical post-hoc justification of virtual murder, could come in handy for us later down the line, say, in most any video game with aliens or demons or Nazis.) Before the controversy, Exidy even took out ads that trumpeted precisely how devoid it was of context: "Death Race 98 is what the player wants it to be: mobsters in the 30's, commandos in the 40's, dragsters in the 50's, hells angels in the 60's, street racers in the 70's."

The half-hearted feints at narrative recontextualization are completely dominated, not even by the work itself, but by the then-very-well-known grindhouse film Death Race 2000 [1975], on which it was transparently modeled (continuing the trend of games looking up to movies.) Death Race 2000 was not a horror experience, but an exploitation film, squarely focused on delivering slapstick carnage and bare skin, which was very common in the 1970s USA. It didn't flinch from its premise, where the state gamifies wanton murder, especially those it deems undesirable, like the elderly or any women, who are worth more points for killing. Critics and fans alike could clearly see such a state of affairs as depicted in the film was a satirical and comedic extension of everyday evaluations of the value of human lives. People in the film more or less up and say that the vaunted "American tradition" is but a churning engine of death and automobile worship. The controversy was over if the social commentary was but a feint, an excuse for the immoral spectacle that perhaps was inexcusable; if it was too high-minded or under-emphasized and ended up going over the heads of the literal elementary schoolers sneaking into the R-rated movie, which was very common in the 1970s USA. This familiar line of suspicion (across eras and political lines) demands satire be broad, easily-distinguished, and single-dimensionally didactic enough for a 9-year-old to grasp, even if (in a given particular instance) underestimated children are not around nor invoked. It doesn’t sound much like satire to me — it sounds more like uncut paranoia about irony, ambiguity, open questions, and interpretation as the refuge of evil.

It's hard to argue that Death Race [1976] was intended as a deft satire, but it's almost inarguable that it was meant as provocative, transgressive, and tongue-in-cheek, which for most purposes is the same thing. Keep in mind how it fits in with its arcade brethren as much as it sticks out. Last time we were in the arcade, Atari was trying out the idea that video games could be sexy, but skipping ahead to 1976, familiar notions have set in: Video games are for children. Simultaneously though, it's not as though Death Race was the first violent video game, not by a long shot — video games in the arcade circa 76 are already largely violent-themed, when not directly imitating big brother Sports and other traditional games. There's the war-themed Tank [1974], the grandparent of Counter-Strike [1999], or Sea Wolf [1976], or the western-themed Gun Fight [1975], about which one arcade proprietor had this to say:

"...that's the tradition of the Great American West, having a shootout, a duel, in the street. But deliberately running people down — that isn't an American tradition at all." [Tuscon Daily Citizen, January 14, 1977]

All too true! Intentionally mowing down pedestrians just isn't part of any American cultural tradition. That's what makes it safe. For Death Race to influence kids in the very literal way hypothesized by some at the time including professional psychiatrists, a (one-in-a-million) child who played Death Race and/or saw the film at age 9 would need to hold on to that idea, which gets its potency and appeal from its abhorrent aberrance, as what is in fact good and normal, all the way through their driver's test at age 18, in direct contradiction of every other stimulus surrounding them, like seeing thousands of real life people model non-homicidal driving. This kind of thinking from the alleged Moral Majority was dominant for about 30 years, despite being cuckoo bananas. Gamer culture is, to this day, quite noticeably and understandably once-bitten-twice-shy about talking about the possible negative effects or aspects of media because of it.

The perhaps accidental echo of the "American tradition" that the movie Death Race 2000 spoke of so glowingly is very telling. War is certainly American tradition — why, Tank came out right at the tail end of the Vietnam War! Gun Fight, like The Oregon Trail [1971], also depicts American tradition through the lens of the western! Violence in the name of justice or warfare is not just excusable, but downright wholesome and patriotic. Nevermind that colonial expansion and war are just as much displays of wanton violence against the groups who don't have as much capability with violent force as you that just happen to have been lent institutional legitimacy by the state in a way that Death Races haven't yet. (I do actually like westerns, believe it or not, but one should not mistake them for anything but a flight of complete fantasy.) What's missing from this trenchant media analysis is not just any notion of the comparable death tolls of intentional vehicular homicide versus wars and genocide, but any real concept of hegemony, the normalization of ideas. Kids aren't constantly inundated from all angles with talk of how cool and good it is to kill strangers with your car, but entire industries and large chunks of the population and culture that aren't even being paid off are committed to convincing kids and generally everyone that war is good and normal, worldwide.

Death Race is conspicuous among its peers only in its failure to provide any adequate justification, any way for your opposition to fight back on a level & fair playing field. Maybe they knew what they were doing, maybe they just honestly didn't see this difference. In succeeding as a work and as a commercial proposition, it lays bare the truth that nobody comes to the arcade to model moral behavior. That despite the pretense and illusion, violence is all ultimately just as senseless and abhorrent and and perverse and primal in a warzone as it is in in a parking lot. This is why Death Race must be singled out as both an immoral aberration and a damnation on its whole medium, as a cause of violence and sickness and not a symptom or illustration. To do anything else would be to concede to its implicit indictment, or, you know, to maybe just chill out a little bit, both of which are equally unthinkable.

