video games
256 screens of pure and total perfection on Pac-man? I want to be this guy!
The only man ever to play a perfect game on Pac-man
Link love goes to the Judges for sharing this gem on the Facebook.
Computer and video games are a cultural and economic force drawing increasing attention from educators, anthropologists, economists, media scholars, journalists, and art critics (King, 2002; Perron & Wolfe, 2003; Poole, 2000).
Computer games have grown in sophistication and brought innovative models of interactive storytelling that is entertaining and inspiring millions of people.
Games have grown not only into an important economic force (grossing roughly US$11 billion), but a cultural force -- a medium of choice for many members of the millennial generation that educators should understand.
While some educational critics have derided games as pointless, it is still important for educators to understand why games have such appeal and understand what design principles underlie them.
Dodlinger's (2007) academic literature review focuses on 35 publications addressing educational video game design spanning the last ten years in order to "identify elements of game design that promote learning as well as the learning theories that conceptualize how video games foster learning" (p. 21).
Dodlinger notes that "While there is widespread consensus that games motivate players to spend time on task mastering the skills a game imparts, some disagreement over the specific characteristics that provoke that motivation exists" (p. 28).
Elements of game design that promote learning
Moreover, Dodlinger's (2007) review identified six distinct design elements that could be deemed necessary to stimulate desired learning outcomes. These elements include:
- Narrative context -- for situating and contextualizing learning -- the storyline
- Goals and rules -- objectives and guidelines - short term, medium term, long term
- Rewards -- (associated w/motivation) -- signals achievement
- Interactivity and multisensory cues -- direct attention, introduce new sensory perspectives, provides feedback cues for error correction
Learning outcomes from educational video games
In terms of learning outcomes from educational video games, Dodlinger (2007) points to research that suggests that well-designed games support the development of 21st century learning skills (e.g., play, performance, navigation, resourcefulness, negotiation, synthesis, collaboration, team work, judgement, discernment) but also other higher order thinking skills such as deduction and hypothesis testing, complex concepts and abstract thinking, and visual and spatial processing.
While exploring the potential for games in educational contexts, there seem to be a handful of challenges to widespread adoption and game integration:
- Understanding the value of games
- Finding appropriately designed games
- Getting games into educators' hands
- Integrating games into curricula, i.e., getting them into kids' hands
- The ethical roles and responsibilities associated with gaming
- The lack of clear evaluation standards associated with work produced utilizing games
- How do we guarantee that the rich opportunities afforded by the expanding educational gaming landscape are available to all?
[I'm sure there are more, these are just a few that sprung to mind.]
Class activity:
Let's take a look at a couple of online educational games and see to what extent they incorporate the six design elements listed above.
Examples:
Tut pup -- basic math and spelling games -- http://tutpup.com
Getty Games -- basic puzzle games based on museum pieces in the Gettty collection -- http://www.getty.edu/gettygames/
Villany, Inc. -- Thwarting World Supremacy through Mathematics storytelling, problem-solving and mathematics -- http://villainyinc.thinkport.org/mission1/default.asp?autoload=1
Free Rice -- social action and educational game -- http://www.freerice.com/
ADDENDUM:
More Educational Games:
Games Multimedia Materials -- a wiki housing several good examples of educational games.
Game Research Site:
Game Research - The art, business, and science, of video games.
Major Reference:
Dondlinger, M. J. (2007). Educational video game design: A review of the literature. Journal of Applied Educational Technology, 4(1): 21-31. Retrieved 23 July 2008 from http://www.eduquery.com/jaet/JAET4-1_Dondlinger.pdf.
My del.icio.us "games" links
[Note: This post is a brief introduction to video and computer-based games in education. It is the basis for a lesson plan associated with EME2040 Introduction to Educational Technology Summer C 2008.]
Image from 1up.com.
I have been thinking about paradigmatic movies that kind of represent a moment in time, regardless of whether they are good or bad. And while movies are, for the most part, dependent on narrative, they also have the ability to capture the built space, clothes styles, hairdos, music, and the general built environment of a cultural moment. To riff on Frederic Jameson’s notion that the “the visual is essentially pornographic,” the act of re-watching “bad” films from the late 70s and early 80s is an act of desire-laden voyeurism for me. The narrative is often secondary to the visual pleasure of the film medium that captures the excesses of the visual that lay bare the nostalgia fueled yearnings of watching
While thinking of paradigmatic films of the 80s (and more on this in some other post), I recalled a film from 1983 called Nighhtmares that is a re-telling of four urban myths, and while I will only focus on the second story titled “Bishop of Battle”–the other three are well worth your time, featuring the likes of Lee Ving, Lance Henricksen, and one of my all time favorites Veronica Cartwright. The “Bishop of Battle” stands out in my mind because I deeply identified with video game crazed kid J.J. Cooney in the episode, played by Emilio Estevez. The short starts off with J.J. hustling vatos in a downtown Los Angeles arcade in order to win enough money to return to the Valley and get to the mythical 13th level of the game Bishop of Battle. The opening scene is rich with arcade imagery, capturing the stand-up consoles that ruled the era, and the game J.J. and the his unassuming victim play is Pleiades (1981). What’s more, when J.J. really wants to get in the gaming groove, he puts on his old school Walkman headphones for a dose of some punk rock, featuring the likes of Fear and Black Flag (an interesting association between punk and video games, and perhaps one of the reasons why Estevez’s next role would be playing a punk in Repo Man ).
