Games: September 2009 Archive Page

Videogames may be economically formidable, but they remain a byword for crass, shallow thrills. A game, it's understood, can look spectacular, but it will have little to offer its audience in the way of values, insights or craftsmanship. It's a curious and increasingly untenable situation, given that, to the increasingly large percentage of the population who play them, games are rapidly establishing themselves as the single most exciting and vigorous creative industry around: a sector able to boast not only booming revenues and growing audiences, but a melting pot of talents and new ideas that is increasingly attracting some of the biggest-hitting figures in film, television and the other arts. --Tom Chatfield, Guardian

Okay, I admit it, being known as the academic expert on a singe indie computer game from the 1970s is something like saying "I'm the handsomest one-eyed pirate on this particular ship, today," which might well be true, but doesn't exactly mean very much.

Still, I'm thrilled that I could be part of Jason Scott's forthcoming text adventure documentary.  I had a fever of 101 when he interviewed me a few years ago, and then a few months later he offered to fly me back to Mammoth Cave for a follow-up interview, but that semester I had missed three weeks of classes due to pneumonia, and I was barely on my feet again, and my systems were operating at about 40% capacity at that time, so I had to turn him down.

Anyway, it's great to see evidence that he's making progress on his movie.

Finishing off a first version of the Adventure portion of GET LAMP, I am reminded of some of the shortcomings of the documentary form - when there's a ton of information, an absolute pile of detail or aspects about a subject, you will be given a tantalizing amount of insight into a subject but crave more.

Or maybe you won't crave more. For some, the subject covered over a few minutes will be sufficient. But for some of us, a certain few, you want to find out every last thing. And not just find it out... find it out definitively, where observation and verification rule the day, and not best-guesses and what-is-saids polluting the landscape.

To that end, as regards the game Adventure and its roots in real caving, as well as exactly what parts the two authors played in the project, you will simply not do any better than Dennis G. Jerz' Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky. It is, very simply, the last word on the subject - I can't imagine anyone going further than this into the history and aspects of Adventure any of us might want an answer to. --Jason Scott

I'm looking for a current book that presents gaming theory at a level appropriate for a 200-level undergraduate course.  I have only scanned through the section of Tanja Sihvonen's work, Players Unleashed! Modding <i>The Sims</i> and the Culture of Gaming (PDF), that deals with Colossal Cave Adventure. I'm not too happy with what I found there, since it seems I disagree with a Wikipedia article. (See footnote 251.)

Yes, it is true that several of my sources claim a 1975-76 date, but the phrasing suggests that some of my sources might agree with the 1972 date.  In fact, except for people who were simply repeating what they had read about the creation of Colossal Cave Adventure, not a single one of the sources I interviewed specified a date before 1975, and the earliest digital evidence is dated 1977.  To put it another way, every single one of the sources who played Crowther's original game specified a date of 1975 or later.

Those "written sources, including the Wikipedia entry" that mention the 1972 date are wrong, as I explain in the article Sihvonen cites. (Why do I suddenly feel empathy for every B-movie mad scientist who shouts "Fools! I shall crush them all!"?)

I can, and do, regularly edit the Wikipedia entry to remove the factual errors, but what can I do to combat the errors that made it into print before I published what I found out about the timeline?

Of course, Sihvonen is right -- it is a fact that many sources have printed the 1972 date.  I listed several of these sources in the section of my article where I thoroughly debunk them.  And who am I to argue with ink on paper?  All I have on my side is thoroughly cross-checked oral testimony and e-mail messages from people who have first-hand knowledge of the events in question. How can that stand up against "many written sources"?  What was I thinking!

One day, perhaps I can spend months and years gathering primary information, carefully assemble it all in a coherent, insanely detailed package, get it peer reviewed by scholars who know what they are talking about, and then somehow, if fortune blesses my efforts, find a magic way that the full text of my findings could be available, for free, somewhere in an online digital network, so that I could direct interested readers to paragraphs 79-83 of a document located at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html.

Interview with Stan Lee (comic guru, creator of Spider-Man)

If you were starting out now, do you think you would have started out in games rather than comics?
If I were young now and I wanted to do stories, I would very much want to get into the videogame business because it's the most exciting. Videogames and movies are the most exciting forms of entertainment. But a videogame in a way is more imaginative, it has more variety. In a movie you stick to the plotline, in a videogame you go in a million different directions. I have no idea how they're able to do that. It's like a miracle.

What advice would you give to a newcomer?
Well it's like anything else, if he or she wants to be a writer they should first study writing. Don't study comic writing, study writing - read literature, read the best writers you can find. Learn the language, learn how to use it. If you want to be an artist, you've got to study the best artists in the business and try to draw as well as they do. But too many people try to become artists in comics and they're not as good as the ones that are presently drawing the comics. --UK Guardian