On Pilgrim in the Microworld
I’ve spent the past week reading David Sudnow's Pilgrim in the Microworld (which is out of print but there’s a pdf of ambiguous legality here). It’s a fascinating book from the early 80s that captures this amazing, autoethnographic snapshot of one man discovering the pleasures of videogaming. What is, on the surface, simply a personal recollection of trying to master the game Breakout!, is a rich and fruitful phenomenological exploration of a whole range of issues from Breakout! particularly, the pleasures of actually, bodily engaging with videogames; the limitations of ‘mastery’ as something to hold the player’s attention; analogies between playing music and playing games that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern David Kanaga essay; market forced and how the design of home console games is still intimately caught up in the coin drop of the arcade; anxieties about the rise of the information age. It balances between enthusiasm towards a new form and worry about its addictive and economic qualities, without ever veering too far in either direction. It’s a remarkable piece of writing and relevant not only as a historic and early piece of videogame criticism but as something that touches on many of the themes that the current wave of games criticism, self included, only now are starting to rediscover.
Which is not to say Sudnow’s work itself has been rediscovered; it never really went away. Anna Anthropy had this to say about it a few years ago. Kill Screen’s Jon Irwin said this last year. No shortage of game studies academics have recommended Sudnow’s work to me over the years (including my own supervisors). His first book, The Way of the Hands has been sitting on my computer for well over a year now. It’s a book about how the hands find their way around the piano as a jazz musician, this really incredible and close descriptive phenomenology. I knew games scholars found Sudnow’s work relevant and useful—indeed, I found The Way of the Hands incredible relevant to my own work—but I always thought it was a sideways thing. Somehow I had completely missed the fact that his second book was about games specifically.
So I’m glad I finally read it as it truly is a remarkable text in its descriptions, its passion, its anxieties, and the future potentials it points to that we are now living in the midst of. I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in reading about videogames, be you academic or not.
Below are some choice quotes. Some I’ve quoted because they provide a particularly insightful commentary on this or that, but a lot of them I just think are beautiful turns of phrase that capture something magical about what it really means to play a videogame. Page numbers are those of the pdf linked above.
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Maybe the point was just to have your part in creating the noise? (8)
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On the moment he clicks with Missile Command:
I smoothly swept right beneath their paths without stopping the cursor, firing en passant. When my placement and rhythm were together, as my missiles got to where the cursor had been when I’d pushed the button, theirs were there too. It was a panning action with several little articulations along the way, the hands in synchrony, one wiping past, while the other inserted punctuations. As you watch the cursor move, your look appreciates the sight with thumbs in mind, and the joystick-button box feels like a genuine implement of action. Bam, bam, bam, got you three right in your tracks, whatever the hell you are…
Whether useful or not, my little movement was nice to watch and feel, and whenever Herb took a break I switched the reset control and started over again so I could practice joy sticking back and forth, gliding past those slow missiles, connecting up with the lines, each explosion right on the button, each electric roar right where it belonged. I was just as content to watch the world blow up and start all over again whenever things got heavy, playing this little three-note melody to refine the accuracy of my video stroke.
Punctuate a moving picture? I’m no painter and don’t dance in mirrors. But here I could watch a mysterious transformation of my movements taking place on the other side of the room, my own participation in the animated interface unfolding in an extraordinary spectacle of lights, colors, and sounds. (20)
After several more pages reflecting on this marvel of how the movement of his fingers transformed into sensations in his other senses:
The full sequencing, calibrating, caressing potentials of human hands now create sights, sounds, and movements. And the eyes are free to watch, wonder, and direct from above, free to witness the spectacle and help the hands along without looking down. A keyboard for painters, a canvas for pianists. With lots of programs to choose from, lots of ways to instantaneously vary and organize the tunings and makeup of the palette. All the customary boundaries get blurred when you’re painting paragraphs, performing etchings, sketching movies, and graphing music. (24)
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On the body’s incorporation of the Breakout! paddle:
Line up your extended finger with the lower left corner of the TV screen a comfortable six feet away. Now track back and forth several times in line the bottom border and project a movement of that breadth onto an imagined inch and a half diameter spool in your hands. That’s how knob and paddle are geared, a natural correspondence of scale between the body’s motions, the equipment, and the environs preserved in the interface. There’s that world space over there, this one over here, and we traverse the wired gap with motions that make us nonetheless feel in a balanced extending touch with things. (29)
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On that first feeling of nearly clearing the screen and really, bodily feeling adrenaline from the game:
Thirty seconds of play, for three bricks, and I’m on a whole new plane of being, all synapses wailing as I’m poised there with paddle, ball, a few remaining lights on screen, and a history that made this my first last brick.
