Visuality of Early Video Game Graphics Programming
As in every other medium, the visuality in digital games has its own specifics. Being of high relevancy to this dissertation, I’ll outline three of them in the following: ergodicity, vocabulary of analysis and techno-historic limits.
Ergodicity
Digital games are especially demanding of their consumers, as the medium relies on a high level of participation. The difference between reading a book, watching a film or playing a digital game was especially well captured by Espen Aarseth’s application of ergodicity in his book Cybertext. Coming from literature studies, Aarseth speaks of a “nontrivial effort [that] is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” [@aarsethCybertextPerspectivesErgodic1997]. This needed effort does not guarantee an exhaustive capture of the played game or a successful play-through. The player creates a path through the configuration of a textual machine, by participating in the game.
This ergodicity is an important aspect when considering the image visible on the screen. The image represents one possible state, defined by the elements that the designers of the game provided, configured by the player’s participation. At the same moment, the image on screen communicates choices for the player, who then can reconfigure it by acting within the game. The image holds its own future possibilities by being within a feedback loop between itself and the player. The above outlined process is paralleled by the communicative features of the image, which can also speak of information relevant to the game’s state, such as high scores or player lives, as well as transporting narratives that create context and experience for the player.
Vocabulary of analysis
As a rather young discipline, merely coming of age, video game studies draws from many other disciplines. This is through a lack of an established corpus of methods and approaches form within the discipline, as well as many researchers entering the field from other disciplines. This is as well true for the aspects that concentrating on researching video game studies.
Being intuitively close, a lot of vocabulary and approaches to study video game graphics have come from film studies. As both media rely on images played out over time, this makes somewhat sense. Nonetheless, can the film studies vocabulary only capture parts of video game graphics, while not being to describe others. Video game graphics are at once aesthetic and narrative devices, as well as informative user interfaces. The Framework for the Analysis of Visual Representation in Video Game (FAVR) [@arsenaultGameFAVRFramework2015] attempts to tackle this problem specifically and as such is a helpful tool in reflecting how video game graphics are analysed.
Techno-historic limits
The third aspect of relevance is the relationship between the image and its technological structures, from which it springs forth. Being digital born, the image in digital games depends on hardware and software to be seen. These can be considered the material aspect of visuality in digital games. Analogue to Aarseth’s coining of cybertext, Stefan Möring applies the term cyberimage to denote the images’ dependence on its underlying technological structures as well as the player’s interaction with the machine [@gerlingScreenImagesInGame2022].
Today’s digital games playing devices are powerful computers, and a myriad of software and frameworks aid in the development and design. Game design in the early days of game development looked quite different. The capabilities of computers were fairly limited and the technical realization of the games had to be done in early programming languages, such as Basic, Assembly dialects or low-level languages like C. These languages do not offer the comfort and possibilities of today, and needed more abstraction towards the machine. These circumstances form the techno-historic limits of early digital game design and directly influenced formal and semiotic aspects of those games’ visuality. These limits as well as the intimate interplay between the technological foundation as a semiotic system in itself and the visible image will be considered in this dissertation through the application of critical code analysis [@marinoCriticalCodeStudies2020].
Time as Formal Element of Video Game Images
There is an aspect related to timing that it also crucial to think about in terms of the Video Game Image. On the one hand we have the microprocessor clock that controls how many operations the processor can do. Assembly programmers are especially attuned to this feature and are optimizing their code against the clock, in order to get more out of the processor. On the other hand we have the aspects of framerate or loading times, which are not visible in stills and screenshot, but iare crucial while playing. Optimizing code and having a fluid playing experience go hand in hand.