Pleasure - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 28

games but as with genre we will also make reference to other media by way of
comparison and illustration.
In chapter 2 of Trigger Happy (2004), Steven Poole pursues the notion of aes-
thetics in the particular context of the early game Spacewar (which fi rst appeared in
1962), and writes, “Its structure offered many of the virtues that are still essential
features of videogames:
• simple rules with innumerable combinatory possibilities;
• the competitive urge to destroy your opponent' s spaceship;
• the pleasure of mastery of a well - defi ned, consistent system;
• the challenge of reacting instantly to craft governed by inertial physics;
• the sensual buzz of playing with animated patterns of light.”
Spacewar originally ran on DEC PDP-1s, which were actually delivered with
the game loaded into core memory for testing and demonstration purposes. This not
only makes Spacewar one of the fi rst computer games ever made but the fi rst to
be widely distributed. In its original form the game was displayed on a small,
round cathode ray tube: white images on a black background. It consisted of two
silhouettes of very simple spacecrafts with an even simpler twinkling central star.
The background was enhanced with a scattering of single, white pixels representing
distant stars.
If you haven't come across Spacewar before you can fi nd links, information,
and images to do with it in the List of Games at the end of this topic (as you can
for all games discussed in this topic). There you will also fi nd a link to the original
code running on a PDP-1 emulator in Java. If you have never played Spacewar, then
you should. Follow the link and play it now before you read any further: it is that
important.
As Poole quite rightly points out, the aesthetic pleasures of Spacewar can be
found in many of today's computer games despite its apparent simplicity. We can
clearly see here the pleasure of destruction, of mastering a simple interface that
demands we develop skills to use effectively. We also see the pleasure of action— as
defi ned in the previous chapter—requiring rapid responses coupled with good hand-
eye coordination. In terms of activities, we are piloting a spacecraft, using weapons,
and so on. However, the game being so old, GIL doesn't have data on Spacewar.
Returning to Poole's characterization of the aesthetic pleasures of Spacewar we
see that the fi rst, “simple rules with innumerable combinatory possibilities,” is more
of an enabling feature of the game architecture than a pleasure in itself. It is one of
the characteristics of certain types of games, such as Spacewar, that makes them so
satisfying to interact with. We will return to this idea of such enabling features in a
moment.
The amazing thing is that so much of what we have come to expect in a wide
range of computer games was there at the very beginning. As with genres and activ-
ity profi les in the previous chapters, we would like to pursue this idea of aesthetics
because knowing what people fi nd pleasurable in a game in general will not
only help us understand games better but will also help us design them better. In