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The Magnavox Odyssey [1971] + Pong [1972]

The most famous Magnavox Odyssey game is Table Tennis. It was the direct inspiration for Pong, and there is an infamous lawsuit decided in Magnavox's favor to that effect, which became famously the first of decades of copyright trolling putting up a hundreds-of-millions tollbooth on the mere concept of video games at home. If we take gaming as a legitimate art form, which is the essential premise of this blog, then it's the equivalent of copyrighting the concept of canvas. Despicable! If we are to take gaming as a legitimate art form, though... It behooves me to mention its business legacy, and move on briskly.

Table Tennis might look for all the world like Pong, (I'm not going to pretend like we can talk about one without the other,) but the way each handles is worlds apart. The elements of Table Tennis are the two pawns, the ball, and the line separating one side of the screen from the other. The pawns are controlled with both a horizontal and vertical dial, much like the horizontal and vertical alignment control dials familiar from period televisions. This direct inversion of The Outer Limits' famous promise is telling of its conceptualization as a "TV Game," designed by a television manufacturer. It's a peek at TV from the technician's perspective, or perhaps the television's itself, all light and no content. The ball always travels at a constant horizontal rate, changing direction when it hits something solid, but its vertical position can be directly manipulated by the last player to touch it with an "English" knob, which fictionalizes it as the spin you give the ball... but that's a lie. Spin, in real life, is applied at the moment and thereafter set. If the ball goes off-screen The line exists, but is, in Table Tennis, intangible and powerless. Players can cross the pawns across the line freely or eliminate it or change its location.

This marks a distinct change from the inherently hostile gameworlds we've seen up until now. Here, the players are in nigh-absolute control of the game. It inherits something of the designer Ralph Baer's experience, the sheer delight of drawing light on the CRT. Basic components like the size of the squares or width of the net or speed of the ball can be customized by the player. The TV screen has become a playground. For example, the players could theoretically completely ignore intended play to create a state of equilibrium and adjust the distance between the pawns for use as a metronome, or at incredibly-close distances, granular sound synthesis. This freedom isn't really the players', though. They could exercise it, but they're not encouraged to. It's the designer's. To freestyle with your square of light would be "play", but it would be the play you do with a toy, not with a game. A game has rules, constaints. The Magnavox Odyssey can have a lot of rules, they're just not enforced by hardware. Thus far, paratext like genre or history has informed how we fictionalize the mechanics of a game, now the rules themselves bare their artificiality and voluntary nature as they leap out of the screen and onto the page. Literally, you are given transparent overlays to superimpose on your screen and circumscribe yourself. Lots of the games come with further extensions like board games and cards.

The games of the Magnavox Odyssey beg to be considered as a whole, like the games of a WarioWare or other minigame compilation, seeing as they all came bundled together with the unit. They are all variations on a theme, which is to say all the other games are based on Table Tennis. It reminds me of the old "creativity test" where you have to write down as many things as you can think of to do with a paperclip. These people, who as far as they know are the innovators of the video game, sit at the dawn of the medium and are really roaring to take it for a spin and see what can be done with three squares and a line. Some games, like Cat And Mouse, want you to move on a grid. Some games, like Handball, make the line solid. Some games, like Invasion, use the "RESET" button that returns the ball when it leaves the screen instead as a "fire" button. Some games, like Fun Zoo or University Of The Solar System which are quizzes to challenge children, or Ski in which you trace a dotted line, could be adequately replaced with two tokens or better yet flashlights to shine on the board to indicate player position. Some games, especially the ones that attempt to emulate team sports with only two pawns like Baseball or Football, spiral into arcane knots that run on for pages and are approximately as complex as... let's say Settlers Of Catan [1995].

The Magnavox Odyssey also has lightgun games, bringing us 3 for 3 on games being a medium where perhaps the most significant direct interaction you can have with the world is shooting it with a gun. It makes you question if there's something fundamental about video games that makes them well-suited for shooting and/or violence. I think there is, but moreover that it's not driven into existence by a rotten, violent culture. Less cynically: It's a way of conceptualizing space and extending player agency beyond the immediate vicinity, nigh-instantaneously and in immediately apprehendable and intuitive ways, same as the ball off the pawn in either Table Tennis or Pong. And death is easy to program, a moving object becomes a non-moving object or even stops existing.

The visual impact of the two square pawns, not to mention the way they explore rules and rely heavily on external text and for the most part familiarity with external referent to function as legible, reminds me of nothing so much as The Marriage [2006], a flashpoint for discussion of the expressive potential of rules as art and a bold stride of minimalism, which almost could have been on the Odyssey save for the gendering colors. I'd like to take a closer look at the alphabetically-first Magnavox Odyssey game: Analogic.

