Kill Screen Sample Issue

KILL SCREEN

VIDEOGAMES. VIDEOGAMES? VIDEOGAMES!

iSSue no. 0

THE MATURITY ISSUE: Sex, Death anD Dying a Brotherly ConneCtion Peter Molyneux ALSO: Controllers Controlled Where is My Heart?

Walkthrough to a Made-Up Game Several Explanations of Our Name Our Residence Evil

OUR RESIdENCE EvIL

pHOTO: JOSé A. MORALES COBOS | fLICKR.COM/pHOTOS/SAILORGANyMEDE

By TOM BISSELL

Other games were nothing more than a collective prologue

S

o it begins here, in your stepfather’s darkened living room, with you hunched over, watching as a dateline title card— 1998 JULY—forcefully types itself across the television screen. “1998 July”? Why not ENGLAND, LONDON? Why not, “A time once upon”? A narrator debuts to describe something called Alpha Team’s in medias res search for something called Bravo Team’s downed chopper in what is mouthfully described as “forest zone situated in northwest of Raccoon City.” Okay. This is a Japanese game. That probably explains the year-date swappage. That also makes “Raccoon City” a valiant attempt at something idiomatically American-sounding, though it is about as convincing as an American-made game set in the Japanese metropolis of Port Sushi. You harbor affection for the products of Japan, from its cuisine to its girls to its video games. To your mind, then, a certain amount of ineffable Nipponese weirdity is par for the course, even if the course in question has fifteen holes and every one is a par nine.

A live-action scene commences in which Alpha Team lands upon a foggy moor, finds Bravo Team’s crashed chopper, and is attacked by Baskervillian hounds, but all you are privy to is the puppetry of snarling muzzles shot in artless close up. To the canine puppeteers’ credit, the hounds are more convincing than the living actors, whose performances are miraculously unsuccessful. The cinematography, meanwhile, is a shaky-cam, Evil Deadish fugue minus any insinuation of talent,

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style, or coherence. Once the hellhound enfilade has taken the life of one Alpha Team member, the survivors retreat into a nearby mansion. You know that one of these survivors, following the load screen, will be yours to control. Given the majestic incompetence of the proceedings thus far, you check to see that the game’s receipt remains extant.

For most of your life you have played video games. You have owned, in turn, the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Genesis, the Super Nintendo, and the Nintendo 64, and familiarized yourself with most of their marquee titles. The console you are playing now, the console you have only today purchased, is categorically different from its ancestors. It is called the Sony PlayStation. Its controllers are more ergonomic than those you have previously held and far more loaded with buttons, and its games are not plastic cartridges but compact discs. Previous consoles were silent but your new PlayStation zizzes and whirrs in an unfamiliar way as its digital stylus scans and loads.

It is 1997. The PlayStation was released to the American market one year ago. You missed this, having been away, in the Peace Corps, teaching English, which service you terminated in a panic sixteen months short of your expected stay. Now you are back in your hometown, in the house you grew up in, feeling less directionless than mapless.

You are also bored. Hence the PlayStation.

The live-action sequence has given way to an animated indoor tableau of surprising detail and OUR RESIDENCE EVIL

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stark loveliness—like no console game you have hitherto encountered. Three characters stand in the mansion foyer. There is Barry, a husky, ursine, ginger-bearded man; Wesker, enjoying the sunglasses and slicked-back hair of a coke fiend; and Jill, your character, a trim brunette in a beret.

A brief conversation ensues about the necessity of finding Chris, your fellow Alpha Team member,

by video games to work. It as though you, the gamer, are an invisible, purposefully compromised presence within the gameworld.

The room’s only sound is a metronomically ticking grandfather clock. You step forward, experimenting with your controller’s (seventeen!) buttons and noting the responsiveness of the controls, which lend Jill’s movement a precision

Like all parables, zombies are both widely evocative and impossible to pin down. part of the reason you had purchased this game was because you were curious to see what the Japanese imagination had made of the zombie. who has somehow managed to go AWOL in the time it took to step across the threshold of the mansion’s entryway. Soon enough, a gunshot sounds from the next room. You and Barry are dispatched by Wesker to investigate.