“Battle of Bishop” Part 1
After being outed as a hustler, J.J. and his friend barely escape to the Valley which is almost entirely represented by the shopping mall (a symbol in film that truly fascinates me from Dawn of the Dead (1978) to Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to Valley Girl (1983) and beyond, the filming of the Mall during the late 70s and early 80s deserves an entire space for thinking film all to itself). While J.J. heads into the arcade to try and reach to the elusive 13th level of Bishop of Battle, his friend Zock is concerned that video games are making him a fiend, and that he has changed. In fact, the rest of the short highlights this change through scenes with a potential love interest he repudiates and his antagonistic relationship with his parents, all to highlight that he’s sick, he is a video game addict—a vidiot! I love this early narrative tracing the idea that video games are like a drug, and their addicting quality can be likened to all the terrible effects of alcohol or heroine. It hits home for me because my older brother used to call me a vidiot back in 1981 when Pac-Man hit the scene (my drug of choice), and I found myself on numerous occasions raiding my father’s coffee cans filled with quarters to feed the monkey at the local arcade.
“Battle of Bishop” Part 2
Finally, in the last part of this short J.J. breaks into the arcade in the middle of the night in order to beat the Bishop, and he does make it to te 13th level, only to have the game come to life within the arcade. J.J. plays for his life quite fiercely and seems to narrowly escape the deadly game. But, alas, the dreaded Bishop of Battle swallows him up in the mall’s parking garage, and with a kind of nihilisitc twist on Tron (1982), at the very end of the episode J.J. is seen by his Zock and his parents being ingested into the actual narrative of the video game, which the understanding that he is never to be escape. See where that addiction can lead you kids!!! I just love it that as early as 1983 video games had entered the moral and mythical status of Hollywood urban legends. This short is represents a deep-seated anxiety about this new and addicting digitized medium, and its projection here as an imaginative tale of being literally consumed by the actual game, which is my its very nature violent and premised upon battle and consumption, has stuck with me. A logic which immediately brings Bryan Alexander’s awesome blog Infocult to mind and the regular discussion on the gothic representations of videogames in the media he regularly traces, especially when they deal with my hometown of Strong Island.
“Battle of Bishop” Part 3
Yet, with all that said, for me the moral tales of such films are fascinating, but it’s films ability as a medium to capture the actual spaces of an aracde during the 80s, which are for the most part gone, as well as the clothes, hairstyles, and the music of a moment is the true pleasure of a return to an example like this. And with this new fangled technology called the internet, fans and hobbyists like those at Rogue Synapse can work on designing an actual version of the Bishop of Battle game for real, you can read the details and download a demo here. I love the internet, it makes my poronographic nostalgia that much more interactive 
“If you blog it, it is no dream.”
Last year at this time, while I was embedded deep in yet another bout of nostalgia, I posted about an old school video game called Killer Shark (1972). I had been lamenting the fact that this game was inaccessible to me now, and how much I loved the flailing shark as it moved back and forth across the screen. Well, yesterday I got a comment on that post alerting me to the fact that Loressa Clisby of Daemon Keep Games has developed a facsimile version of this arcade classic. She rules! You can download it here, just keep in mind that it only works with Windows (luckily I have one of those vestigial operating systems hanging around).
And to throw the gauntlet down, I have taken a minute and a half screencast of myself playing the game, and I have to say that despite the fact that I have only been playing for half an hour, I am the best already. I challenge any of you suckers!
This whole thing led me to search out some information about the place where I played the original Killer Shark arcade game for years: Nunley's Amusement Park in beautiful Baldwin, Long Island. It was a suburban family amusement park (the last of its kind) that had all the amenities of a large amusement park, in the classic style of Coney Island mind you, only in miniature. There was a miniature roller coaster, cups and saucers, ferris wheel, hand carts, miniature golf, and the famously opulent carousel that was designed in 1912 by Stein & Goldstein of Brooklyn and is one of the few that have been preserved and recognized as a landmark.
