I'm very happy to hear tens of thousands of people have read my articles.
But at the same time I'm so sorry to let you know that I had to disable comments on all pages because I don't have enough time to respond to each comment or filter spams properly.
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I'm going to take a summer break. Next article will be published in October.
In a previous article, I asserted that rules are atoms of games. Naturally, it leads us to a thought that gameplays, each of which consists of a play and a set of rules, are molecules of games. As you know, every atom existing in this world has different characteristics and is almost useless by itself. But when a single atom is coupled with specific quantities and types of other atoms, they can form a molecule essential for human life such as O2 and H2O.
Likewise, every rule embedded in games is not fun at all. Rather, they are restrictions which by their nature prevent you from enjoying pure form of plays. But when they are combined together in a proper manner, some kind of chemical reaction occurs and an enjoyable gameplay magically emerges.
But it's not an easy job to find a right combination since it's very likely that you attempt to build a gameplay with either less or more number of rules than actually needed. Like a molecule exists in this world, a gameplay only requires a specific number and kind of rules.
Needless to say, if a gameplay lacks some essential rules, it's either not fun to play or unplayable at all. And the opposite case, where a gameplay has some redundant or irrelevant rules, is equally problematic because such kind of rules prevent you from enjoying the maximum level of fun the gameplay could potentially provide.
In another previous article, I wrote Pong is one of the most beautiful video games. That's because it contained just the right number of rules to realize it's sole gameplay : "Avoid missing boll".
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Pong has many predecessors. Among them, the two most important ones are "Tennis for Two" and "Table Tennis". Tennis for Two contained exactly the same play as Pong - hitting the ball back and forth - but it unfortunately lacked essential rules. Above all, there was no rule to decide which side has won a match. So it eventually ended up as just a novel scientific experiment.
In Table Tennis, the play evolved into a complete gameplay. However, there was also a problem - it had some redundant rules. I assume its developers added them to provide variety and depth. But as a result, its gameplay became unnecessarily complex.
Considering from this perspective, what Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn did when they developed the innovative game can be interpreted as follows:
* Bushnell found a very good gameplay in Table Tennis.
* He got rid of some redundant rules to simplify the gameplay and handed the job off to Alcorn.
* As the result, the gameplay became much more clear but also became too simplistic and lacked depth. So, Alcorn added some rules to improve it.
Although some critics argue that Bushnell just copied the gameplay from Table Tennis (he was actually sued by Magnavox and all but admitted it), it's not an accurate description. It's unquestionable that he stole the gameplay. But by going through this disassembly and reassembly process, it became a much more engaging one. So, there are no reasons not to call it "game design".
If you're not convinced yet, I'd like to point out that the way Masahiro Sakurai makes games is essentially the same.
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Only a few people including Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright created multiple successful video game franchises. So, it's obvious that Sakurai, who launched Kirby series and the sole director of Super Smash Bros series, is a genius game designer.
However, he is not the kind of person who rely solely on instinct. Actually, he takes a very practical and scientific approach.
In his theory, every game has its own “fun core". He begins game design process by extracting a fun core from a game he's interested in.
First, I try taking away everything unnecessary around that core.
He called it "disassembly" process. After that, he explores its other possibilities.
Then, it’s like I place the fun core somewhere else and build around it again.
- from the same page
He called it "reassembly" process. Needless to say, he took this "disassembly and reassembly" approach when he created the original "Super Smash Bros.".
YouTube: Super Smash Bros. (Nintendo, 1999)
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In the first half of 1990's, 2D fighting games was by far the most popular genre in gaming arcades in Japan. The boom began when "Street Fighter II" was released, and smash hit titles like "Fatal Fury" and "The King of Fighters" accelerated it.
YouTube: Street Fighter II (1991, Capcom)
However, as frequently occurs in the video game industry, the boom suddenly ended after 3D fighting games such as "Virtua Fighter" and "Tekken" caught people's attention with its novelty. But he was confident that 2D fighting games still had unutilized potentials.
YouTube: Virtua Fighter (1993, SEGA)
Masahiro Sakurai (2001 @ HAL Laboratory):
Super Smash Bros became a 2D fighting game because I thought it would be more easy to grasp and play than a 3D one. In fact, some people consider controlling characters in 3D environment is non-intuitive. So, I decided to make a game where you can easily distinguish whether your attacks hit the opponent or not ...
... When I designed the game, 3D games was the big trend in the industry and 2D ones was almost out of fashion ...
... I knew 2D fighting games was a stagnant market. So, I believe any new idea wouldn't occur to me if I followed established fighting game conventions. Instead, I wanted to develop an "action game" in which you can gain pleasure just by jumping in high sky.
- Weekly Famitsu (around Dec 2012) Enterbrain in Japanese
To revive the game genre, he disassembled it and found its fun core:
Masahiro Sakurai (2012 @ Sora):
When you hear fighting games, you can’t help but think of having to execute fancy combos.
... I do like the organic, ad lib nature that happens distinctively in fighting games, rather than learning specific ways to get stronger.
... instead of asking players to pull off specific combos that require instant elaborate manipulation, I wondered how I could bring out an element of ad lib.
So, he noticed the fun core of fighting games must be "ad lib", by which I guess he means continuously changing environment and situation surrounding you. To extract the fun core in pure form, he took away unnecessary features like long commands and the health bars.
In typical 2D fighting games popular at that time like "Street Fighter Alpha 3" and "The King Of Fighters '99", you had to press seven or more buttons in the right order to initiate very strong special moves called super combos. Besides, each character had their own set of commands. So, remembering and performing them precisely was a must-have skill to win a match, which would discourage beginners from playing fighting games.
In contrast, you can initiate any action including special moves with a combination of less or equal to two buttons in the original Super Smash Bros. Moreover, all characters shared a single command set. So, making a right choice based on your current situation, not remembering commands, became the most important factor.
In the last article, I quoted from a presentation Sid Meier made at the Game Developers Conference titled as "Interesting Decisions". This is exactly a "situational" interesting decision he talked about.
Replacing health bars with cumulative damage system was a much more important and bold choice. I believe Sakurai borrowed the concept of battle royal between four players from "Yu Yu Hakusho - Makyou Touitsusen", but the damage system made a big difference.
Sakurai: ... I wondered how we could draw out that element of ad lib that I liked so much and thought it would be fun to have the reactions change every time. The result was putting in cumulative damage.
Iwata: By doing that, what you need to do will change depending on the situation. Players will engage in more ad lib - including the by-chance happenings that occur when players who aren’t very good are just punching buttons that can change the course of play. Is that right?
Sakurai: Right.
- from the same page
In this way, he succeeded in recreating the "ad-lib" fun core he extracted from 2D fighting games with different ingredients.
The fact that Super Smash Bros became one of Nintendo's most successful franchise and "Street Fighter IV" gained high popularity not by adding new systems but by omitting complicated ones from its predecessors tells us that games do have "fun core" and redundant rules disturb their work.
Although he didn't mention it, I claim every fun core consists of a combination of a play and a set of "crystal clear" rules.
As we've seen, both Nolan Bushnell and Masahiro Sakurai takes similar steps to build a game. I'll call this a "subtractive approach" as they begin by removing redundant rules from a gameplay constructed by someone other than himself.
On the other hand, the approach Shigeru Miyamoto takes is an "additive" one - he starts from scratch. Without this attitude, he would have never created "Wii Fit" - one of the oddest games in history - because it had no predecessor.
Although these two approaches involve completely different methods, there is no way to decide which one is superior - can you say Super Mario Bros is superior to Kirby in all aspects?
Therefore, they must be doing the same thing - finding crystal clear rules - in a different way.
