🪴 Jachére

Dissertation

Aug 23, 20247 min read

Blinded by the light

Tracing the early history of video game Visuality in programming practices

To what extent were the technological foundations and the materiality of video games intertwined and implicit in influencing and shaping programming practices of early video game Visuality? How did video game developers leverage programming to shape the images of early video games, and what implications did their approaches held for the intersection of technology and Visuality in video game development?

Abstract

I argue that the history of the video game interfaces is not rooted in visual and interactive design, but stems from early programmers’ attempts to mediate between the possibilities of the microcomputer, their own intentions with what the game should offer and the players’ phenomenologies. The hypothesis would be, that the way we see and understand video games is far closer to a computational phenomenology then visual research can encompass in its current scope.

To what extent were the technological foundations and the materiality of video games intertwined and implicit in influencing and shaping programming practices of early video game visuality? How did video game developers leverage programming to shape the interface of early video games, and what implications did their approaches hold for the intersection of technology and visuality in video game development?

This dissertation is framed by my general interest in programming as a human activity. Most often, programming is seen as a very utilitarian practice, a means to an end. This is of course true as well, but it doesn’t encompass programming in its entirety. Programming is a very specific and unique way of production, with outcomes that can massively differ in terms of cultural value. People are drawn to programming by more than just an economic impetus. Reasons for peoples’ motivation to code can include socialization, technological affinity, feeling that programming is matching ways of being, thinking and creating, and it most often includes experiencing programming as a meaningful activity.

I’m especially taken by ludic approaches to programming1. The hacking away, the experimenting, tinkering, and bricolage, the creating of homebrew games and software. While this dissertation is driven by an interest in programming, this then becomes a lens to look at how programming is applied in a designerly way, in the coming of age of the video game interface2.

Up to this day, little advance has been made in studying the material conditions of what makes video game visuality - well - video game visuality[^3]. The difference to other visual media lies in the amalgamation of computing, and the expression of productive or creative intent by video game designers and developer. The specifics of video game visuality are deeply rooted in how human ideas must be translated into instructions that a computing system understands, and vice versa. This necessitates a mediation between the pure logic of the computer and the phenomenological experience of a playing person3. In other words, the video game image is a specific type of interface that needs to take care of a semiotic layer and offering functional affordances4.

Although still entangled with the technical domain, today’s video game development is several layers abstracted away from the bare metal of microprocessor logic. Early developers in the 1980ies had far fewer tools at hand, and often needed to implement basic video game functionality themselves. These developers not only explored the mostly unknown potentiality of the first generations of home computers for their various purposes, they also had to design access to them5. Their work was formative for understanding digital technology and its future development.

Design, then, not only of narration and mechanics, but also in terms of our fundamental relationship to technology.

General Approach

This is a paper-based dissertation. The defined scope includes four peer-reviewed and for publication accepted papers, as well as a synopsis that together form the deliverable thesis. I am associated with the digital humanities at the University of Bern, and come from a master’s in design research at the Bern University of the Arts. Besides those two domains, I’ll bring a longstanding practice as a programmer to the mix.

So far, the methodology is assembled through distant viewing and reading6, oral history, formal analysis of visuality[^8] and source code7, case studies8 and source criticism. The dissertation is part of a bigger project, that researches the early history of video game design and development in Switzerland, Confoederatio Ludens.

My research concentrates on structural aspects of video games as a combination of computing and creative expression, particularly focusing on the era of the 1980s and 1990s and the visuality of video games. I attempt to highlight the democratization of digital creation with the advent of affordable microcomputers for the home. This means I will explore the role of programming in video game development, noting its challenges and its evolution as a valuable skill over the past decades and raise questions about why developers choose to code as a medium for creative expression in video game images, compared to other forms of media.

To pursue my research, I will bring together two disciplinary domains, the digital humanities and design research, as well as two methodological approaches, which are critical code studies and visual analysis. The following outlined texts lead through the process of studying aspects of this trajectory, forming a unified answer to my overarching hypothesis.

Articles

  1. Observing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphics: Distant viewing the history of video game interfaces from 1970 to 1990; Inquiring the relation of the games’ with their platforms (means) as well as the larger history of interfaces (discourse)
  2. Expanding on the Video Game Image as Interface: Formal analysis of video game visuality and interfaces analyzed through the application of an extended version of FAVR; Basing on theories of the Computational Image and Algorithmic Image; Establishing a model of analysing video game interfaces, their semiotic layer and functional affordances
  3. Conceptualizing Video Game Graphics Programming in the 1980ies and -90ies: Formal analysis of source code; Distant reading source code through computational methods and visualizations; Inquiry into structures, organization and conceptual models of how programmers mediate between the affordances of the machine and create access through the video game interface.
  4. Case Studies: Bringing together the former elaborated approaches; Early homebrew video game development and the production of images, where I take a close look at a handful of early video games, including some ported ones, bringing design research and critical code studies together.

Footnotes

  1. Conceptualizing Programming[Conceptualizing Programming]] ↩

  2. Observing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphicsing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphics]]e Image?]], Video Game Image ↩

  3. Computational Image, Bidirectional Framing ↩

  4. I think the interface in video games always in relation to the very abstract processes in the computer, and how software and video game developers need to understand and access those processes. So not only a translation of one’s design intentions into the computer, but also the translation of these computational processes into the phenomenological experience of the user/player. Here I found the work The Philosophy of Software very helpful. He’s talking about a mediation that translates between the human experience and the absolute logic of the computer. I’ve collected a few thoughts on this in Thinking about Images and Software and What is the Video Game Image? ↩

  5. That’s also the big difference, for me, with the Demoscene. While they were mostly programming to watch, video game developers also had to think about how to play their games. As a rule, existing socialization as well as technical socialization is used, but it is always adapted, iterated and supplemented with new ones. ↩

  6. Observing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphicsing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphics]] Barbarians and War in 1980s games and press coverage – Confoederatio Ludens](https://chludens.hypotheses.org/1441) ↩

  7. VICE ↩

  8. Case Studies ↩

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