Video games birth - 2/2

This article is the second part of the origins of video games. Here, I detail the 1965 - 1977 period relatively to arcade, console and mainframe video games. Many more games than those I mention have been published in this period. However, I try to mention only the ones I find the most interesting and innovative in each of the arcade, console and mainframe video game fields.

Arcade video games

The first arcade games were coin-operated. Arcade controllers were very similar to the 1960's controllers: each player had a knob and a few buttons.

Galaxy Game was released in 1971. I could not find any screenshot or video of it. Computer Space was released two months after Galaxy Game in 1971. The video of the game shows how similar it was to Spacewar! from 1961. Both Galaxy Game and Computer Space were 2D space shooters. In 10 years, not much had evolved, but the shmup genre was certainly defined. I think the Cold War space race context influenced a lot the design of video games. Anyway, Pong was published by Atari in 1972. The video game sport genre began.

Gun Fight was published in 1975. Each of the two players controls a cowboy and shoots at the other. Unlike Spacewar! or the other shmups, bullets are limited in number and bounce against the screen. I could find a few screenshots of Gran Trak 10, the first racing game released in 1974. Gran Trak used ROM to store the game data. People played versus an AI. The player could use a steering wheel, two foot pedals, a gear shifter and a knob. Sprint 2 was a racing game published in 1976. This arcade game added two AI cars and more diverse tracks, but the controller stayed the same as Gran Trak 10. Night Driver, a racing arcade game released in 1976, was the first game to show the world in a first-person view. As seen at the end of this video, the speed of the car increases gradually to make the game more difficult for the player.

Breakout was released in May 1976. You can see the video of its port to the VCS 2600. In the original gameplay, orange blocks speed the ball. Each level increases the speed of the ball and the difficulty of the game.

Home consoles

Before 1977, many home consoles embedded the games inside the hardware - few consoles used ROM cartridge. So it makes sense to analyze the consoles as a whole. I found many information about first-gen consoles in this article.

Magnavox Odissey was the first home console. It was released in 1972 and did not use cartridge (the 1978 upgrade of Odissey has cartridges). Odyssey 200 was a 1975 upgrade of the original Odissey console. It contained three built-in variations of Pong.

Pong was ported from arcade to home in 1975 in the "Atari Pong" home console. This console had the game built-in (there was no cartridge). It took a year for Atari to find a retailer interested in funding the fabrication of the home console. Pong was nevertheless a success on Christmas 1975. In June 1976, Magnavox filed a lawsuit against Atari for patent infringement. Like the Pong console, the APF TV Fun released in 1976 had a monaural sound channel. Like Pong, the APF TV Fun had two knobs and several buttons. Four games were built-in: tennis, hockey, squash and single handball.

The Coleco Telstar was a first-gen console series starting in 1976. Its games were built-in Pong variants (hockey, handball, tennis and Basque Pelota) as well as Pinball games. Some 1978 upgrades had sound and games in color. One of the Telstar upgrades had text in French and English for the Canadian market.
The Color TV Game was a series of Nintendo consoles released in Japan only. Although second-generation consoles started to appear in the US around 1977, I think the Japanese market was at that time out of American console makers' reach. The CTG15 had the first controllers linked by a cable to the console, making the play experience more enjoyable. Games were built-in. Some were based on Atari's successes such as Pong or Breakout, but there was also a racing game.

Mainframes

There are several Mainframe games mentioned at wikipedia. I am sure some games are missing or have been forgotten since the 1970's. The mouse had been invented in 1963 and the ball mouse in 1972. Hence players could already use a mouse and a keyboard to play mainframe games on terminals.
These slides from Pamela Fox provided a lot of information (and screenshots).