So, by comparing those two approaches, you'll find a way to build good games. In the next article, I'll write about the ways Miyamoto makes games.
I'd like to begin this article by defining what is a "gameplay", as I believe there's no concrete definition for this word.
In my definition, a gameplay is a structure consists of the following two elements:
• A play, which gives you instinctive pleasures.
• A set of rules, which puts some restrictions on you.
It's that simple, but there are huge differences between just a "play" and a "gameplay".
Let me give a few examples.
Seeing stars twinkling in the night sky is a "play". If you have someone to love sitting by your side, it'll give you a lot of pleasure.
However, if you have someone about whom you know little, this kind of situation will create an awkward atmosphere.
So, you'd better transform it into a "gameplay" by adding simple rules like "whoever finds a shooting star first wins". Sharing a gameplay will break the ice and bring you two closer together (unless you really hate each other).
To construct a game, you need at least one gameplay. So, it's possible to make a game which contains only one play and one rule.
You say such primitive games are too boring and trivial?
I don't think so, because I know a global sporting event which attracts billions of viewers by hosting games belong to this category. During the event, people around the world get excited every day and even shed tears of happiness when their favorite players win medals.
Of course, I'm talking about the Olympic Games.
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Among the sports competitions held there, traditional track and field sports are the most suitable examples. For the purpose of this argument, they can be divided into following four groups:
(A) sprint races, long-distance running races, hurdle races, steeplechase race and relay races
(B) walking races
(C) long jump, triple jump, high jump and pole vault
(D) hammer throw, javelin throw, discus throw and shot put
As you can see, the sports in the A group are evolved from maybe one of the most basic and oldest kinds of play for human beings, "running". Similarly, the ones in the B, C and D groups evolved from "walking", "jumping" and "throwing", respectively.
Each of them contains only one essential rule. For example, the only rule behind sports in the A group is "whoever reaches the goal first wins". Although they vary in distance and the hurdles require dedicated skills, they share the same substantial characteristics.
And the important thing I want you to notice here is, all of these plays are personal, not social, activities. That's the key to understand the difference between a play and a gameplay.
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You may argue that running with friends must be a social activity, but that's not true. I'd like to explain it by introducing the concept of "internal factors" and "external factors".
Both internal and external factors can affect the outcomes of a play. But the big difference is, while a play can also affect its internal factors, it has no direct influence on its external factors.
In the case of running, its primary internal factor is your physical health. And its outcome can be represented by the level of mental pleasure you gain from it.
Naturally, the outcome constantly decrease over time. You must feel very good for a while after beginning the activity because the pleasure it provides should easily surpass the physical pain.
But the difference will eventually be shrunk to zero as your legs get more and more tired. At the point where its outcome is zero, you can either keep running or stop it immediately since it makes no difference to you. However, if you are a rational person, you'll always choose the latter because it's obvious the level of pain keeps rising until you break legs.
In short, running is a play activity where you gain mental pleasure in exchange for losing physical health.
Like this, a play (running) and its internal factors (your physical health) have very tight interactive relationships.
External factors are equally important. The primary external factor of running is the environment surrounding you, which includes things such as:
• the weather
• how scenic the running course is
• presence of friends to run with
As you know, running on a sunny day is more pleasing than running on a rainy day (for most people). Similarly, you should feel less tired or bored when you are running through beautiful forest trails with friends than running on a plain straight road alone.
Thus, external factors also can change the outcomes of a play by enhancing the pleasure and mitigating the pain you get from it. But it's a one-way street - the play has completely no influence on them.
Obviously, you can't change the weather and natural landscapes. Although it's possible that your running partners' behavior be affected by you, it's not directly caused by the play itself - other communication means like verbal and physical languages make it occur.
Therefore, a play is a personal activity. It may produce some experience to share, but it's impossible to share the play itself with other people.
On the other hand, all gameplays are born to be shared between people.
In a game, you can directly alter other players' outcomes by changing your own ones, because each player acts as an internal factor for other players.
So, the outcomes of all players are completely integrated, which means every decision and action you make inevitably changes other participants' fates.
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Probably, the most primitive and ancient game for human beings is hunting. Although its types of outcomes vary according to what kinds of animals to choose as targets, let's think about the simplest case.
When you hunt a bear with a primitive hunting tool like a spear, you eventually reach one of the following two outcomes:
• If you win the game, you'll get his (maybe her) meat as a reward.
• If you lose the game, you'll be eaten by him.
From his viewpoint, your win means his death, and your death means his win. So, in this simple game, the two players' outcomes are completely linked in a symmetric way.
Since there's no way that both players achieve positive outcomes, increasing your chance of winning the game means reducing that of your opponents. He'll swiftly notice the change and make retaliatory moves - and you'll fight back soon.
This chain of actions continues until one side wins.
Like this, participating in a game means linking your fate to others' - every single action you make more or less changes all players outcomes.
So, you don't need any words to communicate with others.
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In the world of games, words are useless. There, "decision" is the common language, with which you can express your thoughts and preferences.
Sid Meier, who founded the "Civilization" franchise made a great speech titled "Interesting Decisions" at the Game Developers Conference 2012.
There, he expressed his belief : "A game is a series of interesting decisions".
In his theory, a "interesting decision", which is important in creating fun experiences, likely to have some of the following four characteristics.
1. Tradeoffs
Each choices should have both pros and cons.
In RPG games, equipments like swords and shields are priced in accordance with their strength. So, its a tradeoff between cost and benefit.
In racing games, while fast cars tend to have less handling, easy-to-handle cars tend to be inferior in speed. Therefore, choosing a fast car can increase your chance to win, but the car may crash before it reaches the goal. So, it's a tradeoff between risk and reward.
2. Situational
Decisions should interact with game situations in interesting ways.
In racing games, you should choose an easy-to-handle car when you run curvy race tracks. But you'd better choose a less manageable but powerful car when you run race tracks with plenty of straight stretches.
3. Personal
Players should be given choices which match their own gaming styles.
In good strategy games, you can employ both aggressive and defensive tactics based on your preferences.
4. Persistence
Your decisions have effect for a certain amount of time. And combining long-term decisions and short-term decisions can create engaging experiences.
In the Civilization series, you have to decide your actions while considering both long-term objectives (to build a military-oriented civilization or an economy-oriented civilization) and short-term objectives (to explore new frontiers, to hire more soldiers or to invest in the economy). This multiple-layered structure creates the well-known "one more turn syndrome".
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Interestingly, another world-famous game designer, Masahiro Sakurai, who launched and directed "Kirby" and "Super Smash Bros." franchises, made a speech at Game Developers Conference 2004 titled "Game Design: Risk and Return", which solely focused on tradeoff between risk and reward.
In his theory, we can understand what makes games fun by analyzing their risk versus reward structures.
Unfortunately, we can't see the presentation slides he used then. But he recently published its Japanese version on a game news site. So, I'd like to translate some of his words into English.
In my theory, the fundamentals of games is 'risks and rewards'
Here, 'risks' are things which can worsen your situation. And 'rewards' are things which give you some benefits. As the result, some risks may disappear or you may be allowed to proceed to the next level.
This concept explains how games create fun experiences. Now, I'm going to prove it by applying it to various genres of games.
"Space Invaders (1978, TAITO)"
In "Space Invaders", a classic 2D shooter, the risk is being shot down by the enemy invaders and destroying them is the reward. Since your and the enemies' missiles can move only vertically, you have completely no risk and no reward when you stay at a safe horizontal distance from them.
Approaching towards them increases both your risks and the chance of getting rewards.
So, you have to voluntarily increase your risk to get some rewards. This is the most substantial part of games.