The dialogue, bad enough as written (“Wow. What a mansion!”), is mesmerizing in performance. It is as though the actors have been encouraged to place emphasis on the least apposite word in every spoken line. Barry’s “He’s our old partner, you know,” to provide but one example, could have been read in any number of more or less appropriate ways, from “He’s our old partner, you know” to “He’s our old partner, you know” to “He’s our old partner, you know.” “He’s our old partner, you know” is the line reading of autistic miscalculation Resident Evil goes with.

Upon entry into the new room, you are finally granted control of Jill, but how the game has chosen to frame the mise en scène is a little strange. You are not looking through Jill’s eyes and movement does not result in a scrolling, follow-along screen. Instead Jill stands in what appears to be a dining room, the in-game camera angled upon her in a way that annuls any wider field of vision. Plenty of games have given you spaces around which to wander but they always took care to provide you with a maximal vantage point. This is not a maximal angle; this is not at all how your eye has been trained 12 | KILL SCREEN

that is both impressive and a little creepy. Holding down one button allows Jill to run, for instance, and this is nicely animated. A pair of trigger buttons lay beneath each of your index fingers.

Squeeze the left trigger and Jill lifts her pistol into firing position. Squeeze the right trigger and Jill fires, loudly, her pistol kicking up in response. All of this—from the preparatory pre-firing mechanic to the unfamiliar sensation of consequence your single shot has been given—feels new to you. Every video-game gun you have previously fired did so at the push of a single button, the resultant physics no more palpable or significant than jumping or moving or any other in-game movement. Video-game armaments have always seemed to you a kind of voodoo. If you wanted some digital effigy to die, you simply lined it up and pushed in the requisite photonic pin. Here, however, there is no crosshair or reticule. You fire several more shots to verify this. How on earth do you aim?

As you explore the dining room something even more bizarre begins to occur. The in-game camera is changing angles. Depending on where you go, the camera sometimes frames your character in relative close up and, other times, leaps back, reducing Jill to an apparent foreground afterthought. And yet no matter the angle from which you view Jill, the directional control schema, OUR RESIDENCE EVIL

the precision of which you moments ago admired, remains the same. What this means is that, with every camera shift, your brain is forced to make a slight but bothersome spatial adjustment. The awkwardness of this baffles you. When you wanted Link or Mario to go left, you pushed left. That the character you controlled moved in accordance to his on-screen positioning, which in turn corresponded to your joystick or directional pad, was an accepted convention of the form. Yes, you have experienced “mode shifts” in games before— that too is a convention—but never so inexplicably or so totally. So far, the game provides no compelling explanation as to why it has sundered every convention it comes across.

You glance at the box in which this game came packaged. Resident Evil. What the hell does that even mean? You know this game is intended to be scary. You also know that zombies are somehow involved; the box art promises that much. The notion of a “scary game” is striking you as increasingly laughable. While nothing is more terrifying to you than zombies, calling a zombie-based game Resident Evil was a solecism probably borne of failing to fully understand the zombie. Part of what makes zombies so frightening is that they are not evil. The zombie, a Caribbean borrowing, is in its North American guise a modern parable for … well, there you go. Like all parables, zombies are both widely evocative and impossible to pin down. Part of the reason you had purchased this game was because you were curious to see what the Japanese imagination had made of the zombie. This was a culture, after all, that had transformed its twentieth-century’s resident evil into a giant bipedal dinosaur.

On screen, Barry calls Jill over, where he kneels next to a pool of blood. (“I hope it’s not …

Chris’s blood.”) He orders you to press on looking around while he completes his investigation. You are no criminologist, but gleaning the available information from a small, freestanding blood puddle would seem to you an undertaking of no more than three or four seconds. Barry, though, continues to ponder the hell out of that blood.

You have two options. Leave the dining room to go back and explore the foyer, where Wesker presumably awaits your report, or go through a nearby side door. You take the side door. Any time you go through a door in this game you are presented with a load screen of daunting literalness: the point of view reverts to an implied first-person, the door grows closer, the knob turns,

the door opens, which is followed by the noise of it closing behind you. Considerable investment has been placed in a dramatic reproduction of this process: the knobs sound as though they were last oiled in the Cleveland Administration and the doors themselves slam shut as though they weigh five hundred pounds.