PDP-10

PDP-10 games nearly always relied on text-based UI for the input and output. Sometimes, the possible player actions or game feedback were printed (on paper, at 10 or 30 characters per second). Lunar Lander appeared in 1969 (on PDP-8). It was apparently textual (I could not find any screenshot) and was ported to a graphic terminal of PDP-10 in 1973. The company who made the graphic terminal commissioned the game to be written in 1973 as a demonstration of the capabilities of the terminal. The user input was taken from a light pen. Starting in 1971, Don Daglow wrote several games during his college years. Baseball was coded in 1971. No screenshots or videos were found. Then Star Trek in 1972 and Dungeon in 1975. Dungeon was the first RPG and it was multiplayer. Colossal Cave Adventure (or simply, Adventure) was an adventure game created in 1976. The game shows both recreational and educative elements.

PLATO

The TUTOR language was introduced in 1967 for PLATO III. TUTOR made it possible to code PLATO games. The third slide of How College Students Influenced Gaming shows a quite exhaustive timeline of the PLATO games. Users had only a keyboard - no mouse - to interact with a PLATO terminal.

pedit5 was coded in 1974. It was the first dungeon crawler game and it was using some of the Dungeon and Dragon rules. The name of the game, pedit5, was deliberately misleading in order to hide it from administrators who had forbidden them. Following the same naming strategy, another dungeon crawler called m199h was coded in 1974 (and deleted). dnd was allowed to stay on the PLATO mainframe by system administrators in 1975. Before that, at least 7 major versions of dnd [...] were deleted from the PLATO system for being illicit games on computer system designed solely for education. In dnd players could buy items from vendors and face the first boss monster of video games (a dragon).

Empire appeared in 1973. The game was accepted by mainframe administrators because it was part of a class work. Up to 30 players could play the same game of Empire "online". It has been upgraded regularly until 1980. The game looks a lot like Spacewar! - spaceships attacking each other. Nevertheless, the game mechanics were more complex as teams could use spaceships with different characteristics ("strong but slow" versus "weak but fast"), and spaceships had two different weapons on-board.

Spasim was a 32-player 3D networked space shooter coded in 1974 and inspired by Star-Trek (and previously mentioned PLATO game Empire). In Panther (1975) players were driving tanks. The terrain in Panther was generated randomly.

Other mainframes

Several other important games were released on other mainframes than PDP-10 and PLATO. Highnoon was written in BASIC in 1970. You can play its emulation. Hunt the Wumpus was coded in 1972 also in BASIC. It was a text-based maze adventure game. Later implementations had graphics (see this video) but the first version of the game was totally textual. Maze War was done in 1974. Two players (connected by an Ethernet cable) wandered in a 3D maze and tried to shoot at each other. It was the first FPS (see the gameplay on a Xerox machine). The Oregon trail was released in 1974 as well. The goal of the game was to teach children about the 19th century pioneer life. In fact, the gameplay is mostly about resource management.

Video games birth - 1/2

The quite thorough history of video games given in this article starts with the first video games in the late 1940's and ends in 1977. 1977 is a pivotal year for three reasons. First, second generation consoles appeared - with cartridges! Second, the Golden age of arcade video games started. Third, the home computer entered the market. The simultaneous improvements made in these three different hardwares definitely triggered the adoption of video games in our modern society.

It makes sense to analyze the gameplay and graphics of early video games separately. Gameplay and graphics certainly limit, extend or complement each other. However I think the progress made in each of them were made independently. Video game graphics did not improve thanks to gameplay innovations. New gameplays did not appear specifically because developers/researchers found new ways to display objects on a screen. Looking at the controllers also helps to understand which physical affordances the players could have.

1945 - 1965: Origins

The first video games were, like the first movies, technological proofs of concepts. They relied on electronical/electrical engineering prowesses of the time. One could argue that these games were more about cathode ray tube hacks than proper computer logic and graphics. Wikipedia mentions the 1947 Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device and the 1951 Nimrod as precursors of video games.

OXO (1952) was the first video game, according to students from CMU. It was a version of tic-tac-toe and was only playable on the Cambridge University EDSAC computer. This video shows how the game can be played in an EDSAC emulator. One can measure how clumsy the use of a rotary telephone controller was: the player had to dial the number of the location where he/she wanted to put his/her symbol instead of simply pointing at the location on the screen.