In Analogic, the players begin at opposite corners of the board and the goal is to get to the other corner. Whoever is first wins, but motion is confined to a grid labelled with arbitrary numbers, and moreover, each player can only move to adjacent squares that would make the sum of the number they're moving to and the sum of the number their opponent is currently on either even or odd (depending on starting position.) On top of this strategic level that could again be replicated with tokens or flashlights, the players must maintain a constant volley of the ball. Keep in mind, the players will be positioned diagonally at the start, and possibly for the entire run of the game, while the ball without constant player input automatically moves horizontally. Once again, even with the OdySim emulator I am bereft of the experience of actually being able to get hands-on and play the damn thing, not only because of the lack of a player 2, but because of the fundamental difference between a keyboard press that will move me at a constant rate and the dial that will let me zip the ball or creep along, so I'm really mostly analyzing the manual here — but I can only imagine that this experience is tense and taxing, even if you know your addition front and back. Also, the players are nominally in competition by virtue of the win condition, but in every other aspect they are inexorably, fascinatingly mutually parasitic. Not only must a connection between players constantly maintained with effort, but the very rules of movement are constructed only collaboratively. This doesn't "mean" anything, like The Marriage is explained to... but it could, easily, with a simple twist of the mind, a recontextualization. There's just as much here as there about the balancing act of pursuing your own goals while maintaining the fraught interpersonal bonds that keep us healthy. It goes to show there's still gold in the 1-Bit Singular Activity Game hills, that works of art don't truly get superseded, be it Table Tennis by Pong or Pong by Ultra Pong [1977]. Art lives in the eternal now.

Pong still largely retains the sheen of the "first video game" in popular culture, even though it's since been outmoded many times over on that count, and part of that is the business savvy of Atari — such as pioneering video game microtransactions by charging 25 cents a taste, instead of $100 upfront (equivalent to $611 in 2019 dollars) for something almost nobody on Earth knew what was yet — turning Pong into something actually popular with the mass public, but part of it is also that, in its stripped-back constrained style, it really does look and feel like the ur-game. Even a short survey of game history up to this point (like of Galaxy Game [1971]) shows that the technology at Atari's disposal could have been pushed much further towards representation and sophistication than they were. No, the primitivism of Pong shouldn't be understood as economic or technological limitations, but as aesthetic ones. Pong is minimalist, honed to a sterile knife's edge.

It was Atari's second time up to bat with the arcade-game model, the first being Computer Space [1971], which was their take on Spacewar [1962], but changed up far more compared to the inspiration than Galaxy Game or Pong, with UFOs that moved in different patterns instead of a star or another player, and bullets curving under the influence of gravity. Their next game would have a punchier name, to match less convoluted gameplay. Pong was actually apparently designed as a telephone-game version of Table Tennis, the designer Allan Alcorn in ignorance of it, under orders to make a tennis game from Nolan Bushnell, who had seen the Table Tennis game. It kinda shows: There's none of the delight in the novelty of drawing on a CRT monitor that bled through into the open design of Table Tennis. For the first time on this blog, the quietly confident craftsmanship of a video game that knows what video games is. The instructions are three lines long, printed on the front of the machine.

The square screen enclosing the play is mostly empty space, but all that vertical space means is that you have more ground to cover and less time to react than on a more standard horizontal-rectangle display. Points (an Atari concept inherited from Computer Space) are the point, written out far bigger than anything else, parceled out one-by-one until victory. The paddles are small, the ball is smaller, and both are fast, in contrast not just to Table Tennis but also the downright stately and methodical Spacewar. The "English" mechanic is replaced with harsh zig-zag trajectories either randomly assigned from half-court or ricocheting wildly from encounter with the minutely different parts of the paddle, so there's no thought, nothing clever, just action. It's a raw reflex test: you can get to any point on the screen in no time flat, but can you operate the dial with both speed and precision? It's a closer approximation of a real white-knuckle sports experience than anything the Odyssey could provide. Such a frenzy entranced.

Magnavox Odyssey games may have pitted players 1 & 2 against each other, but given how the construct of the games only exist by a constant act of collaboration and good faith on both parts, or how it's pitched squarely at the hypothetical nuclear family unit, it makes more sense to conceive of the relationship between the players as nominally adversarial. Pong is much more the competition, and without the constant labor of just upholding rules, players can enter a flow state of conquering the challenges (or challengers) before them. Its location in public means that this is a game anyone with sight and a hand can pick up, even complete strangers, who will then have something to relate about. The advertising shows as a demographic, instead of rosy-faced children, hip 1970s young adults, or boast that its understated cabinet is suitable for "sophisticated locations," perhaps coyly alluding to the massive sexual tension of mingling over a game of Pong [1972] surrounded by ferns and wood paneling. (Atari’s first attempt at a wholly original title, Gotcha [1973], would be infamous for its purposefully boob-evoking controllers.) Video games wouldn't become widely solitary affairs like their cousin the pinball machine until taken back into the home for good with the rise of the Atari 2600 and the first personal computers instead of ARPANET-connected mainframes. I'll regrettably be skipping ahead past multiplayer games from here on out, and thus most of this 1-bit era I'm growing fond of. It's worth noting, though, that in doing so I could arguably be missing the entire point of the medium of games, those communal or outward-looking experiences that the titles covered so far have been purpose-built for.