"Super Mario Bros 3 (1988, Nintendo)"
In "Super Mario Bros", a 2D platformer, you can clear out a lot of enemies at once by kicking a Koopa towards them.
When there's enough space between you and a Koopa, your risk is very low. However, it gradually increases as you inch towards him. And it attains the maximum level at the moment when the horizontal distance between you and him becomes zero.
To avoid the danger, you have to jump over him at some point before then. Interestingly, this dangerous moment is the first time you get a chance to get rewards.
If you successfully jump onto him, he'll be knocked out, which is the reward. On the other hand, if you miscalculate the distance and land in front of him, you'll certainly be in high danger, which is the risk.
This tight relationship between the risk and reward creates a thrilling and fulfilling experience.
The important point here is: by setting up a risk and a reward close to each other, we can create fun experiences. In addition, the magnitude of the risk and the reward have to be carefully balanced.
"Super Street Fighter II (1993, CAPCOM)"
The relationship between risk and reward is the very basis of fighting games.
Every action you make has a predetermined risk and reward structure. For example, in "Street Fighter II", using a special attack called Hadoken involves risks such as:
• You may fail to input the command.
• You lose the freedom to move for a certain duration.
• Your opponent may simply avoid it by jumping.
It meanwhile offers rewards such as:
• You can attack the opponent from a safe distance.
• It makes his next move predictable - he will jump!
• It act as a shield.
If your opponent makes an action like jump, he'll be constrained by another risk and reward structure. Therefore, the key in winning fighting games is to calculate your and your opponent's actions' risk and reward balance and to exploit his weaknesses with your strengths - it's not a simple tit-for-tat game.
"Puyo Pop (1992, SEGA / COMPILE)"
In action puzzle games like "Puyo Pop", piling up blocks, which eventually kill you, is the risk.
Removing many blocks at once will clean up your accumulated stress. The amount of pleasure you gain from it is proportional to the number of removed blocks.
The important point here is: good games allow you to decide how much risk to take. Beginners will take low-risk and low-reward strategies. More skilled players will pursue big rewards by taking high risk strategies.
In this way, you can build a game which can entertain a wide variety of people.
[End Quote]
In a play, the only important decision you can make is, "to continue it or stop it". Actually, it's a no-brainer choice because the only two situations you should choose the latter are either when you find a more fun activity or when its outcomes sink below zero.
Moreover, your decisions produce no direct effects on other players. Therefore a play is, however enjoyable, just a personal pastime activity. You can enjoy it only when you don't have to worry about time, which explains why kids and animals love to play.
But, rules can transform it into a much more meaningful social activity, a game, by directly connecting all participants' outcomes.
It's so fulfilling that it makes you forget time - you must remember playing games through the night.
There are some more important differences between a play and a gameplay.
In any play, your outcomes are set to decrease over time and eventually become zero because doing single activity for a long time causes physical or mental fatigue. However, in a gameplay, your outcomes can at anytime change both upwards and downwards depending on your and your opponents' decisions. So, a decreasing outcome doesn't always mean bad because your next move can change it drastically.
Besides, to make a good decision, you have to make the most of your mental and physical abilities, which means your decisions vividly represent your personality. So, you can express yourself by just playing games.
Nowadays, sharing game-play videos on YouTube and Twitch became a trend. In addition, so-called eSports grew into a global industry. Personally, I don't watch both of them, but I can understand why they became large industries in this context.
By combining plays and rules, human beings uncovered and cultivated the secret power of games. But it doesn't mean any kind of rule can transform a mere play into a much more meaningful game.
Whether a play can goes well with a set of rules is a matter of chemistry.
So, in the next article, I'll explain it in a chemical way.
In the last article, I wrote you can understand how to set up crystal clear rules by observing your body.
Now let's think about its structure.
We are currently living thanks to the coordinated activities of various kinds of organs. When you breathe in, air is sucked into the lungs through the trachea. Inside the lungs, oxygen contained in the air is exchanged with needless carbon dioxide in blood. The blood is carried to the heart through veins and the heart sends the blood filled with oxygen to the entire body.
Although the overall process appears to be very complex, each organ does only simple tasks. Basically, the heart is just a pump and veins are pipes. And looking into more details, each organ consists of thousands of molecules, each of which in turn consists of tiny atoms.
Every game (including analog ones) has a similar multi-layered hierarchical structure:
* Rules are the most basic building blocks, or atoms, of games.
* By combining several rules, we can build a "gameplay".
* A game experience emerges from a combination of several gameplays. And which one to choose as the core gameplay determines the genre it belongs to.
I'm going to explain them one by one.
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Firstly, rules are the most basic building blocks of games.
Of course, beautiful graphics and sounds can enrich the experience and fascinating storylines can keep attracting your attention, but they have absolutely no power to alter its underlying structures. So, they are just cosmetics.
For example, although an antique chess set made of ivory is truly beautiful and can be priced at more than ten thousand dollars, the chess match played with it is not at all different from the one played with a cheap plastic chess set.
Also, there are great video games which contain absolutely no graphics.
"Zork (1980, Infocom)", a text adventure game, succeeded in depicting a huge underground empire and scary monsters living there solely with texts.
In "Rogue (1980, developed by students at University of California)", an RPG, you can explore a deep dungeon and experience highly tactical battles. Although the enemies in the game like trolls and dragons are simply represented with a single character (like "T" and "D"), encountering them would terrify many players since they knew how strong those monsters were.
Zork and Rogue spawned many followers, which formed game genres called "visual novels" and "Rogue-like games", respectively. These genres are especially popular in Japan and "Pokemon Mystery Dungeon" franchise, a Rogue-like game, sold tens of millions of copies globally. It's no doubt that the popularity of Pokemon characters made a great contribution to the success, but its core gameplay is exactly the same one as that of Rogue.
"Pokemon Mystery Dungeon (2005, Nintendo)" on GBA
In contrast to graphics, sounds and narratives, rules determine substantial aspects of games and there exist no games which contain no rules; if one does have no rules, it's just a "play", not a game.
Little kids are good at finding fun or instinctive pleasure in pure form of play. They can spend a whole day alone constructing and destroying buildings with toy blocks without having any specific purpose. For them, rules given by adults must be just an annoyance. But as they grow, they get bored with such primitive plays and become interested in more sophisticated games.
This is similar to the process where we change our tastes and attitudes towards music. When we were infants, we responded to any kind of sound. But as we grow, we tend to become more sensitive to human voices and sounds generated by musical instruments.
It's not just a coincidence because games, voices and musical sounds share two characteristics: all of them are composed following some rules and can function as a medium to convey abstract ideas or feelings.
By using voices, or languages, we can express thoughts and feelings. Naturally, it requires us to follow common rules; otherwise we can't understand what each other are saying. Music can convey more ambiguous feelings. As you know, music can easily spread beyond cultural and national borders. That's because fundamental rules of music like scales and harmonies are following not cultural, but mathematical rules.
Thus, although rules inevitably restrict our freedom to some extent, in return they provide common grounds of understanding.
Rules in games work in the same way.
Kicking a ball is an enjoyable play, but without any rules, it's no more than just a pastime activity. By adding hundreds of rules, which limited our freedom, the pure play evolved to become a global game, football. We can share the same fun and excitement by playing or watching the sport. The fact that currently more than a billion people watch football matches around the globe shows us game is a medium which can cross any social boundaries like class, gender and race. So, you can say game is, like music, a global language.
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Up until now, I've been talking about both analog and digital games without focusing on their differences. However, there actually exist big differences between them.