Tennis for two (1958) is a two-player tennis game on oscilloscope. The physicist Higinbotham, creator of the game, reported: I knew from past visitors days that people were not much interested in static exhibits, so for that year. I came up with an idea for a hands-on display – a video tennis game. A video of two people playing the game shows basic elements of gameplay. Around 0:40, the right player seems to dominate the player on the left. The game was only playable on the Brookhaven National Laboratory device, hence hundreds of people lined up to play “Tennis for Two”. For each player, the controller consisted of a knob (for the direction) and a button (to hit the ball).

Other games followed, all developed in universities or by true hackers and which platform were university computers. Examples are Mouse in the Maze (1959), Spacewar! (1962) or the PLATO platform (early 1960's).

The second part of the early video game history deals with mainframes, arcade and consoles.

Chatroulette and video-chat

It might be a bit too early to talk about Chatroulette as the website is still at the center of a lot of controversy, buzz and viral videos/phenomena. However, I think current Chatroulette issues can provide interesting insights about what to do or not to do in potential MMOG video-chat systems.

Chatroulette

You should try Chatroulette to make your own opinion. Danah Boyd explains that teens usually use Internet to connect with people they know, bu Chatroulette brings back the old randomness of the Internet when wandering anonymously in chat rooms was what kids did. She also adds that there are still a small percentage of folks out there looking for some amusement because they’re bored and they want to connect with randomness, folks who recognize the joy of meeting strangers in a safer space than most physical spaces where that’s possible. I realize that this creates the potential for seeing some pretty gross and/or problematic things and I certainly don’t want to dismiss that, but I’m pretty certain that teens are responding the same way that I’m responding – by clicking Next. Is that ideal? Probably not. For Yann Leroux, Chatroulette is the opposite of social networking: it is not at all building a social relationship, it is a social deconstruction. Indeed, even though people show their face, Chatroulette stays a very anonymous place. No doubt people like to scroll faces pressing f9. But Chatroulette also made me wonder how long is Internet going to stay in this moral panic state. Sarita Yardi explains that We’re still searching for the right balance between protecting our own privacy and being able to live out our social lives online without feeling that the rest of the world is out to get us. I feel like MMOG can be instrumental in setting up this balance.

But before talking about MMOG, it is worth looking at some recent uses of Chatroulette. Merton improvised piano pieces to the people he met on Chatroulette. The Merton viral video inspired other people such as Looking for Merton#1, or even Ben Folds who improvised on Chatroulette during a 2000-fan live improvisation concert. The Nurses even streamed their live concert on Chatroulette.

Video-chat in MMOG

Technically speaking, MMOG already feature voice-chat. It will not be long before video-chat becomes supported, or even the norm. A software could detect if a player is smiling at her/his webcam, and transmits this data to the game, making her/his avatar smile. Such software system could also transform "where players look in the screen" into "which direction the avatar is currently looking to". More realistic and more social. I am sure this is technically feasible and scalable: Chatroulette is a very simple Peer-to-Peer Flash website using RTMFP. AAA MMOG could include this same Peer-to-Peer system in their client code. It would be surprising that CCP developers could include an in-game browser to EVE Online, while peer-to-peer-based webcam discussions could not be implemented between players.

Not a significant source of chat, from Virtual Shackles.