Like Table Tennis was on the Odyssey, Pong was taken as prototype in the arcade, both by Atari and by what was now an industry of a new class of professional video game developers. Just look at this incomplete list of Pong variations and derivatives, which doesn't even count, like, Breakout [1976], sideways solo Pong. As much as that paints a bleak picture of an industry unwilling to explore the boundaries of what games were capable of like on the Odyssey in favor of chasing a quick buck, well, it's a very incomplete picture of what quickly became a pretty big industry: Pong, overnight, forever changes video games from a utopian proposition into a primarily commercial one.

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The Oregon Trail [1971]

(Content Warning: Cannibalism, Genocide.)

In these early days of gaming, it's hard to walk in a straight line without tripping over "firsts." Looking for the first this or the first that is a hook, it's exciting to uncover, you feel like something recognizable of our present-day condition is emerging from the strange, foreign world of the past. It's almost a lie, though. Most firsts are mere trivia that can stand in the way of actually seeing the work. Most firsts are not self-consciously experimental ideas that caught on, but humble clear outgrowths of a prior tendency almost anachronistic to think of as a first, or are purpose-built innovations to serve a specific need (and sometimes you can point at The First and say that it understood what it was doing better than its successors because it knew best why it existed and then was mindlessly copied... but only sometimes.) If you're looking for some kind of great rupture to hang your hat on, the closer you look the less you see.

The Oregon Trail isn't actually first at much, besides. It's predated in most respects by The Sumerian Game [1964], lost to time, in which You are immersed in a narrative role within an existing historical gameworld and asked to manage resources, for purposes of educating children. It's plausible that our 1971 developers were totally ignorant of it, and thus the "first" as far as they're concerned, and instead drawing on, say, Milton-Bradley's The Game Of Life [1960], seeing as the original design was as a board game. The Sumerian Game is probably even more influential and important than The Oregon Trail, as it inspired Hamurabi [1968] [sic], which was then widely distributed in "learn to code BASIC games" books from 1973 on and from there inspired the whole strategy game genre. We, in the 21st century, recognize The Oregon Trail more though, because of the American Gen X ubiquity of The Oregon Trail [1985], which is as Doom [2016] is to Doom [1993], bringing us 2-for-2 on Id references for the geeks and gamers in the crowd.

It tops Wikipedia's list of the longest-running game franchises, and it's gonna stay there. Hamurabi isn't recognized as The Sumerian Game 2, but a bootleg with its own identity, and similarly you taking the reins of a hypothetical Spacewar 2 or a do-over with spiffy graphics would be a fangame or port or its own thing, not a sequel or remake. They wouldn't carry the imprint of legitimacy that comes from the all-important ownership of the intellectual property. It's the way Oregon Trail's original designer, Don Rawitsch, could take his source code offline in 1971, and then port it from paper as the 1975 version I played with only minor tweaks (one of which we'll address later.) It's the way one of its programmers, Bill Heinemann, can deny even his own son from taking stewardship of the code. It's in the way the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium can make the 1985 Oregon Trail with none of the original three creators, become a private entity with the money the property made them, then sell their legitimizing rights to The Learning Company, who can sell it to Mattel, who can sell it to Ubisoft, who can then bestow the power to make legitimate Oregon Trail successors to third parties. It's copyright, or even more broadly the conceptual scaffolding of ownership, that franchises can not live without, and it's not ridiculous at all.

The franchise all started with only the noblest of intentions, though, characteristic of that 20th Century digital optimism that necessarily colors early video games. They were going to use computers to educate children. A game is a spicy way to approach this, but not unprecedented; one could say most games are already educational, even if in a given instance all you learn is about the game. So what's its pedagogical approach to history, and how does it fare?

Well, it's unusually gamey for an "edutainment" title. There's no room for those "read some facts" sections divorced from the gameplay we're familiar with from later titles like the Carmen Sandiego series. Instead, like reportedly The Sumerian Game before it, it relies heavily on now-lost paratext (which ultimately functions much the same as the Carmen Sandiego model) for the delivery of historical fact: the 1971 Western Expansion unit curriculum The Oregon Trail game was originally only a small part of. It could have reasonably been implemented within the tight space constraints of a 1970s BASIC mainframe program as, say, a fact- and text-heavy quiz, but instead we got something very gameplay-heavy that was shortly thereafter shorn of that original contextualizing information. As-is, you can hardly poke at the game's factual inaccuracies, because what little is there is accurate. (For instance, the 1985 edition would make the prevalence of dysentery infamous, but on the real Trail, the #1 killer was cholera.) The game we have is a supplement... but if not hard facts, then what does it teach you? Reading, typing?