The load screen complete, Jill now stands in a long narrow hallway. The camera looks down upon her from an angle of perhaps seventy degrees, which leaves you unable to see either ahead of or behind her. You turn her left, instinctively, only to hear something further down the hall. You hear … chewing? No. It is worse than that. It is a wet, slushy sound, more like feasting than chewing.

The camera has shifted yet again, allowing you to look down the hall but not around the corner, whence this gluttonous feasting sound originates.

There is no music, no cues at all. The gameworld is silent but for your footsteps and the sound you now realize you have been set upon this path to encounter. You panic and run down to the other end of the hall, the feasting sound growing fainter, only to find two locked doors. No choice, then.

You walk (not run) back toward the hallway corner, then stop and go to a subscreen to check your inventory. Your pistol’s ammunition reserves are paltry, and you curse yourself for having shot off so many bullets in the dining room. You also have a knife. You toggle back and forth between pistol and knife, equipping and unequipping.

You eventually go with the pistol and leave the inventory screen.

Jill stands inches before the hallway corner but it suddenly feels as though it is you standing before the hellmouth itself. Your body has become a hatchery from which spiderlings of dread erupt and skitter. Part of this is merely expectation, for you know that a zombie is around that corner and you are fairly certain it is eating Chris. Another part is … you are not sure you can name it. It is not quite the control-and-release tension of the horror film and it is not quite actual terror. It is something else, a fear you can control, to a point, but to which you are also helplessly subject—a fear whose electricity becomes pleasure.

You raise your pistol—and this is interesting: you cannot move while your pistol is raised. You had not noticed this before. You should be able to move with your pistol raised and certainly you should be able to shoot while moving. That is another convention of the form. In video games, you can shoot your sluggish bullets while running, 13 | WINTER 2010

pHOTO: CARMELO SpELTINO | fLICKR.COM/pHOTOS/pIGLIApOST

The camera switches in such a way as to leave you unaware of the zombie’s exact location, though you can still hear its awful, blood-freezing moan, which, disembodied, sounds not only terrifying but sad.

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OUR RESIDENCE EVIL

jumping, falling off a cliff, swimming underwater.

On top of this you have exactly five rounds.

Zombies are dispatched with headshots. You know that much. But how do you shoot for the head when the game provides you with no crosshair? A “scary game” seems a far less laughable notion than it did only a few moments ago.

You turn the corner to yet another camera change. You have only a second or two to make out the particulars—a tiny room, a downed figure, another figure bent over him—before what is called a cut scene kicks in. The camera closes on a bald humanoid, now turning, noticing you, white head lividly veiny, mouth bloody, eyes flat and empty and purgatorial. There the brief cut scene ends. The zombie, now approaching, groans in thoughtless zombie misery, a half-eaten corpse behind it. You fire but nothing happens. In your panic you have forgotten the left trigger, which raises your weapon. This blunder has cost you.

The zombie falls upon you with a groan and bites you avidly, your torso transforming into a blood fountain. You mash all seventeen of your controller’s buttons before finally breaking free.

The zombie staggers back a few steps and you manage to fire. Still no crosshair or reticule. Your shot misses, though by how much you have no idea. The zombie is upon you again. After pushing it away—and there is something date-rapeishly unwholesome about the way it assaults you—you stagger back into the hallway to give yourself more room to maneuver, but the camera switches in such a way as to leave you unaware of the zombie’s exact location, though you can still hear its awful, blood-freezing moan, which, disembodied, sounds not only terrifying but sad. You fire blindly down the hall, toward the moaning, with no guarantee that your shots are hitting the zombie or coming anywhere close to it. Soon pulling the trigger produces only spent clicks. You go to the inventory screen and equip your knife. When you return to gameplay the zombie appears within frame and lurches forward. You slash at it, successfully, blood geysering everywhere, but not before it manages to grab you yet again. After another chewy struggle, you back up further, the camera finally providing you with a vantage point that is not actively frustrating, and you lure the zombie toward you, lunging when it staggers into stabbing range. At last the creature drops. You approach its doubly lifeless husk, not quite believing what is happening when it grabs your leg and begins, quite naturally by this point, to bite you. You stab at this specimen

of undead indestructibility until, with a final anguished moan, a copious amount of blood pools beneath it. What new devilry is this?