I think I can say with some certainty that it was a special place for just about every kid who grew up on the South Shore of Long Island (and far beyond I’m sure) for over half a century. That’ where I played Killer Shark as a kid, but it is also where my friends and I whiled away many a Summer’s day playing video games, skeeball, getting our fortune’s told by a gypsy automata, and beating each other up over a soft ice cream or a slice of pizza, which were served by “the Greeks” who wore white and red vertically striped shirts (all of whom must have worked there their entire lives, for over the twenty year span I frewuented Nunely’s, there was never a new face behind the counter). It was were I took my first date in 5th grade, and where I got broken up with more times than I care to remember. I loved Nunley’s, it is a painful reminder of the fact that even the suburbs had some style and dignity at one time. It was closed at the end of the Summer in 1995, never to re-open.
On that day the South Shore of Long Island got that much more barren and desolate. The land was sold off to some speculator that brought in a chain auto parts store (what vision and imagination!). I actually think about Nunley’s on a regular basis these days while I struggle to entertain two young kids with things to do. I think about how much I would appreciate a place like Nunely’s which has some old school class, wasn’t in some fucking mall or surrounded by box stores, easily accessible by public transportation, and would be just as much fun for me as would be for my kids. All we got is Chuck E. Cheese’s and the rest of that corporate junk, it’s really disheartening how much we have gutted ourselves of any kind of unique and wonder-filled experiences. Everything remains the same, predictable, and utterly sterile. I want a time machine.
Actually, wait…I kind of found one! It’s called YouTube, and it has a great video discussing the history of Nunley’s, its fabled carousel, along with its (at the time) imminent demise. If you watch the video, you can see how the whole place was set up, and the video games actually were placed on the perimeter of the walls around the carousel, you can also see the skeeball if you look hard. Wow, how cool is that! YouTube, I love you!
Image of Nunley’s Ferris Wheel from Cabin333’s Flickr account.
While I obviously haven't been blogging- I have been fast at it. I would say I have been busy, but Dean Shareski (our new convener for K12Online) has taught me we are all busy and I am not suppose to talk about how busy I am, but rather just talk about what I have been up to lately.
I keep a running "to-do" board above my desk. Lately, there have been too many things to fit them all. My life is full of meaning, exciting and that word I am not suppose to say (whispering ...busy). So busy in fact that I forgot to share about one of my most passionate interests.
ABPC 21st Century Learners- Year 3 Culminating
Anyone who has followed me knows that one true passion I have is the incredible work I am helping to deliver in Alabama around 21st Century literacies. On May 1 we had our culminating celebration for this year's 21st Century Learners journey.
What Was Different in Year 3?
In a word-- students. ABPC's leader, Cathy Gassenheimer felt this year's project with schools needed to have an clear connection to student achievement. We wanted to developmentally move teachers along the continuum of use and understanding of the transformative potential of 21st Century teaching and learning strategies to actually applying them in the classroom.
We created a student strand and added students as members of the team. Together we looked at how to change teaching to a self-directed process tied to student passion and rigor, as well are core curriculum standards.
During the culminating event students and other team members were led in a fishbowl exercise that turned out to be the most enlightening experience I have had so far in working towards 21st Century educational reform. Students were asked hard questions about how they learn best and evidence of those strategies used by teachers in classrooms. They were asked what do teachers need to change to be the kind of teachers that would help you learn best? Their answers were profound and I realized for the first time I think-- if we would just ask kids what they need, they know and would tell us. Wow. What a concept.
Here are some of the projects from Alabama this year:
WinterboroSchool
Our theme is: Taking Technology to the next level- The
competitive level.
their individual projects to the competitive level. We decided to
encourage and help our students to compete on the local and state level using
21st century skills we have introduced and use in the classroom throughout
the year. Winning at this level helped validate that we can compete in the
local and state arena using these newly acquired skills. The publicity
has also been great for the entire county. It has been a great
success. We will display our students’ medal winning projects along with
the bling bling they have won in the process.
West
Blocton
For our student project, we
created a wiki. On this wiki, the
students would choose a book to read that they wanted to carry on a
conversation about in the wiki. Then,
they would rate the book. Next, they
would write why they rated the book the way they did. The next few sentences had to include a
comprehension strategy that they used while reading the book. Whichever strategy they used, they had to
support it with text and tell what detail from the story made them use that
strategy. Then, they would write a
sentence to try to encourage others to read the book, even if they gave it a
low rating.
Finally, they would look at other responses other students had
made and carry on a conversation about their book.