The game is turn-based, and at the top of every turn it displays your five resources: Food, Ammunition, Clothing, Cash, and Miscelaneous [sic] Supplies, which are things like axles and medicine. Your cash reserves (which always start at the same place) can be used at the nondescript forts you have the chance to stop at on some turns. Food, clothing, and supplies correspond not to any real values like pounds of food but one-to-one with the cash you spent on them. You just have "30 Clothes," which somehow depletes rapidly. It might be meant as the abstract monetary value, but since there's no selling, it's unclear. Run out of clothes or supplies, and you could die at any moment. Run out of food, and you die instantly. Like in The Sumerian Game, you're managing resources through the proxy of numerical abstraction, but unlike it, this is not a game meant to educate you on economics, this is the First Survival Game. In all this, we see the inverse of the priority motivation of Spacewar: managing finite, dwindling resource scarcity instead of pushing hard on the limits of the infinite.

Ammunition, on the other hand, is not directly vital but ridiculously cheap. Pun intended, it's the best bang for your buck. You're thus incentivized to play into the rugged outdoorsy individualist role (unlike later games, there's no indication that you are anything but alone) by hunting for your food, without the fiddly business of coding something like food that goes bad if you just let it sit. When you go to shoot something, be it animals on the hunt or hunting yourself, or hostile "riders," you are dropped from the methodical turn-based world into a real-time action-reflex one, which delivers a jolt of energy to the whole experience. In a stroke of ingenuity within the text-only limitations, you are tasked with typing the word "BANG" quickly and accurately. In the 1978 version, it also changes the word up on you (like it could be "POW") which makes the mechanic even more reminiscent of The Typing Of The Dead [1999]. The metaphor stands clear: your typing skill, quick and accurate, enacts corresponding quick and accurate violence on the computer. The computer will have its revenge, though.

No matter how skilled you are at hunting for your food and managing your resources, you are at the complete mercy of the gameworld. The random events at the end of every turn are perhaps the real star of the show here — definitely an evolution of Spacewar's star, anyway. The wrong random events can bring you from fine to dead in just one turn. It's not fair!

That's the point. The Oregon Trail is not about getting to Oregon. Sure, that's the goal that keeps you going both in and out of character, but really The Oregon Trail is about the losing. The death message is rendered with great ceremony, three separate command prompts on your funeral, just for flavor. Even when you make it to the promised land, you're haunted by the ghosts of your own failure, and the entire time you're on the journey is low-level tension and dread at the imagined fatality lurking under every rock. That's the pedagogical utility of the game that a book or a lecture just doesn't give you: by placing you in the middle of a world model and an unimportant role, it communicates an impression, a feeling of what it was like to live as an ordinary person in the time and place depicted, and that impression is one of a dangerous world, arbitrary enough that you can do everything right and still eat curb. There's a straight line from here to Cart Life [2011]. Why, Oregon Trail is the First Empathy Game! The terminology of the "Empathy Game," if you're unfamiliar or have forgotten, was a bit of a fad genre in mid-2010s among a handful of thinkpiece writers and social scientists, and notably not many actual game designers. It was a genre that post-hoc lumped together titles like the aforementioned Cart Life, Depression Quest [2013], That Dragon, Cancer [2016], and even Spec Ops: The Line [2012]! With the exception of the latter, the sales pitch of the genre was basically that in snubbing traditional concepts like "fun" and "violence" in favor of depicting a minimal-gameplay sad world drawn from the author's deeply personal (and often enough, marginalized) experience, these games would make you a better person; they were good for you, like eating your vegetables. Game designer Anna Anthropy was particularly enraged by cis allies patting themselves on the back in this way for playing her short title Dys4ia [2012], and in response to all this she exhibited The Road To Empathy [2015], which was a pair of her size 13 high heel boots with a pedometer attached, so that people could literally walk a mile in her shoes and try to get the high score. (A scathing Cinderella story.)

I myself am a cis white male living in Oregon's Willamette Valley, cause to worry that when I telnetted in to play the game it would instantly award me victory. I grew up here. I was born too late for Apple IIs preloaded with Oregon Trail in the classrom, but one year in elementary school the teacher put together her own longform, paper-based, team-play Oregon Trail game. My team died trapped by snow in the mountains, and then once I was checked-out and scorched about the loss, the whole class got to learn about the Donner Party, a group of settlers who went into the mountains, got snowed in, and ate each other. That's a harrowing, tragic situation about people at the furthest extremities of humanity, and we didn't get too deep into it, but it wasn't sanitized. Years later, don't know how many, I wondered: why? Not why did it happen, but why was I taught about that as history? Not even that it was gruesome, but it didn't square with my understanding of capital-h History at that time, that it was just such a small story that had immediate effect on nobody outside of the Donner Party themselves. It was just some fucked-up shit that happened once. Trivia. What was I meant to learn? Not to go through the mountains in a covered wagon during winter? No, no, it had to be one of those abstract moral Life Lessons... Was it solemn respect for the dead? The terror of nature, and the weakness of man and our society in the face of it? I've seen it used to make exactly the opposite point, that adversity builds morality and character, which is incredibly stupid but that doesn't mean that wasn't meant as the takeaway.