None of it has made sense. Not the absurd paucity of your ammunition stores, not the handicapping camera system, not the amount of effort it took to defeat a single foe, not that foe’s ability to play dead. You know a few things about video-game enemies. When they are attacked they either die instantly or lose health, and for foes as tough as this one you are typically able to track this process by way of an on-screen health bar.

This zombie, however, had no health bar. (Neither do you, properly speaking. What you do have is an electrocardiographic waveform that is green when you are at full health, orange when you are hurt, and red when you are severely hurt. Not only is this EKG stashed away in the inventory subscreen, it provides only an approximate state of health. Right now your health is red. But how red? You have no idea. This game is rationing not only resources but information.) When video game characters die, furthermore, they disappear, like Raptured Christians or Jedi. Your assailant has not disappeared and instead remains facedown in a red pool of useless zombie plasma. This is a game in which every bullet, evidently, will count. This is also a game in which everything you kill will remain where it falls, at least until you leave the room. You stab it again. Revenge!

You flee the hallway and return to Barry. Before you can tell him what has happened, the door behind you opens. The zombie whose deadness was a heliocentric certainty has followed you.

You (not Jill: you) cry out in delighted shock.

Your worried stepfather, a few rooms away, calls your name, his voice emanating from a world that, for the last half hour, has been as enclosing but indistinct as an amnion. After calling back that you are okay, you are newly conscious of the darkness around you, the lateness of the hour. For the first time in your life, a video game has done something more than entertain or distract you. It has bypassed your limbic system and gone straight for the spinal canal. You lean back, cautiously.

You are twenty-three years old. You have played a lot of games. Right now, all those games, all the irrecoverable eons you have invested in them, seem to you, suddenly, like nothing more than a collective prologue.

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AIR TRAFFIC

By MATTHEW SHAER

A million minds, a million miles

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N

ot so long ago, a former musician named Dave Mark had an idea for a video game. This was back near the turn of the millennium, when the industry blood lust for phantasmagoric spectacle and point-andclick carnage had not yet arrived. Demanding games like Black & White were a hit with critics; the supremely realistic Operation Flashpoint, was scooped up by the US military, for use in training recruits. Mark’s idea was to take the things that made these games good—that gave them complexity, strategy, and intricacy—and tweak the artificial intelligence to such a degree that they became great.

Mark, who is fond of saying a good AI designer must also be a good psychologist, was primarily interested in how he could best replicate human behavior. “AI in games is generally too limited, and because of that, it is too predictable,” Mark told me recently. “In most cases, even in highlyadvanced games, a player either knows exactly what’s coming, or knows how the enemy or ally is going to respond. If this, then that. If that, then this. AI has gotten better over time, but there is still a point in many titles when the game play starts to look really very stupid.”

When we first spoke, I had just finished Resident Evil IV on the Nintendo Wii, and I told Mark that the enemies in that game generally came in about four varieties, each of which acted in predictable ways: the evil farmers threw their axes, the evil bugs climbed up the wall and dropped onto your head, and so on. Even the largest of bosses fought under a transparent rubric. In one way, of course, this is what made the Resident Evil franchise such a success. Many gamers just want somewhere to point their Wiimote—the sooner they shoot the zombie’s head clear off his slimy shoulders, the better. There is catharsis in a predictable game.

It validates a player’s sense of his own intelligence; frustration is replaced by release.

But there is another audience that craves a deeper gaming experience. They want to be immersed; they want to stay up until four in the morning until their eyes turn rheumy; they want to slam down Crunk!!! Juice and burrow away from the real world. These were the gamers Mark wanted to write for. “How does a character proceed in the world? That should be the real question driving a good game, and it’s not,” Mark said.

The game Mark had in mind, it should be said, could never be a mass market sensation. He knew this when he set to work in 2001, and he’s proud

to say it now. There are no zombies in this game; no monsters, no riddles, no motion-sensing technology. There are planes, but they don’t have guns, and there is animation, but it sure isn’t pretty, even by the pixilated standards of yesteryear. What Airline Traffic Manager does have is math. Hard calculus. Equations by the hundreds of thousands.

In fact, the name of Mark’s consulting and development company is Intrinsic Algorithm; its motto is “Reducing the World to Mathematical Equations!”