Socially speaking, I tend to follow Ami Bruckman: either teens over time will learn to be more careful with their personal information or we as a culture will learn to be more tolerant of what people do in their personal lives, especially as youth. In any of those cases, I think the magic circle will prevent MMOG from having video-chat channels spoiled like Chatroulette by exhibitionists, drunks or voyeurs: people come to play. Obviously, MMOG also have their stories, but way less than Chatroulette. While one may wonder what the norm is on Chatroulette, playing or chatting is definitely the norm in MMOG, not exhibitionism. Several reasons:

• Playing keeps one's hands busy (although some eat, but that is digressing)
• In-game, there is nexting is impossible. A bothering avatar stays where it is. One can choose to ignore someone else's utterances, but /ignore does not kick a player out of one's field of vision.
• Reporting is much more possible: in Chatroulette, exhibitionists go too fast for me to be able to report them. In MMOG, there is usually a minimum 5 to 10 seconds during which one can not disconnect one's avatar.
• And it's too much hassle to go through an application process and eventually pay $15 per month simply to show one's anatomy to the world.

At the moment, MMOG players, and most people in our society, are not really ready to let their webcam show their emotions or reactions, even if it is through an avatar. However, video-chat in MMOG means a lot of interesting challenges. Technically, this means improving/implementing in-game character facial expression, realistic or not, sensitive webcams, filters, etc. As for game design: Which member of the group is this NPC looking to? What is this dumb NPC trying to tell me in looking at this particular equipment piece of mine? Which zone of the map is my partner pointing at?

Communication channels

Past - channels and emotes

Dourish reports that in old MUDs of the 80's, typing emote smiles and bows would make your character smile and bow to another user. Twenty years later, typing /smile in SWG would similarly let your character smile for a few seconds to another character. Compared to textual MUDs, the SWG players see avatars acting when performing the emotes.

Chats with multiple simultaneous channels have been used for at least a decade in first-generation (ie pre-2000) MMOG such as Everquest. As of December 2009, UO, another first-generation MMORPG launched in 1997 only allows its players to participate in one channel at a time. Hence I guess multiple simultaneous channels have been a feature found after the latest first-generation MMOGs. Conveniently let us say multiple simultaneous channels is a second-generation MMOG feature.

Even though MMOs have evolved a lot in the last two decades, it seems that within the MMOG worlds themselves, the communication mechanisms have not evolved that much.

Present - voice-chat

Some current virtual worlds/MMOGs offer general group activities who require a fast-paced synchronizations and collaborations between avatars within the virtual worlds. Intense action between players means textual chat does not provide a fast-enough and handy-enough communication chanel. As Monty Sharma says, typing and combat don't mix - it's a good way to die. And being able to talk freely improves strategy because your guild can discuss the plan of attack in detail without being tied to the keyboard for IM. However, enabling such a functionality within the game means increasing enormously the data traffic for the server, potentially increasing player latency. To my mind, this is the reason why MMOG system designers avoid implementing a voice-chat system within the game. Hence, players often use a external third-party tools like Ventrilo (launched in 2002) or Teamspeak (launched in 2002) and many guilds (if not all) look for free Teamspeak or Ventrilo servers so that they can use a voice-chat system.

Since its creation in 2005, Vivox has brought voice font and 3D voice to MMOG. Their voice-chat system has been integrated into more and more MMOGs:

• Eve Online in 2006
• Second Life in 2007
• SOE Station Voice plateform in 2008
• All Points Bulletin in 2009
• Global Agenda in 2010

Technically, the Vivox system is based like Ventrilo and Teamspeak on VoIP. But the difference is the Vivox voice-chat can follow the client-server architecture and logic of the game itself (providing, I bet, the MMO game developers have an access to the Vivox component(s) API). There is actuallty a lot to comment about Vivox solutions, whether from the social, technical, community management or marketing perspectives so I may post about all this later. An interview with Monty Sharma, VP of Vivox production management and marketing, tells a lot about the overall strategy and benefits for all sides. For the end-user, the MMOG company seems to provide this voice-chat service. But behind the scene, the MMOG company does not suffer the enormous extra data traffic generated by voice-chat and the development burden as they outsource it to Vivox. A win-win-win strategy between MMOG companies, Vivox and end-users.

In the end, third-parties such as Teamspeak, Ventrilo or Vivox have realized that The real-time strategy is too important, and the socializing is too much a part of the fabric of these games to leave the communication in a rudimentary form. Voice is elemental in this context.(Monty Sharma). It seems substantial improvements in MMOG player communication have come through in the last five years...