Writing this now, I think I have figured out that I was being taught about my heritage. It's odd to think of it that way, but it's not out of the ordinary in many cultures to pass down illustrative tales of suffering to the young so they and their example are not forgotten, though. I believe I was meant to associate myself in some continuity with The Donner Party, their inheritors as an Oregonian, as an American, as — to put it sharply — a white person, and truly, I am. The subtext is that the past of hardscrabble living and suffering we underwent to get here (in this case, a literal location, Oregon,) legitimizes our comfortable place now. Likewise, the intention of The Oregon Trail is to get us to identify and empathize with the settler. Both are virtual memory, simulated aggrievement.

Our second game has taken as its subject and theme perhaps one of the few darker and more harrowing subject matters than war: colonialism. Identifying colonialism in games is in vogue right now, but it's currently most commonly leveled as a criticism at let's-call-them-post-Minecraft games in which you are actively engaged in both extracting resources from and changing the environment to suit you, even where there is no colonization on the narrative end. The Oregon Trail is just the opposite, using its resource management purely to emphasize that we are at the whims of our environment, while its narrative framing is colonization. It flinches from the larger truth of what it is depicting in favor of an attempt at systematized monetary verisimilitude that absorbs us.

The Oregon Trail [c. 1847-1869] can be considered a mirror for its rough contemporary, The Trail Of Tears [c. 1830-1850]. Nobody wanted to be on The Trail Of Tears. People were being forcibly relocated from what prosperity they had managed to carve out for themselves into conditions of deliberate impovershment. The mass suffering and death they experienced on the way was, when not maliciously engineered, fully intended, and it did nothing to legitimize their claims to the land they now had. Conversely, the settlers moving far west were doing so entirely voluntarily.(The game starts you in St. Louis, 1847, coincidentally the exact time and place a legally-enforced Mormon exodus began, but this game isn't The Utah Trail.) There's a phrase for that hopeful dream that fundamentally motivated every last Oregonian settler to embark on their painful journey: Manifest Destiny. The land out west is already metaphysically yours, you just have to go out and take it in fact. In period records, what is done to the indigenous people across the continent is described in jarringly passive voice (such as "dying off",) as what are clearly active campaigns of hostility are waged with full intent to exterminate. The suffocating, violent racism of the 1800s United States can not be understated, and yet it is full-on swept under the rug, not just here, but almost everywhere you turn that's not the niche of a serious history for adults. This was an era when even some white slavery abolitionists were only that way because the thought of sharing a nation with any black people, even slaves, so offended their sensibilities.

The Oregon Trail game is, point blank and very straightforwardly, white nationalist propaganda. Now, it's not hate speech! It doesn't come out of the damp basement printing press of a Neo-Nazi, but the cleanliness of the omissions and assumptions and unwarranted romanticism of a standard grade school American History curriculum, and from the noblest of intentions. It's not Custer's Revenge [1982] or The Birth Of A Nation [1915]. In fact, the most major & germane difference (possibly) between the 1971 teletype version and the 1975 one I played is a modulation towards greater racial sensitivity: The random event of hostile "Indians" is scrubbed to "riders." This leaves only friendly Native Americans, which is actually, so I read, broadly historically accurate for what a trail-goer would encounter. The Cayuse War, for example, did start with an attack on a white civilian, but most of the engagement was between military forces. Not to form a bad habit of relying too heavily on author quotes, but here's what programmer Bill Heinemann had to say about it:

I heard from Paul [Dillenberger, fellow Oregon Trail coder] that we needed to eliminate any negative references to Native Americans. Since my generation had grown up on TV cowboy shows, my first reaction was that we were denying a piece of our own history.

Get a load of this honky. He instinctively thought the heritage he needed to pass on to Minnesota schoolchildren was the pulpy good-guy-bad-guy myth of the unrevised Western, masquerading as fact. The Oregon Trail is, in the end, just as much the flippant pop culture fantasia as Spacewar, despite the pretense of fact and education. Thankfully, Mr. Heinemann thoughtfully backtracked on that count, thinking of potential Native American children playing the game. In 2017, lead designer Don Rawitsch even said that he'd like to see a version of The Oregon Trail from the Native American perspective. In 2019, we got exactly that.

When Rivers Were Trails [2019] is the product of almost 50 more years in development in ludic story delivery and edutainment. It's marketed as the Native American response to The Oregon Trail, though it too takes place about 50 years later, in the 1890s. This places it after the end of most direct warfare, save with the Apaches, although Geronimo had already surrendered and you do not visit the American Southwest. Instead, when you are given the choice to resist, it takes the form not of, say, mass armed rebellion, but in community spiritualism and helping negotiate the crooked legal system.