Hewitt-Trussville Middle School
contains descriptions, examples, and uses for 21st tools in the
classroom. The wiki also contains information about project based
learning.
You can find out wiki at http://21centurylearners.wikispaces.com .
Challenger Middle School
Challenger 21st Century Team Group project:
Our professional development project is called "iTeach
2.0" and we invited the middle schools in our district to become a part of
iTeach 2.0. Each school sent two teachers to a workshop we sponsored to learn
about 21st century tools. We established a wiki for our team and participants
to use to share ideas. Our April face to face meeting was a type of fair where
each school shared a tool or project that they successfully used this semester.
Our computer will display screen shots from our wiki and our display board will
define data collected and cool tools explored during this year’s iTeach
workshops. Our wiki is http://iteach2-0.wikispaces.com .
We invited 18 students to commit their own time to work on a
project they would select. Twelve saw the project to completion. We gave three
basic guidelines: the students must develop their project around an issue that
affects teens, the project must help someone, and the project must be
communicated using technology tools. Our students brainstormed on their
own private wiki and were very passionate about teen issues! They decided that
they wanted to work on a project related to poverty. The students then researched
and decided that they wanted to adopt an impoverished school in another
country, which led them to
formed an Invisible Children Club to raise money.
The students created posters, a
website and a multi-media embedded PowerPoint to present to the student body.
They learned so much about war torn
Uganda and the
suffering of the children there. They have a basic knowledge of how this war
started. The amazing part is that we have not taught this information to our students.
They have taken a project with very few guidelines and have learned so much!
For this year, the project culminated in a fund-raiser, which raised $1778 in 3
days! This has become a project that encompasses many of the 21st century
skills. Our students are learning about society, geography/history,
communication, discernment, teamwork and many other skills. We will
display a computer with a timeline/info about their project work and their
presentation. We will have an additional computer with screen shots of
their webpage. Their website is http://www.freewebs.com/guluschoolproject/
George Hall Elementary
Collaboration is the main thesis for our project. This year
collaboration projects includes Skype interview with Janis Kearney, diarist for
Bill Clinton and author of "Cotton Fields of Dreams", Elluminate session with children from the
Dominican Republic and a weekly Skype collaboration with 5th grade students in
West Blocton Al. We continued the wiki field trip project using Scaling where
the students were proactive in the production of the projects to go online.
Blossomwood
Blossomwood
Elementary's team project for 2007-2008 has been to obtain more technology
resources for classrooms and adequately train teachers on how to use these
resources. Promethean ACTIV boards have been purchased for all classroom
units and teachers have attended both training at school and online training
from Promethean. Today, Blossomwood is displaying some sample classroom
flipcharts, as well as flipcharts that were used to train the faculty.
Clay-Chalkville High School
We will be presenting a Power Point presentation that highlights
some of the work that our teachers have created with their classes to enhance
student learning, as well as to promote communication between the classroom and
the home.
For instance, we have teachers that have created wikis with the
main purpose to keep the students and parents updated on assignments and
projects that are coming up. At the same
time, other teachers use blogs to allow the students become more involved in
the learning process.
Discovery Middle School
Middle School will showcase our journey from local to global connections through a
photostory. We will highlight our challenges and how we have overcome
them. We will also share our current projects that will lead us to
district wide integration of Web 2.0 tools.
Mt. Laurel Elementary
Sharing Web 2.0 Tools
Mt Laurel Elementary School is a K-3 school right outside of Birmingham. We are in our second year with the 21st Century Learning Team.
Our team's focus project was sharing Web 2.0 tools with our faculty. We conducted a survey to determine awareness and use of Web 2.0 tools and found that very few were aware of Web 2.0 tools, and even fewer were using them.
As a team we compiled a resource list of Web 2.0 tools. We held a meeting with our teachers and presented an awareness training to share the uses of each tool. We shared examples of how we had been using these tools and how students could benefit from using Web 2.0. We also encouraged them to let us help them set-up any of the tools they would think they would like to use in their classroom.
As of today, the number of teachers that are using Web 2.0 tools has changed by 60%, compared to when we initially took our survey. We now have grade levels participating in projects and teachers using these tools to create works with their students. We have teachers participating in book studies using Wiki’s, classes and parents blogging, podcasting galore, but most of all the awareness of the many tools that are available to each of them to enhance their class lessons and projects.
Cullman Middle School
Collaborative project-based teaching aligned to state content standards, reviewed by students. That is our lofty goal with this wiki. For 2008, we have selected 4 courses to focus on: Social Studies, grades 7 and 8 AND Computer Applications, grades 7 and 8
This project is designed in conjunction with the Alabama Best Practices Center's 21st Century Schools professional development. The project will be developed by a team of teachers and students from Cullman Middle School.