In many ways, the concept of Airline Traffic Manager is similar to Railroad Tycoon: the player manages the operations of a major airline, juggling flight paths, travel schedules, pilots and planes. The variables are manifold, and include bad weather, malfunctioning avionics, and potholed runways.

What sets Mark’s game apart is the staggering scale of the model. His canvas is 400 airfields in 300 metropolitan cities; his cast is 1 million opinionated Americans. The task of the player is to juggle the needs of those passengers, who must be fitted into 60 different types of aircraft—and 100 different cabin configurations—before they are shuttled off to some destination on the other side of the country. Each character arrives with his or her own prejudices, fears, and anxieties.

Some folks will demand first class; some will order vegetarian food; some will expect their in-flight entertainment system to work. There are big passengers, and there are small passengers. There are passengers who travel with vomiting babies on their laps; there are passengers that will need extra-large seats to accommodate their extra-large bottoms. The player is in charge of it all, and must become a maestro of this seething horde.

In a YouTube video created in 2004, Mark demonstrates the simulation from the origin point – in other words, from the world a first-time player of Airline Traffic Manager would step into. “At the moment,” Mark says in a voice over, “and this is right after starting the game, we have one million passengers in the game, and of which, at the moment, 44,000 have already booked itineraries.” Every time the simulation enters a new 24-hour period—the game can be played in real time – the customer list generates anew. So assuming you played Airline Traffic Manager for one week, you’d be dealing with 7 million passengers.

Play for a month, and you’d have 31 million on your hands. And you thought tending to one railroad line was difficult.

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As Mark hinted at the GDC, not a single of those 1 million asses acts in the same way as the other 999,999 asses.

At the 2009 Game Developers Conference, Mark was a featured speaker on a panel about the future of AI. He spoke after Richard Evans, a Senior AI Engineer at Electronic Arts, and before Phil Carlisle, a Lecturer at the University of Bolton.

Carlisle talked about Descartes and the difficulties of mapping facial emotion; Evans talked about social modeling in Sims 3, a mainstream game which went on to sell millions of copies. Mark spoke about Airline Traffic Manager. In the first few minutes of his lecture, he showed a photograph of a puppy, and asked the audience whether they wanted to kick, run screaming from, or meet the animal. The majority wanted to meet the puppy.

Then Mark showed a photograph of a snarling dog, and asked the same question. The majority now wanted to run screaming from the dog. Still, as Mark later told me, there were gradations to each reaction—some folks would have kicked the snarling dog, rather than run away, and some would have been annoyed by the cute puppy.

What everyone should take away from the exercise, Mark explained, was that different people have different reactions, and those reactions are

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modeled on a regularly-changing set of variables, including personality, history, and mood. This should all be pretty obvious. But if you take a look at the best-selling games from the past few years, you’ll notice that the overwhelming majority don’t bother mapping the gradations in behavior. Either a bad guy is dead or he isn’t; either the princess is saved or she’s eaten by a dragon; either you hit or you miss. Correspondingly, games currently elicit a narrow range of emotions from human players: I am either scared, frustrated, or happy. In real life, I am often scared, frustrated, and angry, but I am also sometimes tentatively happy, miserably sad, somewhat queasy, or totally confused. Human experience has gradations, in other words, and so should games.

Using a collection of colored charts and graph Mark went on to explain all this to the audience; he also demonstrated a bit of how Airline Traffic Manager might work. The old method, he concluded, which relies on “identical units,” clearly wasn’t working. It made for “shallow, repetitive game play,” and “unrealistic interaction.” But by sampling a wide range of situations, and inserting

AIR TRAFFIC

a large cast of characters into each of those situations—as well as amping up the number of variables—a developer would eventually create far more choices. A good game, he said, “is a series of interesting choices.”

And Airline Traffic Manager is nothing but choices. The game comes equipped with a handful of point A to point B “challenges”— players, for instance, can compete to become the most-respected carrier, or the most profitable.

The gameplay in these scenarios is restricted chronologically and laterally; once you win or lose or run out of time, the game ends. But the real achievement of Airline Traffic Manager is a “free market” option, where the model sprawls, in real time, over days, weeks, months. In that mode, the challenge is not to just to entertain the complaints of a million passengers, but to do it better than your competition. After all, airline carriers don’t operate in a vacuum. They must constantly scramble to match their prices to the latest offerings on Travelocity, and cope with the fluctuating costs of fuel, maintenance, and labor.