In the story, you wander aimlessly west, away from the traditional lands in Minnesota you can now never return to. Along the way, you meet many Native Americans, who aren't typically so much characters as they are the medium by which facts about the land and history are summarized, ala the Carmen Sandiego model of edutainment referred to earlier. When Rivers Were Trails hews closer to something like a visual novel with minigames, and is nowhere near as interested in systematizing misery as The Oregon Trail. The worst things that directly happen to the player are rare harassment by the Indian Patrol, and there are resources as a nod to The Oregon Trail, here Willpower, Food, and Medicine, and, fittingly enough considering the direct equation of resource-to-cash in the 1970s game, they're used mostly as forms of currency for trading. Other than that, they don't "matter," in that they're super easy to come by living off the land and running out of food or medicine won't kill you. Only running out of spiritual Willpower will, which suggests to me that you're on some metaphoric level a ghost animated by your journey, bearing witness to vignettes of not so much the suffering itself, but the almost-post-apocalyptic aftershocks of great misfortunes and displacements and how various people are holding on or moving on. Don't mistake it for an Empathy Game — it's strictly educational.

[arcadeidea]

Spacewar! [1962]

Spacewar is still the first video game. Not technically: the developers of Spacewar were already aware of a playable Tic Tac Toe implementation on the very computer they were working on, which by that point was already a more-than-decade-long tradition for computers, not to mention Tennis For Two [1958]. (For greater detail on this cascade of history, watch Ahoy's fantastic and dry documentary The First Video Game.) These prior works are only trivia, though, and false starts all of them. They're what you find if you look at the past not on its own terms but on ours, applying a rigorous schema of definition aspiring to the condition of a science, searching for something specific they couldn't have known they had. Tennis For Two is the only game of that protozoic era to be relevant or even known of to anyone in the field for the next several decades, and even then all that was required of it was the mere fact of its existence (its status as a trivia item) for the sake of a something so banal as a lawsuit. They are worthy of honorary mention, but a medium is not a prescription, it is a chain of tradition. Not only is Spacewar wholly original and something only achievable with a digital computer and not an attempt at transferring a real-life game, but more importantly and ironically, it did not exist in a vacuum.

Spacewar is not something you apply a definition to, Spacewar IS the definition. Although nothing so strident and bold and definitive was intended as it would be with later games, when it was taken as a prototypical guide by those who followed, that is what it functionally became. Not to be too precious and romantic and mythologize it ("First there was nothing, then there was Spacewar!"), not to be too essentialist about it ("Spacewar contains the seeds for all what followed"), not to use it to answer What Doth Games and fall right back into the checklisting trap — but we can read the game itself as a manifesto, a collection of precepts and assumptions, and one of the creators (JM Graetz) was even considerate enough to give us an itemized list of exactly what the MIT Tech Model Railroad Group hoped to achieve in making Spacewar:

1) It should demonstrate, that is, it should show off as many of the computer's resources as possible, and tax those resources to the limit; 2) Within a consistent framework, it should be interesting, which means every run should be different; 3) It should involve the onlooker in a pleasurable and active way — in short, it should be a game.

The expressed reason video games exist as a distinct artistic medium, as anything more than a shadowplay of traditional games and sports, is to show off the power of our computers. I use that word — power — and not the more prosaic and accurate "computer resources" that Graetz used for a reason. It's 1962, and it can not be put out from anyone's mind, viewer, player, or creator, that computers would be instrumental in a real Space War of the foreseeable future. Or even a terrestrial war, which was the sole practical purpose and reason for the existence and funding of computers up to this point in history (if we take pure mathematics for its own sake as "impractical.") It's a show of force, it could even be a threat if it were leveraged in a Cold War propagandistic context against those with weaker or nonexistent computers and not with the giddy, childish innocence that it was created and received with. Better to call the spirit "utopian frivolity," though. Self-proclaimed hackers brought not only Spacewar to the system, but the music of Bach and by extension his rosy vision of the divine and human. Perhaps these programmers may have had their imaginations circumscribed and imprinted with the hitherto military legacy of computing, not to mention American culture... but these eggheads messing around saw the potential of computers reaching far beyond that, towards a hi-tech Arcadia. There's much to admire there, but it carries the unmistakable stench of classical tragedy, and Spacewar serves as a testament of the damnation from within: not just that it is a window into an imagined future of nothing but war, but that its explicit priority is the poisonous ambition to simply use more and more resources, again endemic to American culture as much as it is to future game development culture.

Things like "crunch" weren't around yet, of course. Spacewar is sometimes casually attributed to Steve Russell as the lead or main developer, as in the current lede of its Wikipedia article. The original concept was borne of three-man bull sessions with Russell, but then the very first step towards practical implementation was taken by a fourth man. Russell then created a barebones prototype, including the ships and their ability to turn and thrust and shoot (and it is not mentioned, but presumably, to die.) In response to playtesting, he added background stars. After that point, it became stone soup. Other people in the Tech Model Railroad Club would have a bright idea — bespoke controllers, accurate background stars, freshly optimized ship-turning code, death animations, hyperspace warp, and the big one, the central gravity-well star — and then just implement it themselves. The end result is a game that's simple, but surprisingly polished and full-featured, especially compared to our image of early games as clunky, primitive, blocky things. It reminds one of the hagiographic myth of early-90s Id, a very small team of friends having as much fun making the game as they are playing it, all leaving their personal touch on the work. Steve Russell was not the auteur with a hand on the tiller and an eye on his vision, but one crucial member of the team. It's all very kumbaya, non-hierarchical, no pressure, if we take testimony about its development on face value and don't chuck it out as rose-tinted nostalgia.