We hope that this will be a treasured resource for educators across the state, the country, and the world. Depending upon the success of the site, we hope to add additional areas of study in the future. We recognize the level of learning and retention of learning that project-based lessons hold for students, as well as the interest it adds to classes. On the outset, this seems like a project designed to aid teachers, and it will do that, but more importantly, this project will aid students in fostering a deeper interest in learning. With the Computer Applications courses, we are fortunate to be embarking upon new territory. At this time there are not specific standards for grade levels, only grade bands. This project will assist us in focusing on learning objectives and organizing those objectives in a sensible format. The student team will be comprised of students involved in
Cullman Middle School's SWAT (students willing to assist with technology) team. The teacher team will select a student team leader that will serve as a liaison to the teacher team.
Dean Road Elementary School
Our team sought to showcase the various ways we use the Smart Board to communicate more effectively among staff members and students. An immense part of our daily communication begins each day with our morning broadcast, WDRE, which features fourth and fifth grade students as broadcasters. Other grade levels are involved by reciting the pledge of allegiance and sharing the daily weather. All parts of the broadcast are viewed through the use of the Smart Board.
Not only do we begin our day with the Smart Board we also use this valuable learning tool in many other ways throughout the day. We display our morning messages, share interactive websites embedded in our daily lessons, and research an endless amount of information that can be easily displayed for all to see. This beneficial tool as helped foster communication through shared lessons created on the Smart Board software that assists teachers in planning and presenting the curriculum in a way that increases the students’ motivation to learn. The Smart Board, found in all classrooms, has become an irreplaceable learning tool that teachers and students just can’t seem to live without.
Fayetteville High School
The Fayetteville High School team has led a 21st Century Learners initiative for 10 schools throughout Talladega County. Modeled after the training sponsored by the ABPC, the FHS team, along with other teachers from Winterboro School, have served as mentors to over 20 teachers in their school system. The team will display the materials used for this project as well as evaluations from some of the participants in the program.
Wrights Mill Road Elementary
Tech-Know Expo
5th grade students brainstormed topics related to technology that interest them. Then, they volunteered to teach those topics they felt they were “Tech-sperts” in. The students prepared presentations for the younger grades and invited parents and members of the community to attend. Topics ranged from “Lights, Camera, Pinnacle in Action,” to iPod 101 and “How to Convince Your Parents to Let You Get A Cell Phone.” Students taught about blogging, making avatars, using Blabber, and the latest and greatest in text messaging.
Dr. Janet Murray’s unbelievably intelligent and thought-provoking talk, “Inventing the Medium: Learning and Symbolic Expression from Knucklebones and Senet to Second Life and Spore,” examined the historical role of games and game play upon the evolution of humanity, communication, and representation (read the abstract here and video will be forthcoming). Immensely interesting stuff that will take me a while to process and make sense of. During her discussion she talked about PeaceMaker, a game that provides varying mediated perspectives upon the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by allowing you to play both sides of the struggle (the game’s tagline is “Play the News. Solve the Puzzle”). This got me thinking about Tiltfactor, and organization that creates games for social change (an organization Jeff Drouin pointed me to with his comments here).
…we create games for change, educational games, artwork, and social software. We hope to make effective interventions in thinking about how games, and software in general, can evolve to take into account social activist principles. For example, how can one design for multiple learners and multiple play styles? Can games improve the self-efficacy of underrepresented groups? Can games teach equity? What is an excellent design solution which focuses on collaboration, yet also satisfies competitive urges?
You can find out more about the lab from the video below.
Lawrence Kutner has authored a new book suggesting violent video games do not create violent children.
As the parent of three young children and a Director of Technology at an all boys school, this story feels good. Do you know of opposing research?
Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mytripsmypics/2455932465/
I recently came to the realization that my best friend in Fredericksburg is my 12 year-old neighbor. I just can’t avoid the fact that I have never really progressed beyond the sixth grade; I am still so dearly enthralled by the product-inspired wonder of my youth. Whether it be Star Wars (and this encompasses everything from the movies to figurines to stickers to trading cards to comic books to UnderRoos), Raiders of the Lost Ark, Clash of the Titans, Pac-Man, our first family VHS player, or the Atari 2600, culture from the late 70s and early 80s is the wellspring of my strong penchant for nostalgia. My 12 year-old neighbor feels the brunt of my unfortunate condition.
Our relationship began benignly enough talking about Lego Star Wars sets, the associated video games, and the current state of Star Wars culture more generally. When I found out he hadn’t seen the real Star Wars movies (namely episodes IV, V, and VI 1/2) I lent him my DVDs and asked him to think about where our shared myth system began. I haven’t been able to convince him of my opinions on the far superior quality of the original trilogy, but I am working on it.