The “series of interesting choices” extends

towards infinity: players must keep one eye on the pulse of their customers, and the other on aircraft load factors and the general condition of their fleet. They’ll need to purchase land and airport space from ailing competitors; unload unprofitable property; and manage the layout of each gate, from the garages to the check-in desks. They’ll need to stuff 1 million asses into 1 million seats every day, and then wake up and do it all again.

As Mark hinted at the GDC, not a single of those 1 million asses acts in the same way as the other 999,999 asses. The world of Airline Traffic Manager is not the world of Resident Evil, where the same three zombies march resolutely towards the camera, pitchforks held overhead. Here, the player encounters passengers who are mildly content, if a little hungry, and passengers who are in a rush. Frustration, disappointment, fear—all these emotions factor into the equation. Broken planes; planes that are about to break; pilots that could use a vacation; pilots that are fresh and rested.

It’s mind-bogglingly arcane stuff—a world stripped down to integers. But for the right player, the prospect of a game like Airline Traffic

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Manager is tremendously appealing. It envisions

a world that really is “reduced to mathematical equations”—a world where everything is not only possible, but everything is happening at once, all the time, and occasionally, twice on the hour.

On a purely technological level, artificial intelligence—and thus the emotional resonance of the best games—has improved mightily over the past few years. Although the major studios are concentrated mostly on low-brainpower, highaction fare, games like Fable II and Sims 3 prove there is still a market for character-first titles.

Still, many developers feel there is a considerable distance between what is possible and what is actually being brought to market.

“I suppose the simplest problem with AI in mainstream gaming today is that most games don’t think of AI broadly enough—as something that extends beyond pathfinding and other forms of planning,” Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech and a founding partner at Persuasive Games, told me. “There are exceptions—character AI in the Sims 3; drama management in Far Cry 2—and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that those titles are driven by design leaders who understand AI much more broadly.”

Damian Isla, who was until recently the lead AI programmer at Bungie Studios, said the issue was one of “risk aversion.” “I think you’ve got a lot of set designs out there that we know work,” Isla said. “And you’ve got an industry that’s become big-budget driven, with hundreds of millions of dollars. No one right now is too interested in the experimental. It’s the same thing we’ve seen with Hollywood: it’s a natural reaction when so much money is at stake. The studios will say, ‘We’re not sure these games are going to work, so we’re not going to back them.’”

Mark, for his part, is not particularly interested in studio backing, or an angel investor. His commitment to Airline Traffic Manager has everything to do with the fervor of a career innovator. He wants to prove that AI isn’t just 22 | KILL SCREEN

a matter of shooting zombie brains out of the backside of zombie skulls. He wants to prove, per Bogost, that AI can be more than the backbone of a game: that it can become the game itself.

Mark first conceptualized Airline Traffic Manager sometime in 2001, and planned to start work in earnest the next spring. Then life caught up with him. There were medical problems; there was a lock down on funding; at some point, he realized that he was going to go broke if he pursued the game full-time. “Just as I’d get my feet wet, I’d have to duck out again,” he said. “Fits and starts—that was the only way I could make it work. With a game like this, I didn’t think there’d ever be an angel investor.”

So in the mean time, Mark set about building a successful consulting and programming business.

He helped found the AI Game Programmers Guild, and last year, he published his first book, Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI. It’s not an easy thing getting a new business off the ground, and Mark found he had less and less time to work on Airline Traffic Manager. In 2004, he managed to crank out a video demo of the game, which is now available for free online. He circulated the video, and expected his friends to be daunted by the complexity of the game, or to nod and smile politely. After all, who wants to juggle dietary preferences for a mob of disgruntled passengers, when they could be stabbing vampires with a stake-firing machine gun? Who wants to scrutinize seat plans in a 747, when they could knee a drug dealer in the face in a Chinatown alley? But the response to Mark’s creation was one of awe. Several acquaintances told Mark that the scale of Airline Traffic Manager was unprecedented, as was the subtlety with which he mapped the responses of each passenger. “As strange as it sounds to say,” Mark says, “there are a lot of techniques here that could apply to [mainstream] games.”

Consider, for instance, a shooter like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. When Infinity Ward developed the game, they built in a good deal of squad-based AIR TRAFFIC

warfare—the player must rely on, rescue, and fight organized groups of computer-controlled soldiers.

