Pleasure - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 34

• Co - presence : We even have co-presence. This incredibly early game is two-
player; we are present with our opponent manifest in the skillful (or not)
co-presence of the other human at the other set of controls. No AI of the day
could approach a human opponent.
• Presence : It is very well documented that Spacewar was highly addictive
and people played it for hours. Players were literally “lost in space.”
Not bad for a game that is almost forty years old. Why was it so successful? Well,
if we reconsider Spacewar in terms of Janet Murray's enabling features of computer
games:
• Procedural : The game is nicely procedural. There are not a lot of objects to
defi ne; just four, in fact: the two spaceships, the little sun, and the missiles
you fi re; but these are very effective.
• Participatory : There is defi nitely “fl ow” material here; take a look at Csik-
szentmihalyi's characterization again.
• Spatial : The game is not too spatial in terms of “space,” which is just a black
square, basically but in terms of the gameplay space it's huge. The combi-
natorial possibilities of your own spacecraft controls are enormous and com-
bined with your opponents you defi nitely get a huge number of gameplay
situations.
• Encyclopedic : This characteristic is not particularly relevent here but it
doesn't have to be with this type of game.
Spacewar is a highly playable game to this day and still looks surprisingly modern.
One of the reasons for this is that the game so cleverly evokes deep space despite
its very limited resources to do so. We'll seek to explain how it does this in terms
of theory in Part II of this topic.
ZORK
Sixteen years or so later we get another type of game represented here by Zork, an
early text adventure game. There is no action or twitch, not even in the fi ght scenes;
there are people to talk to, and time to think. It appeared in 1977 and has an imagi-
nary landscape of forests, buildings, enemies, objects to collect and use, and so on.
The following is a short opening sequence—only one of many of course—from
Zork: The Great Underground Empire, which appeared in the early 1980s:
ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire
Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983 Infocom, Inc. All rights
reserved.
ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Revision 88 / Serial number 840726
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a
boarded front door.