Forget about placement, a score, elegance as an end in its own right. Forget about a model of good play to motivate practice. Here’s all the motivation you’d ever want: get that action again, those last few bricks left and that eery lobbing interim as the ball floats about so you never know when it’ll hit and you don’t dare try placing a shot because you’re more than happy just to hold on with your eyes glued to the ball. Please don’t miss, come on, do it, get that brick, easy does it, no surprises, now stay cool, don’t panic, take it in stride, get it now. Get that closure. Video-game action. You know when you’ve got it like you know your first drunk. (41)
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On the way videogames and technology generally program the player (something Haraway and Latour and Science and Technology Studies and Hayles would talk about in another decade):
If you engage a human body through eyes and fingers in a precisely scripted interaction with various sorts of computer-generated events, what seem like quite complex skills are rapidly acquired by regular repetition. Sequences of events can be scheduled into readily mastered routines of progressive difficulty, and a program of timed transitions can be organized, programming you, in turn, at an economically desirable rate. (46)
and later:
It’s as if instead of truly incorporating the events on the screen within the framework of the body’s natural way of moving and caring, the action on the screen must incorporate me, reducing or elevating me to some ideal plane of synaptic being through which the programmed coincidences will take place. (97)
and then:
Perhaps our being is now further shaped by the very programming motions typing hands have learned. Calculating arises out of primordial properties of our prereflective bodily being: two symmetrical halves, ten fingers, eyes on a horizontal plane in relation to the ground, and a mouth that likes to count out loud. We count and count and count until we invent a numbering system, based on ten digits, and some years later, having long since lost sight of how that system originally related to our anatomy’s way of seizing hold of the world, we use ten digits to type instructions directing electricity to outline our body’s mathematics back at itself. And we’re thus now incarnated in the coolest digital version of ourselves to ever come along, a self-actuating, glistening little creature under glass that we now and then poke at through wires. (132)
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On visiting Atari Inc to find out how to play Breakout! better and hinting at the military-entertainment complex:
Follow Mathilda Avenue, my instructions read, so I circled round that way, these monstrous white retinas still in sight, and now came alongside a massive Lockheed missile installation. I’m looking to my right for the road to Atari, as these strange-looking planes are cruising overhead, one every thirty seconds in a landing approach coming in from the upper right corner of my windshield. No wonder they made Missile Command here. Where’s that street? Oh, there’s Atari. I see the logo. The sort of building I expected, only smaller, brand spanking new, suburban California clean air industrial park architecture, like on every block throughout the Santa Clara Valley, Silicon Valley, forty miles south of San Francisco. Here I was in terrifically sunny Sunnyvale. Chipville, U.S.A. And there was Atari, and those Lockheed experimental something or others overhead. Bang, bang, bang, got you three right in your tracks, a nice panning shot out the car window. Was Lockheed a test sight for the Atari imagination, or the other way around? (62)
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On videogames’ close relation to musical instruments, even more so than the playing area of a non-digital game:
Like a piano, whose strings are tuned in accordance with strict mathematical rules, not like a tennis court, say, where action occurs in a relatively indeterminate open space. (66)
and much later:
By itself, a chess board, basketball court, Ping-Pong table, or racetrack in the solid world is nothing but a more or less bland setting for action. Sure golf courses can be handsomely groomed, the Le Mans Grand Prix traverses spectacular scenery, and there’s the general tendency we have to embroider even the most instrumental activities with expressive flourish.But to the very extent aesthetic consideration is given to the design of a playing area, even when intended to increase competitive excitement , purely contextual features of play are embellished with other grounds for participation. Here we’ve got an extreme case, where the sheer novelty, colorfulness, and range of sights and sounds invite an interest in the object that enters into dialectic tension with its officially contrived purpose. Designed to make playing the game more engaging, these colorful little creatures under glass ask for experimental playfulness, particularly when you’ve got lots of free time around the house. And that undermines the competitive drive. If every time you bounced a basketball it made different sounds, you’d dribble more than necessary. (139)