And yet there are times when a character seems to be operating in only one dimension—he charges forward, no matter what the risk, no matter how many fellow soldiers have fallen dead behind him.

Without realistic characterizations, the game often feels robotic.

Mark, theoretically, has built a model with the capacity to juggle millions of behaviorally unique characters. His passengers don’t operate in one dimension; they are not merely brave or strong. They have preferences that must be met, yes, but their responses are gradated, depending on a flood of variables. How would one million of those characters interact if they were smashed together in one of the biggest corporate clusterfucks in the world? Well, they’d behave in 1 million different ways.

This kind of intricacy is a Holy Grail of sorts for AI developers, who view character mapping as paramount to graphical wizardry. A few years ago, I interviewed Peter Molyneux, who was then working on Fable II. “We could have made a game which had more horrific moments or more action moments than any other game,” Molyneux said.

“But we decided that making you feel you are loved, by the wife you have chosen, by the children you have sired, by the community you have helped—and the simple unconditional love of your companion dog would be a much more satisfying gaming experience.”

A “satisfying gaming experience”—one cobbled together out of a flood of integers and equations— remains Mark’s goal. Still, as of this summer, he had not yet managed to stow away enough time to finish Airline Traffic Manager. His services are in high demand, and he remains happily, and frantically, busy. On the afternoon we spoke, Mark had just returned from a consulting gig; the next week, he had agreed to meet with the directors of a prominent game studio, who were interested in having him look at some of their games. He was in Texas with his in-laws, and told me he could give me just a few minutes before his next scheduled “mandatory food-based event,” but once he started talking about Airline Traffic Manager, the few minutes turned into an hour. “I work full time, and I’ve already got ideas for three other games,” Mark said. “This thing though, this first game, remains my goal. I want to get it done,” he said, and then paused. “I will get it done.”

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PAUSE

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Logan Walters / website13156.com

PAUSE

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VOL. 1, ISSUE 1 FEAR GLUTTONY PSYCHOSIS FRUSTRATION PAIN SICKNESS REJECTION DISGUST

PLUS! BAGGING BAMBI NO RUSSIAN REIMAGINED A 30-YEAR BAN ON PINBALL

INTERVIEWS WITH MESSHOF, ANNA ANTHROPY, JESS CHAVEZ, AND KRYSTIAN MAJEWSKI

AND THE MOST DISGUSTING PUZZLE EVER WRITTEN!

VIDEOGAMES ARE NO FUN.

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A hunting coin-op breaks boundaries with bullets

BIG BUCK HUNTER

BY JASON FAGONE PHOTOGRAPHY BY FRED BENENSON

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BIG BUCK HUNTER

“In the latter part of my school life I became passionately fond of shooting; I do not believe that any one could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds. How well I remember killing my first snipe, and my excitement was so great that I had much difficulty in reloading my gun from the trembling of my hands. This taste long continued, and I became a very good shot.”

— Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

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B

ig Buck Hunter Pro is an arcade game with no characters, no mythology, no lush video, very little mission, and no story. What there is is a gun. On the screen, photorealistic animals—bucks, elk, white-tail deer, prong-horned antelope, big-horn sheep, moose, blackbirds, bluebirds, skunks, foxes, rabbits, wolves, squirrels, possums, and raccoons— scurry back and forth and wait for you to shoot them with the gun.

That’s pretty much it. Big Buck Hunter Pro is exactly what it appears to be: a hunting simulator, a more varied and lushly rendered version of the NES classic Duck Hunt. And yet, over the last four years alone, gamers have fed more than $50 million into Big Buck Hunter Pro machines, a few crumpled dollar bills at a time. It may well be the most lucrative arcade shooter the world has ever seen. When you factor in the other versions of

your Brooklyn Lager on the rim of the pool table.

(The game’s design is simple because it has to be; now that there are virtually no more arcades, the main players of arcade games are people in bars, who are apt to be playing while drunk.)

So: the gun.