Future - Facial

I wonder if written chat will still be actively used in Global Agenda. Global Agenda is a MMOTPS, which means text-chat can be deadly in critical situations. Maybe it will be used between strangers who do not want to talk to each other during quick missions they have to complete together. The interviewer of mmorpg.com explains voice-chatting is not always what players want in the game.

One of the issues I had while playing DDO is that groups would invite you into a party and immediately set up voice chat. Suddenly strangers were on the game talking to you over your computer. This seemed a little more open than having a password to get into say Ventrilo and only allowing certain people in.

It might well also happen that emotes are still widely used during PvP encounters. For instance, the following chat log is something perfectly possible:

St3ve [Team 1] has been killed by j4ck [Team 2]
j4ck waves at St3ve
j4ck [Team 2] has been killed by Azure [Team 1]
Azure waves at j4ck
St3ve laughs

The Ragnarök Online MMORPG enables the use of alt+digit shortcuts for emoticons. For instance, by default, alt+2 displays an interrogation mark above your avatar's head. Even when fighting dangerous boss monsters or other guilds, players can use these emotes without having their fingers too far away from their skill shortcuts.

In the futurist dystopian movie Gamer, a (fat and ugly) player smiling or laughing will make his/her (slim and sexy) avatar respectively smiling or laughing. With Microsoft Project Natal recognizing 31 body parts, we are on the way to facial recognition. Actually, Shane Kim, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, mentions that Project Natal also got voice recognition. It has a multi-array microphone so that it can recognize different voices in a room among the different players. It also recognizes faces. I do not really think that recognizes faces means recognizing facial expressions like smiling. But it's on the way ...

Suggestion to Microsoft

For frequently visited web pages like the Project Natal main page, I'd suggest to be CSS-compliant with as many "common" browsers as possible. Try visiting this page with Firefox3.6 and access/display the tabs at the top of the page ...

Edit (February 25th 2010): it seems that Microsoft has updated the page :-)

[Cinema] A few common aspects in the Matrix, eXistenZ and Avalon movies

These 3 closely-related sci-fi movies deal with the virtual reality theme:

• The Matrix (all of the 3 movies) from the Wachowski brothers, 1999. A “steampunk” rusty-metal reality and black-and-green virtual world where machines use humans to generate electricity. Slave humans are permanently connected to the Matrix to keep their mind busy.
• eXistenZ from Cronenberg, 1999. A game designer introduces and tests his new game with a dozen of people. The game content changes with the participants’ state of mind. A very interesting idea is a series of virtual reality game inside a virtual reality game inside a virtual reality game. In the end, some of the players do not know what is real and what is virtual.
• Avalon from Oshii, 2001. In a dark, gloomy and uninteresting world, an FPS-like game called Avalon gathers many players. One gifted player makes her way into the levels to reach the legendary “class Real” level.

The interface to connect to the game slightly differ from one movie to another. Humans can connect to the Matrix if they sit on a dental chair and are plugged hard-metal sharp-ended wires at the top of their spinal column. In eXistenZ, the player connects to the game station called pod through an umbilical cord plugged in the lowest part of their back (spinal column again). These two movies depict a very intrusive and violent way to connect to the game. Indeed, the first time Neo logs in the Matrix, his convulsed face makes the spectator feel the pain of the connection. However, in Avalon players just stay peacefully on a dental chair and only wear a helmet that covers their entire face. Logging off the game can be done in putting off the helmet. To my mind, external user interfaces for virtual games should stay “outside” of the body for people to accept the game. I choose to play the game, and I am free to push the “log off” button at any time. Similarly, computers have more and more complex pieces of software to manage the energy they consume, make them sleep, shut down when this task is done, etc. but it is unimaginable that our computers do not have any physical power-on/off button. Same idea for virtual reality games.