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As Sudnow gets utterly obsessed with a 'perfect game’ (clearing the screen in a single ball) and learns more about how Breakout! was programmed, he stops seeing it as a 'game’ at all, which is really interesting to think about in both terms of the fundamental differences between video- and non-digital games, and in terms of how we sometimes feel like we are more intimately connected to the skeletal 'mechanics’ of a videogame once we’ve played it too much:
All worked out, programed, set up in detail to function in a certain fashion. And that’s not an opponent, nor a game, not by any stretch of the imagination. You got a nerve-racking contest only if you didn’t understand how to cope. But once your skill brought you where you could see the patterns, or you got some tips you were about to discover on your own anyhow, the game disappeared. (72)
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The whole possibility of Breakout and all the other games depends upon this capacity we have to transcend the limited equipment the computer makes available. And when the programmer set up the angles as he did, it was his own body’s natural inclination to make this necessary adaptation that provided the background required for such an artificial arrangement to work. Without the natural organic inventiveness of our bodies in this respect, there’d be no video games, and in the final analysis the true marvel of these objects resides in the ways we can instantly adapt our selves to the altogether meager resources they provide.“ (83)
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On realising his desire to understand how the game was programmed was not useful for getting better at the game:
Knowledge about the paddle’s programmed subdivisions and angles no more truly aids the task at hand than a knowledge of physics could help you line up a certain point on a bat with the ball in order to hit to the field. When a paddle or a bat is incorporated by the body, becoming a continuation of ourselves into and through which we realize an aim in a certain direction, such implements lose all existence as things in the world with the sorts of dimensions you measure on rulers. They become incorporated within a system of bodily spaces that can never be spoken of in the objective terms with which we speak of objects outside of ourselves. (84)
You don’t so much “aim” the ball, it seems, as you must somehow allow yourself to let the aiming take place through a private and inaccessible mode of communication between your eyes and hand. (85)
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On the reset button on the Atari console he had been abusing, obsessed as he was with that perfect opening:
That reset button was an engineering mistake of the first magnitude when used as I’d used it, embodying the most ontologically and metaphysically curious notions, a token for perhaps the biggest mind-body conflict to hit the scene since Descartes first got us into serious trouble. (103)
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Now I imagined an intrinsic elegance in sitting back watching a TV, systematically directing the patterned unfolding of its sights in a precisely detailed way, moving through a switchyard of invisible tracks. That seemed far more exciting than a contest with a contraption that simply has speed, endurance, and the capacity to do more things than you could handle at once in its favor. What’s the point in racing a sewing machine to see who can do a hem faster? Little did I know both how much and how little you could just sit back. (105)
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On realising the intimacy of videogame design with the setup of the arcade:
What I overlooked was that it was a business enterprise first and foremost, not an aesthetic monastery. And prime time is mighty expensive. It ain’t good business to let players quickly gain consistency with a winning video-game pattern, at least not yet, not without some modifications, not without getting rid of some of the contest and its profitable organization. It’s okay to get good fast, but only if the action is so organized that once you do you don’t get bored. But why rock the boat; who in his right mind doesn’t run with a winning horse? There’s lots of loose change in the world. (106)
and later:
The altogether remarkable fact about this little cultural artifact is that the learning curves of the skills, hence their very nature, and the incitements to play the game, these were engineered as two sides of the same coin. A quarter. (115)
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On the metaphysics of videogames:
It couldn’t fit for the simple reason I was in the presence of an altogether new creature, this video game. The objects and events on the screen, the entire organization of the human being squared off against it, the whole kit and caboodle lies in its own mysterious turf. What is a “thing” in this terrain, what does an event mean here, what could “skill” be with these events, what, if anything, do the notions of movement, coordination, thought, action, emotion, consciousness, motivation, and a “nervous system” refer to with respect to this new microworld in our midst? (108)
On having to submit to the game, and a hint towards the idea of 'flow’ that game studies gets so excited about:
Competence is possible only when action is motivated in those ways the game itself motivates it, and the game motivates action in ways proven to be most profitable in a rapid coin turnover scheme. That makes the skills inseparable from the profitably arranged enticements that bring them into being. It’s not that you have to “care” in order to get good, but rather that you have to be kept caring. You’ve got to be kept in the right state so you’ll get to some places a little bit better all the time, so that a goal remains alive by always moving just ahead out of reach and you keep wanting to attain it without having to spend a fortune. (114)
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On creating videogames, and predicting the future of cultural studies:
I can store instructions, hold them electrically alive in a thing I’ll call a “memory.” Ooooh yeah, “memory,” sounds mysterious, makes my electronic switchyard seem intelligent. That’ll sell. If I can show extraordinary looking things with my machine, I’ll bet philosophers and scientists will even try to rethink “memory” into something made up of stored coded instructions for switching routines. They’ll even think this memorizer is like a brain if it does a lot of things that even look on the surface like what brains think brains do. They can make their quarters with theories about artificial intelligence, while other philosophers will make theirs arguing about what “intelligence really means,” how it’s something very different from computer memory, how artificial intelligence is altogether artificial. As for me, I’m a practical man in business, the rent here is outrageous, and this computer cost me a fortune. If my machine stimulates vital controversy on the nature of man and intelligence, focuses a sharply pinpointed interest in the relation between freedom and technology, so much the better. Memory. Yeah. I like it. Just the right image for the times since we keep forgetting the past, things change so quickly these days, and there’s just too much to remember. (119)
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button pushing was intrinsic to the logic, charm, and power of the medium. (124)
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The central skill of video gaming was orchestrated out of continuous trial and error market testing: a sufficiently dense texture of routes through the TV neighborhood was set up in conjunction with a fixed, manageable, yet somewhat frantic pace for exciting travel. Each variable was economically adjusted till the setup reached the point where a typical user could only see a safer path through by traversing the territory again and again and again, often enough seeing a bit more and thereby getting a bit more action for a quarter, that he’d want to get still more again. Loose change in the pockets of human bodies, and the most rationalized piece of machinery since the wheel, interacted back and forth over many variations until a new creature was born: a real time, front to back, self-contained and scheduled sleight of hand magic trick chip. (127)
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On the technological/cultural tension at the core of videogames:
Traditional boundaries are blurred to where you’re not sure if you’re adding numbers or making music, telling time or playing with bleeps, programming or being programmed. Will it all boil down to just so many different varieties of calculated doodling? (138)
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On technological progressivism and criticism:
Sure Breakout is primitive compared with others even now on the market. But so are wooden recorders alongside Steinways or Moog synthesizers, and that doesn’t stop us from making great music on them. As the engineer said, “Breakout plays well”, and its very simplicity asks for further exploration. Direct descendant of the original Pong, its organizational elegance demands critical respect. (140)
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On video play for its own sake:
I could take on new problems to solve, but I’d rather stay with Breakout for the while. It’s a nice doodling machine, there’s a simple formal elegance to the thing, its harmoniously balanced grid uncluttered by doodads and monsters, the tracing of the ball so light and airy. And with the increasingly finer sense of angles I’m developing, it invites the impulse for symmetrical music with well-formed figures moving rhythmically around. Then too there’s something compelling about the very ways it jars me, about that melody-making failure, how it’s so much like solid world action that clips right along, and yet so different. It’s like one of the lemurs they make such a big deal out of in biology classes, lying at the border between two phyla and hence informative of the transformation that occurred on the threshold of a new mode of being. An “action game” helps keep alive the ambiguous experience of this mutated form of touch we now have between our mobile bodies and its calculating reflections, keeps the mysterious interface more accessible for our inspection, situates us precisely at that point where our hitherto natural mobile tendencies come into conflict with this number machine and the new ways of existing in these microworld sights and sounds. (143)