More recently, we’ve been focusing on video games. He is enjoying [[Battle Front II] at the moment, and the thought occurred to me that he is experiencing modern video games devoid of their beautifully vectorized history. He has no real sense of the Old Gold games, and that’s a crying shame. So while I didn’t walk 5 miles to school in the snow, I did experience the colossal disappointment that was the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man first hand, and I thought he might need to understand my pain and experience a bit more intimately. So, how do I go about this? What method should a video game sensei take?
Well, in the age of educational technologies and the beauty of the internets, there is really only one way to emulate the experience…that’s right, you guessed it: to actually play those games and experience their dislocating magic. There are many ways to do this, and luckily I have access to just about all the original consoles and games I am talking about here so I don’t have to worry about all the moral, ethical, and copyright ramifications that bog down those with fewer resources. The fact that we have to agonize over “stealing” the culture” they” (who the hell is ‘they’?) used to shape us with, the very culture we made relevant bac —it’s an outrage! So, in sympathy (or is it solidarity?), I’ll share below some of the resources available for getting your hands on a few select emulators that are freely available online. And, if you use them in the spirit of enlightening your 12 year old neighbor with an impressionistic history of video games, you may even be able to claim educational fair use
CLASSIC CO-OP ARCADE GAMES:
It all really starts with classic Co-op Arcade gems, games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Ms. Pac-Man, Tempest, Pole Position, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Asteroids, Gyruss, Ghosts and Goblins, Battlezone, Asteroids, Punch-Out!, Star Wars, Rampage, Q*Bert , Galaxian, Joust and on and on. In fact, two of the first things I did when I first got on the internet in 1994 was search out all resources on the classic 60s show The Prisoner along with any and all information on the history of classic video games. A bit later, my friend and co-worker at UCLA’s Audio Visual Services, John Spellman, discovered MAME, and it has been an on-going love affair ever since.
The stand-up arcade games are a treasure trove of memories. Our local comic shop “The Incredible Pulp” had Galaxian and Joust in the back of the store, and my friends and I would spend hours playing those games in a really amazing setting surrounded by comics, beautifully painted D&D lead figurines, the beautifully illustrated AD&D handbooks and modules, along with countless other artifacts that make up some of the most vibrantly imaginative and obscure objects of my adolescent desire. And there was the Grand Bald Pizzeria that had some pretty good pizza (even by NY standards) and a new series of arcade games constantly streaming in, everything from Track & Field, to Ghosts and Goblins to World Karate Champion to the grand poobah of them all Pac-Man (and still my all-time favorite video game bar none). Finally, their was the Baldwin Pool Hall, a smoke-filled billiards parlor that took a corner of its huge floor plan and put in an arcade, with everything from Make Trax to Pole Position to the Star Wars vector game, Tempest, Battlezone, Defender, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Popeye, Pooyan, and a few more I can’t remember because I didn’t play them.
In fact, these stand-up coin-op games are so intricately linked with the small stores of the community I grew up within. And while I had Atari 2600 when I played most of these games, the experience of going up the block with friends to various stores to play these games was different. It often led to other connections and discoveries in the community, whether making new friends, getting in the occasional fight, or having a space as a ten or twelve-year old that was not entirely dominated and dictated by one’s parents. having these video games in these various stores allowed you to hang out regardless if you had bought anything (well before box stores like Borders made this a “unique experience” and charged you accordingly for it). You were in many ways a part of the world you played in, and I knew the proprietors of each of these stores quite well. I was a kid in the neighbor and that meant something to me, my friends and I were people they knew and the folks behind the counter were people we also knew quite well, joked about, and imagined lives for them beyond their role as shopkeeper.
I wasn’t a god damn number they were ordered to sell a rewards card to; I don’t want your stinking rewards card, I want to talk to a human being! Sorry for that…but arcade games were an integral part of the built environment of my growing years and they framed my person in so many ways beyond the actual game itself. it is complex series of relations that often get discounted when you just look at the game, or isolate that game within one family’s living room.
For some more information on the Golden Age of Video Arcade Games check out this great Wikipedia article.
So, in short , if you are looking for the Classic Coin-Op Arcade games for your computer then MAME (for Windows) and MacMame (for the Mac) are one, precarious way at it. Precarious because when it comes to getting the actual ROMS for each of the games, you’re on your own because they’re still under copyright and it is illegal to distribute them. This doesn’t mean they aren’t easy to obtain. In fact, a quick Google search will do the trick, but you still have to weigh the onus of ownership and how our culture is being imprisoned by draconian copyright laws that are incongruous with the digital flow of information and resources.