Usually, rules of analog games are written in books and enforced by human referees. For example, FIFA, the governing body of international football, annually publishes an official rulebook called "Laws of the Game" and appoints referees for international matches. However, written rules can cause problems as some of them allows more than one interpretation. Moreover, human referees sometimes make wrong calls mistakenly, or intentionally in exchange for bribes.
On the other hand, rules of video games are directly embedded within their computer programs and enforced by the very computer which runs games. Since the way to interpret computer programs is predetermined and computers are immune to bribery, you can always expect fair and accurate judgements, which enables creating finely-tuned gameplays.
Shigeru Miyamoto (1998 @ Nintendo)
Before computers were invented, rules of games were not firmly settled and judgements of human referees were inaccurate. Computers solved those problems, but they also created another one.
Although high accuracy of judgements is useful in developing games, players may feel discouraged as computers treat them in insensitive ways.
Therefore, it's our important job to create engaging experiences.
- Game Hihyou (Jul 1998 issue, p.24) Micro Magazine Publishing in Japanese
It has another advantage: you don't have to follow external rules and laws.
When you play football, you not only can't touch the ball with your hands unless you are the goalkeeper, which is prohibited by the rule, you also can't fly in the sky, which is prohibited by the laws of physics. Since there are no such restrictions in video games, you can fly to the moon and view Earth from space.
This combination of almost perfectly accurate judgements and the complete freedom from external rules is the main reason we are attracted by video games.
You can reproduce any kind of fun experience you encounter in real life as long as it can be broken down into individual rules, which is the most important job of game designers.
Hideo Kojima (2004 @ Konami)
We, professional game designers, are devoting our lives to searching for rules which can create fun experiences no other games have ever provided.
- Dorimaga (vol.23, p.61) Softbank Publishing in Japanese
Hideo Kojima (2002 @ Konami)
I believe a game designer is a person who can figure out "why something is fun" and also have an ability to construct a game based on it.
To do that, firstly we have to find some rules and systems which can reproduce the fun experience. Then, we consider what kinds of characters, worlds and levels will enhance its gameplays. It's only after that we think about what kinds of narratives and cutscenes will be appealing.
In the case of Metal Gear series, firstly I made the hide-and-seek system, then created protagonists like Solid Snake and Raiden, and finally constructed the narratives which explain why they have to carry out sneaking missions.
- Weekly Famitsu (around Dec 2002) Enterbrain in Japanese
Shigeru Miyamoto (1999 @ Nintendo)
To make the jump action in Super Mario Bros, firstly, we had to decide whether we should calculate the movement of Mario using a math formula or move him along a predetermined path. Then, we considered what should happen when he jumps down to lower grounds and what about the opposite case. After that, we had to decide how many milliseconds it should take to initiate the action after pressing the A button, and so on and on.
If I write down the rules behind the jump in detail, even kids can understand its mechanics. But, they'll never notice how many rules we actually put into the game. "Designing a game" means deciding every detail of it and representing them in a mathematical way.
- Game Hihyou (Nov 1999 issue, p.57) Micro Magazine Publishing in Japanese
So, the invention of computers enabled games to demonstrate their full potential.
Now that I've explained the importance of rules, which are atoms of games, I'll talk about molecules of games - gameplays.
The US video game industry was created by Atari in 1972 with the debut of Pong and almost crashed in 1983. It was not completely dead, but no one knew how to cure it.
In 1985, Nintendo sent a hero named Mario to North America and magically revived the industry. Although it was five years later that the plumber became "Dr. Mario", he had the perfect prescription for the disease - what I called the three elements of successful modern video games.
Pong was able to achieve success because it owned two of them.
As I wrote before, the first and most fundamental element is "instinctive Pleasure" or Fun. When it was released, the vast majority of people didn't know anything about the new kind of entertainment. So, the fact that they could control objects on a TV screen was simply a fun experience for them. Besides, the iconic "pong" sound amplified their pleasure.
But, that doesn't explain why Nolan Bushnell's first attempt, Computer Space, didn't go well. What made the difference was whether it had "crystal clear Rules" or not.
Of course, that's the second element.
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Here, the phrase "crystal clear" means easily understandable for anybody.
Some students at Stanford did enjoy playing the game. So, for those who could understand its rules, it was a fun game to play. But it ended up as a commercial failure because the rules were hardly understandable for ordinary people.
Every video game has two parts. To understand and remember new rules is the painful part and to enjoy gameplays is the fun part. Importantly, only those who endured the pain can have maximum fun. Therefore, unfortunately, they only experienced hardship and stopped playing it before getting any rewards for the effort.
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Playing a game is somewhat akin to investing in financial markets.
We reluctantly invest our precious time and money in a game anticipating it will eventually pay out some rewards which at least offset the cost. Currently we know from experience that most video games published by large companies are worth the cost, but people back then weren't so sure about it.
People tend to become cautious when they invest in an asset about which they know little.
Let's take Bitcoin for example.
Until first half of this decade, few people considered the crypto-currency had real investment value and no one knew how many dollars each Bitcoin should be worth. So, people had to invest their money keeping in mind that the asset might turn out to be completely worthless.
I assume those who played Computer Space should have felt the same way. They didn't know how much fun the game could provide. So they spent only a moderate amount of time to understand its rules.
But, the rules were not crystal clear. To enjoy it, they had to understand at least:
* How to control the spaceship with three buttons (rotate left, rotate right and thrust)
* How enemy UFOs behave
* How to shoot down UFOs with missiles
* How to avoid being shot by UFOs
There was no tutorial stage in the game and its arcade cabinet wasn't equipped with a handy instruction manual. Therefore, if they really wanted to enjoy it, they would first have to discover rules by conducting experiments like scientists and next would have to practice controlling the spaceship again and again like a trainee pilot. In short, it was far from an entertainment for everybody.
On contrary, Pong had only two essential rules to remember:
* You can move the racket vertically with a knob
* You'll never lose unless you miss the ball
After learning them, the fun part begins immediately. Moreover, there was no need for you to discover the rules because they were designed to be crystal clear at a glance. Its arcade cabinet had only one input device (the knob) and the second rule was written on its center as "avoid missing ball for high score".
Most people would have grasped the rules in their first attempts or by watching other people playing it. So, they only had to invest just a little time to enjoy maximum fun. Although Computer Space was much more fun and deep game, they preferred Pong because it was a sure investment for them.
Having crystal clear rules is especially beneficial for multi-player games.
In a game with easily understandable rules, it takes a relatively small amount of time and effort to learn essential skills. Moreover, it's almost impossible to fool your opponents because there are no vague or hidden rules you can exploit to gain advantages.
So, crystal clear rules provide level playing field for everybody.
Therefore, once a person played Pong and found the game fun, he would invite his friends to play with. Since the game provided only a few strategies and techniques, it would take just a little time before they caught up with him. After that, they were able to compete with him on a level playing field. It's not hard to imagine they would also invite their own fiends. So, that's why the game became a social phenomenon.
By the way, you may think the rules of Pong are easily understandable because of their simplicity, but that's not true. You can understand them easily because they are very intuitive.
In the case of Table Tennis, a predecessor of Pong, you can also move the racket horizontally. This too is apparently a simple rule. But it made the game much complex in a bad sense. It might not be the case if the game was made for NES. However, to play it on Magnavox Odyssey, you had to use two almost identical knobs to controls the racket, which was far from intuitive.
Like this, a bad combination of simple rules suddenly makes a game counter-intuitive and difficult to comprehend. Then, how can we set up crystal clear rules?
You can understand it by observing your body through the lens of a microscope.
A few months after the release of Computer Space, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded their own company. They named it Atari, after a Japanese term used in Go, an old Chinese game.
