When did tinkering become programming?
The title is a direct quote from Pierre-Yves Hurrel, one of the organizers of the Leisure electronics Conference in Lausanne conference, which I attended this week. It is also one of my key takeaways from the conference, as well as my own presentation, Programming and Becoming. The conference concentrated on “the emergence of video games: Towards a genealogy of ludic practices and computing artifacts”, that pivotal moment when video game culture started to establish itself.
The scope of perspectives was enormous, ranging from detailed analysis of video game manuals and printed newsletters to tracing the histories of early game devices and companies to rooting everything in the larger socio-cultural contexts of specific regions. Quite a few of the talks and presentations complemented each other. I could, for example, build on Regina Seiwald’s outline of serendipity in video game development history and Michael Conrad’s history of BASIC dialects.
An aspect that frequently came up was the “freedom” experienced by those present in those early days. Freedom in quotation marks, since it was basically men not having to care much about accountability. Be it journalists establishing patriarchal modes in the game-press, or entrepreneurs caring little about intellectual property. On the other hand, there was also the freedom experienced by amateurs (as in people that like to do something but don’t earn money for it) with early video game development and creative expression, the freedom of having easy to hack devices and being able to transform those, the freedom to explore untapped potentiality of an upcoming technology, the freedom to just come up with yet another BASIC dialect or clone another countries Game&Watch device, and fill it up with your own semiotics.
The latter “freedom” would be tinkering, in the question that Pierre-Yves posited. I also addressed this in my own contribution, Programming and Becoming, where I reported on two ongoing cases studies of mine, Robox.md) and Aldebaran.md). I recorded a transcript, post-conference. The two cases focus on the programmers of the mentioned games, what got them in touch with their practice, and what kept them going. A major takeaway was the time when they got socialized with computing, so, serendipity. Their first computers, a TI-99/4A and a ZX Spectrum, had writing code as the only way to engage with them. Even starting a game often meant writing a few instructions. In turn, these two started to program video games themselves.
One interviewee mentioned, that one of the reasons he didn’t continue video game development, was the complexity of making a game on the Amiga. Whereas their first game was for the Commodore 64, the new machine was more difficult in just getting things done, although having better multimedia capabilities. It’s a singular case for now, but I would love to speculate around it, in relation to Pierre-Yves question: During the 80ies, there has been a joint-effort by states and the economy, to get people into computing. Parts of that were state-sponsored support programmes like the BBC Micro that made computers affordable and drive competition. On one hand, we have hundreds of households all over Europe getting computers for all kinds of reasons, and the development of a new informal programmer class, while other processes try to professionalize and economize on this potential.
That is a rather rude abstraction and the reality on the ground was so much more complicated, especially in different political ecologies, such as Portugal, Poland or the GDR. The interesting part for me would be the entanglement of programming practices with these processes and drives. After having to cut a lot of material from the presentation, even a whole case study, I figured that I had enough that I could expand this into a whole paper. This could mostly be the Agenda, on “Bridging Design Research and Critical Code Analysis”.