ATARI 2600:
Without question the Atari 2600 home game console will forever be a part of some of my most splendid memories of consumer culture. The idea of going to Sears or Playland to buy a video game cartridge remains one of the most vividly expectant moments of possibility in my paltry life. The history of Atari 2600 is in many ways a fundamental history of media in the 80s that is as important as the VHS home recorder or the death of the single-screen movie theater. I didn’t know this at the time, but as of 1981 there was as many as eight million Atari 2600 systems sold, at a $100 some-odd bucks a pop that’s $700 million dollars. Moreover, the Pac-Man cartridge alone sold 7 million copies, making it the best selling 2600 cartridge of all time, not to mention one of the greatest disappointments for any console since. Check out this list of ten Atari 2600 cartridges that sold over a million copies. It seems kind of crazy now, but when you do the math from just the two figures above, Atari in the early 80s was probably a billion dollar company, insane! And seems like the dividends won’t ever stop coming in. Interestingly enough, according the the Pac-Man Atari 2600 Wikipedia article, the video game crash of 1983 is linked to such disappointments like Pac-Man and E.T., in fact despite selling seven million copies of Pac-Man and 1.5 million of E.T., Atari seems to have lost on both:
Although Atari sold seven million units (of Pac-Man), out of a 2600 user base of ten million, twelve million cartridges were manufactured, under the expectation that the game would re-stimulate sales of the console. When this did not happen, Atari had to write off the five million unsold copies, incurring large losses.
The same held true for E.T a year later, four million copes were manufactured, but only 1.5 million sold. The millions of unsold cartridges have become part of an Atari landfill legend that gets mentioned in the E.T. wikipedia article (so fun!):
In September 1983, the Alamogordo Daily News of Alamogordo, New Mexico, reported in a series of articles that between ten and twenty[18] semi-trailer truckloads of Atari boxes, cartridges, and systems from an Atari storehouse in El Paso, Texas were crushed and buried at the landfill within the city. It was Atari’s first dealings with the landfill, which was chosen because no scavenging was allowed and its garbage was crushed and buried nightly. Atari officials and others gave differing reports of what was buried,[19][20][21][22] but it is widely speculated that most of Atari’s millions of unsold copies of E.T. ultimately ended up in this landfill, crushed and encased in cement.[23]
So much of this waste had to do with Atari’s move to capitalize on a video game or film’s popularity, which meant entirely disregarding both the design and play of their games. Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the few games in this circumstance that most agreed was relatively unique and forward looking with the use of more than one controller for action/adventure narrative game play. Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600 still remains one of my personal favorites, along with Popeye (a beautiful adaptation from the original Coin-op), Kaboom!, Pitfall!, Warlords, Asteroids, Chopper Command, Superman, Haunted House, Adventure, Night Driver, Combat, and Space Invaders. For a full list of all Atari 2600 games go here.
And while the Atari 2600 games occupy a large part of my imagination from back-in-the-day, they were just about all inferior to the arcade coin-ops save a select few (Pitfall! being one of them). Nonetheless, the limitations of this gaming systems offers a fascinating space for disorientating a contemporary game fan. I plan on having my neighbor play the 1979 Atari 2600 game Superman, which may be one of the most de-familiarizing and confusing games for a kid who is used to a more seamless and congruous narrative game play. Not only are the sound effects extremely grating, but the game play is terribly disorientating. Try mapping space in this game, it ain’t easy (in many ways these early games are similar to the early 1900s films that film historian Thom Gunning talks about as experimental and alternative spaces that would later be modified and codified into more dominant film narratives, most famously exemplified by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation).
One more thing, I recently discovered a whole series of adult-themed games for the Atari 2600. A whole underground I never knew about
So, all this nonsense to say that there are a number of Atari 2600 emulators (see the list at Atari Age here). I have played with the Z26, which works with both Windows and Linux, and it gets the job done. Stella is an emulator for Windows and the Mac that I haven’t played with, but plan on trying out sometime soon. Same drill with the ROMS for the Atari 2600, they are available, but the questions remain.
COMMODORE 64
I have far less experience or knowledge of Commodore 64, and much of my experience with this system comes from friends who actually had one. I got one second-hand almost a decade after it was popular, and it is quite fun, but I wasn’t really into computers in the 80s as much as I was into video games, and a full-blown computer seemed like a whole lot of overhead for what I wanted to do. That said, I wasn’t oblivious to the classic games like Pirates!, Boulder Dash, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Conan: Hall of Volta, Lode Runner, and Choplifter. I still have a lot to learn about this platform, and the list of games is actually two Wikipedia articles, which suggests just how many there are (it’s kind of overwhelming!).