Then Bushnell made two moves, one of which yielded almost nothing and the other one created the multi-billion dollar video game industry.
At first, he made a plan to develop a racing game. Although he and Dabney devoted most of their effort to the project, it didn't go smoothly.
As a separate move, he hired a young engineer named Al Alcorn, who belonged to his former employee, Ampex. To teach how to develop a video game, he gave the newcomer an assignment to make a simple ping-pong game. Initially, Bushnell didn't feel any enthusiasm about the game because he was busy working on his own project - and it was a borrowed idea.
About a month before the foundation of Atari, he visited a trade show in which Magnavox, an electronics company, demonstrated the world's first home video game console named Magnavox Odyssey. The machine contained several games such as Hockey and Football. Among them, a game simply titled "Table Tennis" attracted his attention.
Table Tennis for the Magnavox Odyssey
Of course, the core concepts of "Pong", the world's first commercially successful video game, came from it.
But, Pong is far from a perfect copy of Table Tennis - and that's the reason of its huge success.
--
In Table Tennis, you can control the racket (a white rectangle) with two knobs; one for vertical and the other for horizontal movements. Following the rules of the sport, when your ball go out of the table, you'll lose a point. Besides, you can alter trajectories of return shots with a knob labeled "ENGLISH".
As a table tennis simulator, it was apparently too simple. However, as an entertainment for everybody, most of whom didn't know anything about video games, it was too complex.
Therefore, if Bushnell had had enough time to copy the game by himself, he would have made a perfect copy, and it would have ended up as a commercial failure just like Computer Space. But he didn't expect the same high standards for the newly hired engineer.
So, he took away excess parts from the game, and only its bare bones were left.
• Now you have only one knob which moves the racket vertically.
• When the ball touches an edge of the game field, it simply bounces back.
Thus, the development of one of the world's most simple and beautiful video game began.
--
When he ordered Alcorn to make the ping-pong game, he didn't thought it would become a commercial product. So, it's understandable that he was very much surprised when he saw its first prototype three months later.
As he expected, it was a simple game. But it was much more fun than he expected.
At that time, his own project was a little bit stuck and seemed to require some more months to finish. So, he changed his plan and decided to make a commercial product based on Alcorn's prototype. He gave a name - Pong - to it after the iconic sound effect it produces when the racket hits the ball.
Having got support from the entire company, the game was improved and sophisticated day by day. Its arcade cabinet contained no excess parts. It had a monitor, two knobs for two players, and that's all. On its center, the objective of the game was written in just one line: "Avoid Missing Ball For High Score".
Pong (Atari, 1972)
In September 1972, its development was almost finished and they carried out its first location test at a bar.
The result was much above their expectation. A lot of people gathered around the machine and played it again and again. Some of them got so addicted to it that they would form a queue in front of the bar before its opening hour.
There's a well known story that the machine sometimes broke because too many people injected too many coins into it. Feeling people's enthusiasm for their game, he increased the number of testing locations one after another, and saw almost identical situation anywhere.
In short, it attracted people and money like a magnet. To build a machine, they spent around four hundreds dollars and each machine constantly earned more than a hundred dollars.
Seeing its strong performance, Bushnell decided to manufacture all machines to run Pong by themselves. Originally, his business plan was to create video games and sell their licenses to arcade game manufacturers. But at this point he realized it was a ridiculous idea.
Now that he's found a clear path to success, why not grab the chance? That was the moment when he began to walk the path to become a millionaire.
Of course, he didn't have money to build a large factory. So, at first he rented a garage office as a temporary factory. It was truly temporary because they relocated its factory to larger places for three times in less than a year.
Eventually, they rented a bankrupted recreation facility and refurbished it as a factory, in which around two hundred people worked and as many as a hundred machines a day was produced.
And the rest is history: Home Pong, Breakout and Atari 2600...
But its success story ended suddenly. Of course, I'm talking about the video game industry's crash in 1983. It was like a hurricane or a tsunami - retailers in the US realized the fragility of the business.
In time of disaster, we need a savior.
At this time, the hero came from the other side of the Pacific Ocean - with a hat and mustache.
After getting a bachelor degree in electric engineering, Nolan Bushnell was hired by Ampex, an electronic audio-visual manufacturer.
One day, he saw an advertisement of a newly released computer and was astonished at its price, because it cost less than a tenth of a PDP-1. Although it was still too expensive to use as a coin-operated amusement machine, he thought he could make an even more affordable computer by himself.
After carrying out research and simulation of its profitability, he decided to jump on the opportunity to create his own business. But he was not too stupid to quit his job immediately to become a self-employed entrepreneur. Rather, he took advantage of that.
As an engineer in the company, he was able to buy electronic parts he needed at wholesale prices using his business connections. Moreover, the company used to provide generous benefits for its employees - they could get various kinds of electronic part for almost free when they needed one for their hobby.
But, to enjoy those benefits he had to fulfill his duty as an employee, which meant only limited free time after work was available for the development. So, he invited one of his senior colleagues named Ted Dabney (later became a co-founder of Atari) to do the development works together.
After doing their work in the office, they would gather at their second office - Bushnell's house - to develop the machine and a Spacewar clone for it.
They had worked extremely hard for months and a working prototype of their first product was developed. To make the game named "Computer Space" a commercial product, Bushnell made a contract with Nutting Associates, a coin-operated amusement machine manufacturer.
Although the finished version of the game lacked some features of Spacewar including gravitational effects and didn't have a multi-player mode, its graphical quality was not far from its original. To make it more attractive, Bushnell designed a futuristic-looking upright cabinet. Until this point, he must have been sure of its success.
In fact, when he carried out a location test at a bar called Dutch Goose, many people gathered around the machine and enjoyed playing it. But, at most of the other bars he used as test locations, almost no one touched the machine, why?
That's because it was a too complex and difficult game for ordinary people. It inherited both good parts and bad parts from Spacewar. Among them, the most problematic one was its control system.
You had to use three buttons (thrust, rotate-right, rotate-left) to control your spaceship and another button to fire missiles. And since there was no brake button, you had to carefully control its speed.
I know it doesn't sound so difficult for you. But when the game was released in 1971, there were no commercial mobile phones and not all people used TV remotes or ATM machines in their daily lives. So, ordinary people back then wouldn't have used more complex machines than cars. Although the machine came with several pages of instruction guides, they wouldn't bother to read it since they were gathering there not to learn something new, but to enjoy some alcohol.
The test at Dutch Goose was an exception because it was located close to Stanford University. For students at Stanford, the game should have been much easier than their daily academic activities. Besides, some of them might have already played Spacewar or its ported versions.
In short, it was a fun game, but just a few people was able to enjoy it.
Eventually, the game took its place in history as the world's first arcade video game. But for its publisher, Nutting Associates, it ended up as just a commercial failure.
However, it became the springboard for Bushnell's later success. He received a handsome amount of license fee and learned that "Fun" is an important element of video games, but not everything.
It was not long before he found the second element of successful video games and became a millionaire.
When Steve Russell and his friends completed the development of Spacewar, there was no market for video games. So, they allowed anybody to freely copy it. Furthermore, DEC used it as a testing tool in the production line of PDP-1 because it made use of a variety of functions of the machine. After checking the products, workers of DEC didn't bother to erase it. Hence, the game became a free gift for buyers.
One of those buyers was the University of Utah, where Nolan Bushnell, a co-founder of Atari, learned electrical engineering.
--
He was born in Utah in 1943. In his childhood, amateur radio captured his enthusiasm. He earned money to buy radio parts by fixing his neighbors' home electronics like TVs and washing machines. This experience helped him when he later made prototypes of arcade video games by himself.