This stands in contrast to the game, which is a fantasy of violent domination in competition, with a definite winner. We could unpack the implications of that more, and what it all means that the very first video game was of war, but, well, we'll have plenty of chances to in the future to say the least. Two opponents, precisely balanced and equal in a space ballet, identical in every way except for visually (the distinctive silhouettes of the needle and the wedge are a minor triumph in character design.) Hey, maybe there's some Tic Tac Toe influence there! Spacewar's idea of gaming is inherently multiplayer, and that makes sense. Solo games like pinball or Solitaire card games exist, but the large majority of games at this point that inform what we understand a game to be are all communal activities. The game even came with inviting options to modify the game's parameters to suit the player's preferences.

[I must confess now: other than maybe a couple minutes at a computer museum with a partner, and a few minutes in the middle of writing this awkwardly sharing a keyboard on a browser emulator with my dad, I don't think I've properly played this. I'm just a tourist. Is this an analysis of Spacewar or of JM Graetz's The Origin Of Spacewar? This is more of a programming note than anything about the game, but part of why I'm starting this project is because I've always been on the outside looking in when it comes to gaming. I've always loved reading about games more than playing them, and this writing and canon-exploring endeavor is a hope that I can fill in the gaps and to force me to form my own thoughts. And what's the point if I can't well play the game for myself? Unless I change my mind, I'll be largely avoiding multiplayer games whenever I possibly can, because not only can securing a Player 2 in these early non-online games be an awkward or high barrier to clear for me, and not only are many of them ephemeral, and/or hard to fix in place and get a read on, such as here where the intention is that every run is different because of the guile and fumbles of your human opponent even though the game blatantly remains static, but their basic legibility depends even more than usual on practiced skill that I just haven't personally built up.]

The game is inherently hostile to your continued existence, and both players are only empowered to make it even moreso. Movement is constant, although very slow so as to facilitate strategic marksmanship over spray-and-pray. It's not an anxious atmosphere though, the edge of threat and action is what keeps the player engaged, throws them into interaction and thought. The central star is the key that makes this dramatic and dangerous gameplay: it makes it impossible to stay still, and it serves as the passive threat of death, one that can't be defeated, only negotiated. The only other gameplay element to speak of is your human opponent, but the star serves as the personification of the game itself. It shares something in common with the roulette wheel, not in the randomization which is more in play with the Hyperspace Warp Hail Mary, not even in the gravitational pull, but in the way it stands as an emblem that ultimately, you're playing the game on the terms of the game-maker and at the mercy of physics. Maybe it's only a small philosophical leap from playing against the computer's game and a player to designing a game played against only the computer.

Spacewar exists already at the fruitful intersection of abstraction, simulation, and fiction that games will never escape. You don't get to brake, but instead have to apply reverse thrust, in a nod to simulating what space flight would really be like. But you can pivot freely without applying any thrust at all as though on a Lazy Susan, so that your nose is always pointing in the opposite direction   of the thrust for quick visual clarity. Your bullets don't obey gravity like your ship does. These have their respective knowingly-silly technobabble explanations, papering over the gap between simulation and abstraction with fiction. War is its name and theme, but it's really more of a duel, boiling war down to a single dogfight. Space is its name and theme, but it's not empty and it's not infinite, it's a closed area smaller than a sheet of paper that wraps around at the edges and corners, which if I'm visualizing correctly, would resolve to a teardrop shape (which is then projected onto a rectangle, which is then projected onto a circle.) In each case, we are presented with a small slice of what we understand through the minimal text (the title) to represent an almost incomprehensibly bigger idea.

We easily understand its shorthand mostly through intertextuality. We only understand what we're looking at, and why we can regard war with frivolity, because of the pulpy science-fiction wrapper. The inspiration for the concept is explicitly cited as low-culture "genre fiction" for nerds like the seemingly endless procession of science-fiction B-movies through the movie theaters. Specifically singled out is the cheesy space opera book series The Skylark Of Space. The yearning for the combination, a Skylark Of Space special effect B-Movie, was exactly what produced the creative energy in the bull sessions to dream up the totally-unprecedented gameplay concept of Spacewar. That's right: the first original video game was genre trash born of frustrated aspirations of filmmaking. Doesn't get much more fitting an inauguration.

Spacewar spread like a folk song, not a commercial proposition. The determination was made that there was simply no consumer base, so the source was handed out to anyone who asked. Somehow or another, a fellow hacker would catch a look at Spacewar, then return to their own machine to recode it from scratch if it wasn't a PDP-1, and people would keep adding onto it themselves. That's a remarkable method of propagation that has its successors such as the Type-In game but it relies heavily on a baseline of common computer literacy that necessarily dies out as computers get both more widespread and infinitely less demanding on the user to learn how to program just to use it. I can't help but feel a twinge as Spacewar is cloned into Galaxy Game [1971], one of the first if not the first coin-op arcade video game. Money makes it ugly: Is it stealing when it was freely and casually distributed before?