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