After growing up, he entered the university in 1963. Nowadays, it is regarded as one of the top US universities in the field of computer science, especially computer graphics. But they didn't have a department for computer science at that time. So, it took a few years before he touched a PDP-1 there. However, during the days before then, he learned the basics of entertainment business from his working experience in a nearby amusement park.
During weekends and summer breaks, he worked as a game operator at Lagoon Amusement Park in Salt Lake City. Although there were no video games yet, he was able to learn how to induce people to spend money for amusements. In addition, as he was good at repairing machines, when some amusement machines broke down, other workers would call him for help. So, he was able to observe how those machines worked.
After having worked there for years, he was promoted to the manager of all games in the park and learned the business side of entertainment.
Nolan Bushnell (2009):
I was actually the manager of the games department of an amusement park when I was at college, so I understood the coin-op side of the games business very well.
Actually, he was not the only person who tried to make commercial video games. But among them, he was probably the only one who correctly understood both technical requirements and business aspects of video games.
--
Now let's back to the story of his academic life.
During the last half of the 1960's, the University of Utah hired several talented computer science researches including David Evans and Ivan Sutherland - the duo later became known as pioneers of modern CG technology - and allocated much money and research effort to the area. Although the newly created computer science department owned some computers, undergraduates like Bushnell were only allowed to use them during computer science classes.
Nevertheless, he visited the computer room almost daily and became friends with some of teaching assistants of computer science. Thus, he was granted access to the machines in off-peak hours.
There, he learned the basics of computer programming and played some of the earliest video games including Spacewar, which became his favorite. He and his friends also developed some video games, ranging from a primitive one like Tic-Tac-Toe to a little bit more sophisticated ones, but none of them were in the same league as the revolutionary shooter.
From his working experience in the amusement park, he knew what kinds of games would attract how many customers. He thought this exciting video game could attract large crowds if he could make it an arcade game. But he soon noticed that it was almost impossible to make any profit from the game because a PDP-1 cost around a million dollars (in today's dollars).
So, he had to dismiss the idea at the time. But the day to test his thoughts had arrived unexpectedly soon.
Spacewar was developed by some members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). Despite its name, their main interest shifted from the hobby to digital computers after they found a TX-0 in the campus.
As I wrote in the last article, the machine was a successor of the Whirlwind computer, the world's first computer with real-time processing capability. It ended its role in the Lincoln Laboratory when a more powerful computer called TX-2 was built. So, the lab transferred the outdated machine to the university's campus, anticipating it to be used for research and education purposes.
The machine was managed by its Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Although MIT also owned some large computers like IBM 704, their use was strictly limited to serious research projects and ordinary students like the members of the club didn't have right to use them.
By contrast, the newly installed machine was managed under a much more open access policy. Moreover, the machine's administrator was an assistant professor named Jack Dennis, who was a former member of TMRC. So, they were allowed to use the machine unless it was used by researchers for important works. They were soon amazed by the advanced features of the machine and almost hooked on it.
Thus, those model railroad fans became probably the world's first computer geeks.
A few years later, they heard the news that an even more advanced machine, PDP-1, was coming to their campus. They were so thrilled that some of them soon began to make plans about what kinds of programs to write. Among them, Steve Russell and his friends made the most ambitious plan - they dreamed of making a video game in which you can experience a war in space.
Actually, even TX-0 had some entertaining programs like "Mouse in the Maze", "HAX" and, of course, a Tic-Tac-Toe. But they were developed only to demonstrate its high computing power and advanced features.
What the geeks of TMRC was going to do was the opposite. They used high computing power of PDP-1 to develop an entertaining program based on science fiction stories, which was their common hobby other than model railroads and computers. Especially, they loved "Lensman", a space opera fiction series written by E.E. Smith, and wanted to make a game where they can become a pilot of a spaceship.
That's why Spacewar became an innovative game. Unlike other "games" developed to demonstrate latest computers - and much similar to the case when William Higinbotham created the world's first video game, Tennis for Two - Steve Russell and his friends used the latest computer solely to entertain people including themselves.
I'll not write the details of the development history because it's so famous. Rather, I'd like to point out an important factor which enabled Spacewar to become a successful video game - MIT's open and cooperative culture.
Although it was long before the word "open-source" became commonly used by software developers, the source codes of the game were completely open to anyone. They were recorded on tapes, which were stored in drawers in their clubhouse. So, those who wanted to know its software architecture had no hurdles to access. And some of them in turn made great contributions.
It's a fact that Steve Russell constructed the basic structure of the game. But what really made the game a masterpiece were additional programs written by his friends. Without their contributions, the game would end up as just a technical demonstration of the latest machine, which in turn would delay the birth of the video game industry considering Nolan Bushnell, a co-founder of Atari, made video game his business because he saw a huge business opportunity in Spacewar.
Among them, the most important improvement was made by Dan Edwards. When he saw an early version of the game, he complained to Russell that controlling a spaceship was just boring because its movement was too linear. So, he made a suggestion to apply some gravitational effects of the sun, but Russell dismissed it by saying the machine didn't have enough power for such calculation. Edwards was so confident in his idea that he decided to write the program by himself. When it was completed, Russell saw no value in it and only reluctantly merged it with his main program.
Steve Russell (1997) :
Dan Edwards' works added nothing other than more complexity to the existed program - it didn't improve the game.
Shin Denshi Rikkoku 4 (ISBN: 414080274X, p.60) NHK Publishing in Japanese,
This comment is very interesting because it shows that even the lead programmer of this incredible game didn't understand what makes a video game fun. Contrary to his understanding, the gravitational effects is the key factor of its success because it introduced the concept of "tactics" into video games.
While it's true that the gravitational effects increased the difficulty of controlling a spaceship, mastering it is an enjoyable activity; skiing and skating also require some practice before you actually experience the fun part, but millions of people enjoy them.
And it also means that your opponent can't easily predict your moves, which increases your chance to beat more skilled players by chance.
Actually, you can make absolutely unpredictable moves in the game. When you are in a desperate situation, there's a last resort function for you called "hyperspace".
It was developed by another member of the club named J. M. Graetz. By using it, your spaceship will disappear and later reappear at a randomly chosen point in the game field. Of course, there's some limits. You can only use it a few times for a single play and your situation may not get better - your spaceship may reappear in front of the opponent or a point very close to the sun, which destroys nearby spaceships.
Although those two additional features were not very well-designed, they did add some tactical depth to the game, and people loved them.
However, in the case of video games, "deep" doesn't always mean good; it's a double-edged sword. That's the key to understand why Nolan Bushnell's attempt to make money from the game failed.
Computers and electronic gadgets can be categorized in several different ways. In a standard way, we categorize them like Supercomputers, Desktop PCs, Notebooks, Tablet PCs, Smartphones, Smart-watches, VR devices, Smart home devices and so on.
But ultimately, there's only two distinctive categories of computers: the ones meant to be operated by organizations vs. by individuals.
Needless to say, supercomputers belong to the former category and most of the others on the list above belong to the latter.
To be clear, if you are a business tycoon or someone like that, you might be able to own a latest supercomputer but will need specialists to "operate" it. And, of course, almost all large organizations in the world owns PCs but operating a personal computer doesn't require more than one person.
The important thing here is, those two categories represent not their capabilities but their suitable applications. Even in today, playing a FPS on a supercomputer is not a good idea - it's capable but not suitable. So, we needed some kind of a personal computer with real-time processing capability to develop and play high-quality video games.
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The invention of the personal computer was not an evolution, but a revolution.