Players can be trapped IG. Traps are illustrated by the same example in Avalon and the Matrix: bricked up windows. Players do not know they are imprisoned until they try to draw the curtains and discover a wall instead of a glassed window.

As for the IG characters, the Matrix contain NPC (agents and “programs”) and actual humans who can change into agents at any time because they are plugged into the Matrix from the machine world. The “program” characters such as the Oracle or the Merovingian lead me to compare the Matrix to a Massively Multi-player Online Game (MMOG) where players have to accomplish quests: the Oracle said that freeing the Key-maker will let Neo enter the secret back-door to end the war between humans and machines. In Avalon, the “Ghost” is the NPC to kill to access the secret levels. Some mercenaries are used by a GM to help Ash, the heroine, destroy a huge war machine but all the other characters are actual players. Avalon reminds me more of a First-Person Shooter (FPS) game as we never see huge groups of people connected at the same time in the same level of the game (a dozen players in the “Ruins C66” level and half a dozen players in the “Flak Tower 22”). In eXistenZ, all the 10 connected players have a role and the story evolves around these roles. NPC are seen very rarely and players never talk to them. eXistenZ is actually just a virtual role-play game, but the GM usually in charge of organizing the story in table role-play games has been replaced by a computer.

In the three movies, pets have minor background roles which most of the time make the spectator raise an eyebrow. In Avalon for instance, in one reality, the heroine feeds a dog she has. When she goes in another reality, a portrait of the exact same dog hangs on her wall, but she can not find the dog. Another time, she prepares food for her dog, but suddenly realizes she has no dog. It took me some time to figure out that maybe the “realities” she thinks she lives in are actually other levels of the game where some parameters change from time to time. In the Matrix, Neo has a déjà-vu when he sees the same black cat doing the same actions twice in a row. The other members of the team explain that a déjà-vu happens when the Matrix is being modified dynamically. Indeed, they shortly realize that they have been trapped inside a building as the windows have been bricked-up. A dog was seen inside the eXistenZ game, and this dog happens to be the dog of the winner of the game. I think the message conveyed by the 3 movies is that pets follow us in all the worlds we can be. They are life partners and therefore stay permanently in our minds, whatever the reality we are in.

The death of players is implemented differently in the 3 virtual worlds. In eXistenZ, the player is simply kicked-out of the game while in the Matrix, dying IG means dying In Real Life (IRL). Unlike Avalon, in both the Matrix and eXistenZ, we never see bodies disappearing after their owner has been killed. In Avalon, a player asks the heroine to kill him and see if his body vanishes to check if the “Class Real” level they are currently in is actually the real world: “if you kill me and my body does not vanish, then this world is the real one”. Following this discussion, Ash shoots the other player and the corpse disappears as usually happens in game levels, leaving her astonished.

In the 3 movies, exploits, cheats and bugs keep reminding the spectator that the action occurs in a computer game and underline the fact that all of these incredible events remain virtual, they are not real. At the end of the eXistenZ movie, the game designer reaction about the winning couple is “there was such a non-fair-play and anti-game atmosphere inside the game”. In the Matrix, Neo’s unique superman powers “break” the Matrix rules (ie stopping bullets with a gesture of his hand) while normal humans can only try to “bend” these rules (ie try to dodge bullets). Breaking rules is nothing more in the Matrix than an exploit. The cat deja-vu happening when the Matrix is dynamically changed to trap the group is an obvious bug. Killing the Ghost NPC in Avalon brings a ridiculously huge number of points to the player, letting her connect to the higher levels. I feel like that this huge number of points is an exploit in the game design of the level. Moreover, a Game Master intervenes to make the heroine reach the Ghost: this intervention can be seen as cheating. Finally, a character in a fish shop of eXistenZ repeats the same words until the players say the appropriate words that launch the discussion with the NPC. Such a not flexible dialog feature in NPC made me think of the underlying code:
while(input != “blabla I expect you to say”)
{
print(“what do you want?”);
}
print(“here is your quest”);