The emulator available for the C64 is called VICE, and the ROMS once again are plentiful. In fact, the amount of non-copyrighted material for the C64 will probably be far more plentiful than the Atari or classic Coin-Op emulators which are almost entirely proprietary.
OK, that’s it, I’m officially shot. This post is all over the pace and I could still talk about the first Nintendo system and how games like Mario Bros. and Blades of Steel were amazing to me, but I don’t have it in me at this point. Just more fodder for the next nostalgia outburst.
I have been using emulation to give my twelve-year old neighbor the people’s history of classic video games and home consoles (much more on both the emulation and the history shortly). While preparing these rigorous classes, I came across a couple of gems that I can’t believe I hadn’t known about until now—so if this is old news please forgive my enthusiasm. The classic horror movies The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween were made into video games for the Atari 2600 back in 1983 by Wizard Video Games.†
In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game you are Leatherface and are charged with “murdering trespassers while avoiding obstacles such as fences, wheelchairs, and cow skulls. Each victim slain gives the player 1,000 points. The player receives additional fuel at every 5,000 points (5 victims). A life is lost when the player’s chainsaw runs out of gasoline. Gameplay ends when the last tank of gas is consumed.” ¹
In the Halloween video game, you are a babysitter “who must save children from a knife-wielding Michael Myers. The player obtains points in two ways: by rescuing children and bringing them to ’safe rooms’ located at both ends of each floor of the house, and by stabbing Michael with the knife (if it can be located). The player advances a level either by rescuing five children or stabbing Michael twice. The killer gets faster with each level increase, and the game continues until all of the player’s three lives are lost.”²
Seems like the games are remarkable for a few reasons other than the game play, for even by the standards of 25 years ago they were nothing short of terrible in terms of graphics and narrative conception. A fact that may make them candidates for two of the earliest b-video game. The story surrounding their release is interesting in regards to more recent backlashes against violent video games, such as the furor over the Grand Theft Auto franchise. They are considered the first video games in the horror genre, and their adult themes and “graphic” depiction of violence resulted in many retailers refusing to carry the games. And those who did often kept them behind the counter on a request-only basis. Given this controversy, the game sold extremely poorly. Wizard Video Games soon after went out of business, yet these two titles are considered extremely valuable today by collectors given how rare they are as well as the fact that they cross over ito the horror memorabelia manaics, making them a rather valuable commodity.³
Thanks to the beauties of emulation, you can see examples of the game play for each of these gems below. The whole idea of these “ultra-violent” Atari 2600 games is both puzzling and fascinating to me. Most video games for the Atari 2600 frame a certain amount of violence depending how you look at them, Kaboom!, Pitfall!, Space Invaders, Combat, etc., etc. Yet, the idea of Michael Myers severing heads and Leatherface cutting up pixels with a chainsaw, no matter how bad the graphics are, is too much. Not necessarily because they are too gory or difficult to look at—for they are ridiculous in that regard—it’s simply the idea of violence, the idea the developers of this game gambled on exploiting and lost, yet that was only the beginning. The state of video games today offers a totally different level of verisimilitude, yet I still think it is the political valence of an idea that is controversial, not the actual violence regardless of how good or bad the graphics are. I’ll have to re-visit this idea again soon, for it is half-baked but interesting to me.
A clip from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game:
A clip from the Halloween video game:
† Wizard Video also distributed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre on VHS, which marks an interesting relationship between home video and home gaming consoles during the early 80s, which may be just as obvious and trite as it reads here, or it may tie into the idea of a new market for all things “b” that I have always believed the VHS made possible, despite the fact that it killed the single-screen movie house (which I love and miss dearly). Oh yeah, and it aliented the moviegoer by keeping him or her in their living room. Oh yeah, and the quality of VHS tapes was terrible…
Tom Woodward turned me on to this fascinating keynote presentation by pirate radio DJ Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, at The Medici Summit on March 3rd 2008. It resonated on several levels about issues that have been circulating for a while now in regards to re-mixes, mashups, and all things copyright in educational technology. This talk highlights some excellent example of the tremendous creative value of re-mixing in relationship to corporate competition —which is not my particular bag— yet many of his points can be ported over to the educational sphere somewhat easily. Namely, embrace the re-mix and understand the culture of piracy as an innovative force that often emerges as a way to fill a void or gap in the current models of cultural distribution. My favorite example of the re-mix is the re-working of the classic 1980s video game Castle Wolfenstein into Castle Smurfenstein, which the game designers embraced and proved to be a tremendous boon to the cultural significance and popularity of the original.
If you have the time, it is well worth a watch…
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