In the industrial revolution, we found a smart way to extend our physical abilities. Industrial machines powered by fossil fuels had multiplied the productivity of individual workers and new kinds of transportation, most notably steam locomotives, had reduced the time required to move goods and people around the world.
Similarly, personal computers extended our mental abilities - I think you don't need clues.
--
The history of the revolution began in 1955 at the same place where Whirlwind computer was developed - MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. Until then, practically all digital computers were supercomputers - they were meant to be operated by organizations like governments and giant companies.
The revolutionary, Ken Olsen, was a relatively junior member at the lab. Although he was not deeply involved in the development of Whirlwind, he was very much impressed by its high capability and potential.
His main role there was to evaluate usefulness of new technologies and develop experimental machines using them. One of those works, TX-0, changed his fortune and opened a new frontier in computing. As its extended name "Transistorized eXperimental computer zero" represents, it was the first transistor computer developed at the lab. Although it inherited the core architecture of Whirlwind series, which consisted of thousands of vacuum tubes, it was much smaller and required less maintenance work.
YouTube: TX-0 (MIT Lincoln Laboratory, 1955)
Back then, most research effort was focused on making more and more powerful computers. For example, IBM was also an early adapter of transistor technology and they used it to develop more powerful supercomputers (they preferred to call them "mainframes"). For them, it just meant that they could cram more electronic parts into the same space once occupied by large vacuum tubes.
But Olsen saw the technology from a completely different perspective. He thought he could make a more affordable and easy-to-operate computers by combining it with real-time processing capability and intuitive user interface of Whirlwind series.
To realize the vision, he decided to leave the Lincoln Laboratory for founding his own company, DEC.
--
Here, I assert that PDP-1, its first computer released in 1960 and the machine on which Spacewar ran, was the world's first "personal computer" in a practical sense.
Although it cost around a million dollars (in today's dollars) and you couldn't move it alone, it was meant to be operated by individual users and did provide features and I/O devices which later became the industry's standard.
For example, its users would write a program with a typewriter-like keyboard. Then, the machine would load the program and ran it in real-time. They could see the results on a CRT display and could control it with a keyboard or pointing devices. When they found a coding error, they could debug it on the machine itself.
All of those facts are hardly surprising because they're what we usually expect from modern PCs, which in turn supports my assertion.
Therefore, although DEC officially introduced PDP-1 as a "minicomputer", it was undoubtedly a forerunner of today's PCs.
But like other innovative products, it didn't become popular overnight. First of all, there was no market for such kind of product. Moreover, it lacked a killer application software to prove the usefulness of real-time computing.
So, it was not just a coincidence that the innovative video game, Spacewar, was developed for the world's first personal computer - they needed each other.
To motivate and assist software developers, PDP-1 provided a simple and useful command set and various kinds of optional I/O devices including "light pens". Also, its hardware architecture was so simple that its users could connect homemade devices - some members of Spacewar team built a gamepad by themselves.
In short, it was a perfect toy for geeks who had enough time and passion to learn new technologies - MIT have never lacked such kind of people.
So, let's resume the development story of Spacewar.
One of the most essential technologies for video games, "real-time processing capability", was born from a fear during the Cold War era.
In 1949, The Soviet Union successfully carried out its first atomic bomb test. Combined with its capability to send bombers to the mainland US, the nuclear threat suddenly became serious.
Having recognized the shifting power balance in the Cold War, the Department of Defense (DoD) decided to replace their outdated air defense system. They feared hostile aircraft could sneak into the airspace of the US as their radar system's coverage area was not enough.
The most obvious way to improve its capability was to dramatically increase the number of radar sets. And since the ultimate objective of the air defense system was not just to detect but to intercept hostile aircraft before taking any military action, it was almost meaningless unless it could provide real-time airspace information.
Therefore, the system had to receive and process data coming from hundreds of radars without delay, but there were no computers which meet such high demand.
At that time, there was an associate professor of Physics at MIT named George Valley. He also had concern about Soviet nuclear strikes and had been making suggestions to the Air Force about improving air defense.
So, the DoD launched Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee and appointed him as its chairman. Then, he consulted several computer manufacturers about the possibility of realizing real-time computations, but none of them had a good solution.
Fortunately, he found the answer lying in his own campus. During the WWII, MIT was involved in various military research projects. Among them, a project named Whirlwind attracted his interest.
Whirlwind computer, a resulting product of the project had a massive computing power, which was enabled by very efficient and powerful memory units invented by one of its members. The project had been receiving funds from the Office of Naval Research and the machine was meant to be used for a flight simulator. But after years of delay of completion, the sponsor lost interest and decided to abandon it.
It was at just this time that Valley heard from one of his colleagues about its technological progressiveness. So, he decided to invite members of the project to join his new project and let them continue developing more fast and powerful computers.
Having found a promising computer technology, he was given a green light to advance the project to the implementation phase. Thus, the committee was dissolved and a large project currently known as Project Lincoln and the construction of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory was started. After just a few years, they hired thousands of talented researchers and engineers and the lab became an epicenter of innovation.
--
For example, the Internet has its origin here.
To gather information from radar sets installed in all parts of the nation, they required a reliable and efficient data transfer network. A centralized network which covers the entire nation is easy to build, but apparently vulnerable to destruction as its central hub becomes the single point of failure. Therefore, they divided the nation into 24 areas, each of which was managed by a direction center, and constructed a distributed network among them.
Although today's Internet was evolved from another military-funded network called ARPANET, its concept was thus born in the Lincoln Laboratory.
--
Anyway, having received abundant funds, the Whirlwind computer was much improved in speed.
By 1951, it had evolved enough to process incoming data in real-time, so they carried out their first live test of an interception.
It went perfect. The machine was able to process data without delay and the location of the aircraft which acted as an enemy was successfully transmitted to the interceptor aircraft.
So, this is the beginning of real-time computing.
Eventually, this technology became the driving engine behind video games but it was not a foreseeable future for people back then.
AN/FSQ-7, the deployed version of Whirlwind, not only cost an enormous amount of money, but also required a dedicated building with expensive cooling equipment to prevent it from overheating. Besides, since it was composed of thousands of very fragile and unreliable vacuum tubes, specially trained maintenance workers had to be standing by 24/7.
Therefore, the computer itself had little impact outside the military, but it indirectly caused the creation of two distinct categories of computers, which have been affecting our lives in many ways since then.
In this article, I'd like to talk about a subtle but important question.
• Tennis for Two - the first video game recognized by the public - was born in 1958 and played by hundreds (or maybe thousands) of people.
• Spacewar! - a legendary video game which paved the way for the creation of the industry - was born in 1962.
As you know, every innovative product spawn copycats, which sometimes surpasses the original in popularity (and in rare cases makes another innovation). But during the four years, no other notable video games were developed, why?
To make an innovation, you need two things: strong will and proper technologies. Considering the fact that Tennis for Two attracted many people's attention, there should have been some people who tried to mimic the success, but failed. Therefore, what lacked was some essential technology for video games - then what was it?
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Earliest digital computers (excluding experimental ones) were developed to solve complex math problems, mostly related to national defense programs. For example, "Colossus" was developed by the British government in 1943 to decode Nazi Germany's military messages encoded by the famous Enigma; "ENIAC" was developed by the US government in 1946 to improve aiming accuracy of artillery.
In 1952, IBM released their first mass-produced large-scale electronic computer called "IBM 701", which meant digital computers gradually had been expanding their territory towards other industries. But since it cost around a hundred thousands dollars (in today's dollars) per month, only handful of giant companies like Boeing and GE could afford to rent it.
Although those computers cost vast amounts of money, their computing power and functionality were not so high by today's standards.
The most important thing is, those machines didn't have "real-time processing capability". In other words, they could not deal with multiple tasks in parallel.
Today, even with the cheapest computers, we can do many things simultaneously; you can do your taxes while watching videos on YouTube and chatting with your friends online. But those early computers had no such capability, and even worse, computers were very scarce in proportion to demand. So, the users had to wait hours or even days before receiving a calculated result.
In such circumstances, it was practically impossible to develop a video game which must process your inputs in real time; no one would play a game which takes minutes to move a character after pushing a button.
That was the reason why there was four years' gap between Tennis for Two and Spacewar's respective debut.
Actually, both of those two games were developed in exceptional environments.
As I described briefly in the last article, Tennis for Two was running on an ANALOG computer. In contrast to digital computers familiar to us, which deal with discrete numerical values (0 and 1), analog computers use physical length or angle of objects to solve problems; the most primitive form of analog computer is slide rules.
By their nature, analog computers are not suitable for works which require high precision. But they gave nearly real-time response to inputs and were much more affordable compared with digital ones. So, it was a very smart choice.
It reminds me of a development history of Game Boy. When the handheld gaming device was being developed, color liquid-crystal displays were already available for mass production. But Gunpei Yokoi, its producer, instead decided to use common black-and-white displays because they were much more cheaper and energy-efficient.
A year and a half after Game Boy's debut, SEGA released a would-be competitor with a color-LCD named Game Gear. Although its color display was truly appealing to the possible customers, it ended up gaining only a small portion of the market because it cost about twice as much as Game Boy and it drained batteries too fast (nearly unimaginable to play it without an AC adapter).
Gunpei Yokoi (1997 @ KOTO Laboratory):
The only big advantage of color-LCD was its vivid first impression. At that time, it had more disadvantages than advantages.
- Yokoi Gunpei game kan (ISBN: 4480432930) published by Chikumashobo on 6 August 2015, p.156
Anyway, history tells us when it comes to entertainments like video games, people doesn't care whether its underlying technologies are advanced or not. All they care is what kinds of new fun it brings.
--
The other innovative game, Spacewar, was developed by some students and faculty members at MIT who belonged to the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC).
In the early 1960s, some universities in the US already owned digital computers, but only limited number of people were allowed to use them. In that sense, MIT, one of the world's centers of technology, was no exception.
However, some members of TMRC were exceptionally lucky because a former member of the club one day assumed the management of a latest digital computer called PDP-1. It was relatively smaller and cheaper than other machines, but very powerful and functional. In fact, it was the world's first commercially available digital computer with real-time processing capability.
From that day, a room which housed the machine became their second clubhouse and they began to compete each other over how effectively they could demonstrate its power, which lead to the creation of Spacewar.
But before moving the story forward, I'd like to turn the clock back to the days when the world's first real-time digital computer, which was an ancestor of PDP-1, was being developed.
We don't have to go anywhere - because it occurred here, MIT.
Before go into the details of the creation of modern video games, I'd like to talk a bit about the earliest video games. Although the video game industry, which was created by Atari, has only less than 50 years' history, computer games are said to be as old as computers themselves.
Unfortunately, no one knows who invented the world's very first computer game - probably, the inventor and people around him thought it was too trivial thing to record.
The first well-documented and widely recognized example of entertaining use of computers is "OXO", which was developed by a scientist in Cambridge using a huge computer called EDSAC. Some researchers and journalists argue this is the world's first video game, but I don't agree with them.
The game undeniably has some historical importance - it was made in 1952 - but it's not more than a single-player version of Tic-Tac-Toe, as you can see in the video below. So, it should rather be regarded as a digital simulation of an analog game.
YouTube: OXO on an emulator (University of Cambridge, 1952)
Actually, there are records about some other computer games older than OXO, but all of them were too primitive and they share few common features with modern video games.
However, we can't blame their creators for not making an effort to develop more fun and sophisticated games because computers back then were too expensive and scarce to use for entertainment purposes. In fact, OXO was not developed to create a new form of entertainment. It's main purpose was to research on interactions between computers and human beings.
Then, a natural question arises: what was the first video game which was developed solely to entertain the public and achieved it?
If you know much about the history of video games, you may think the famous "Spacewar!" (1962) is the first such one. But it has a not so famous, not so frequently quoted, but very important predecessor called "Tennis for Two" (1958).
Although the game itself - unsurprisingly, a tennis game for two human players - is not so attractive or exciting one by today's standards, its history is interesting.
Besides, I think it's worth to mention that those two games both have strong connections to a historic event: the creation and spread of nuclear weapons.
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The (probably) world's first tennis game was made by a physicist named William Higinbotham. His profession was to develop electronic measuring instruments. After hired by MIT in 1940, he worked on projects related to radar systems for warships and warplanes including B-29 bombers, which devastated populous cities in Japan during the WWII. In 1943, he was invited to Los Alamos, NM, where he worked on the Manhattan Project and saw the birth of nuclear weapons.
In the summer of 1945, two atomic bombs dropped from B-29 caused the largest man-made disaster in history.
After the end of the war, he and his fellow researchers jointly formed a lobby group to call for the limitation of nuclear weapons. So, it was a natural choice for him to join Brookhaven National Laboratory, which was founded in 1947 to conduct research on peaceful use of nuclear energy.
The lab was built on the site which was used as a military camp during the war and it housed some large particle accelerators and latest nuclear reactors. For people back then, those unfamiliar machines and nuclear technologies itself were a cause of fears. Therefore, a couple of years after its foundation, the lab decided to open its doors to the public for a few days every year to mitigate concerns of people living nearby.
The event became an annual tradition of the institute. But it was unpopular among ordinary people because they were not allowed to access important facilities due to security reasons. So, the visitors had to spend time walking around looking at boring posters and inactive machines.
To make the event more vibrant and attractive, in 1958, Higinbotham decided to create a new kind of enjoyable display from which people can learn some scientific knowledge by actually touching it. Fortunately, the lab had an analog computer which could simulate the movement of a bouncing ball. I don't know if he was particularly interested in tennis, but the function was convenient for simulating the sport.
With help from one of his colleagues, he was able to build the machine before that year's annual event.
The resulting game named Tennis for Two was a very simple one.
YouTube: Tennis for Two history and gameplay (Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1958)
• There's a tennis court on the screen and each of the two players holds a controller, which has a button and a knob.
• When the ball is in your court, you can hit it by pushing the button.
• You can change the angle of the (invisible) racket face by rotating the knob.
Despite having such a simple and unsophisticated structure, it was an enjoyable game for the public. In fact, hundreds of people lined up to play the game.
Why it was so popular?
That's because it contained the most important element of successful video games, which I wrote in the last article - instinctive pleasure.
Actually, the game apparently lacked many common characteristics of today's video games.
It didn't contain high quality graphics - a circle for the ball, two lines for the court and that's all.
It didn't have an ultimate objective - even scores were not shown on the screen.
It was a very shallow game - all you needed to win was good reflexes.
But it did contain an instinctive pleasure - to hit a ball back and forth - and they simply loved it.
Seeing many people surrounding the machine, he noticed he made something special. But he didn't bother to devote his time to developing another game. The lab also had no interest in researching on the new form of entertainment they discovered by chance. After the next year's annual event, they disassembled the machine to reuse its parts for other more important scientific researches.
It was not until video games became popular in the US that they understood the game's importance. Today, they are boasting they made the world's first video game and created the industry.
I think they are exaggerating their achievements too much. Rather, they should be proud of having developed a computer game solely to entertain the public, because it was an unprecedented attempt.
Thus, the era of video games had begun. But unfortunately, the world had to wait nearly four years before meeting a truly revolutionary video game - Spacewar.