It’s large, as these things go. You feed in your dollar bill and pick it up, feel its heft. And it feels nice. Sort of the way your iPhone feels nice. You’re immediately aware of its plastic friendliness. Even if you’re not a hunter, even if you’ve never shot a gun before in your life—and if you’re the median Buck Hunter player, this describes you accurately, a phenomenon we’ll get to in a minute—you instantly understand that some serious thought has gone into this gun. It’s a good feel for your trigger hand, the way it rests on the palm. There’s a kind of curvature on the back of the gun that your thumb and forefinger wrap around. The front-to-back balance is right. It doesn’t feel chintzy or cheap. And in fact it has been designed to be virtually indestructible; the same way that AK-47s are built to shoot cleanly even if the stock is caked with mud, this gun has been assembled with an eye to the rigors of the American bar environment (as Petro says, “Who knows what people will do to the gun”).

But of course all you want to do with the gun right now is shoot it, expertly. You want to hold it steady, pull the trigger, and watch the screen flash as it registers your bullet hitting home, the buck slumping over dead on the grass. Then again.

And again. When you pull back on the pump to reload, it clicks just so, and there’s actually some tension, which means that the spring is calibrated beautifully. “It feels just good enough so that it feels like you actually did something,” says Petro.

There’s a reason the gun is such a pleasing object. Petro, 44, used to work at Midway, the king of arcade manufacturers, maker of all the great monopolizers of ’80s-era youthful evenings: Tron, Ms. Pac Man, Rampage, and on and on.

“Gun games are kind of my forte,” he says. He’d made a bunch prior to Buck Hunter, including Terminator 2: Judgment Day; and his current company, Play Mechanix, which he founded, is full

The feeling of killing a buck in Buck Hunter is less like the feeling of killing something in a videogame than the feeling of telling someone you love a lie. You don’t have to. You do anyway. the game—in addition to Big Buck Hunter Pro, there’s the original Big Buck Hunter, plus Big Buck Hunter II, Big Buck Hunter 2006: Call of the Wild, and Big Buck Hunter Safari, together comprising about 40,000 deployed consoles across the 50 states—you’re talking “a quarter of a billion dollars, probably, in coin drop,” says George Petro, the game’s creator. “That’s conservative.”

It’s worth asking why Americans are so crazy about such a simple videogame, and an arcade game at that. And maybe the best place to start is with the Buck Hunter gun, because the gun is the first thing you notice when you walk up to the nearly seven-foot-tall Buck Hunter cabinet— probably in a bar, probably having just set down 6 | KILL SCREEN

BIG BUCK HUNTER

of old arcade and pinball guys who understand weight and actuator switches. They’re gamers, not hunters; “We just knew that hunting is popular.”

In 1999, Petro and colleagues dummied up about 25 percent of a Buck Hunter prototype and wheeled that first cabinet into a bar in Aurora, Ill. near the Play Mechanix office called Pocket’s.

“It was like instant freak-out,” Petro says. If you believe Petro, guys in the bar were lined up to play it before he’d even unloaded it from the hand truck. “It’s a strange thing with a coin-operated game,” he says. “It’s not like home games. We actually get a chance to see people playing it.” Petro stood in the bar and watched the first guy pump in his first quarter (the game only cost 25 cents back then). “The game abruptly ended, because we didn’t have a lot in there. It said, ‘Thanks for playing, sneak preview.’ And then, all of a sudden, the guy looks around, puts more money in, starts playing it again.” Petro called Midway to see if it’d be interested in manufacturing Buck Hunter, but Midway didn’t return his call. So he heaved the Buck Hunter cabinet into a minivan, jingling coins and all, and drove it straight to Incredible Technologies, maker of Golden Tee Golf. “I showed ’em the cash box. ‘This is like two days right here.’

There was like 250 bucks in coins.”

Incredible Technologies bought the game, helped Play Mechanix put out three or four versions of increasing refinement, and crammed thousands of consoles into bars across the American South—in hunting country. But it wasn’t until Petro hooked up with another distributor, Betson Enterprises, and added a second gun to the console for head-to-head gameplay, that the game really took off. Betson was “very good at getting it placed in urban locations,” says Petro. “All of a sudden, it doesn’t just have to be in a hick bar. It can be in Manhattan. And it can earn gangbusters. Once it hit the mainstream, everybody got on board.”

The new cabinet, now called Big Buck Hunter Pro, wedded the tension of two-player combat to a fresh set of graphics: lush digital vistas of Montana, West Virginia, Texas, New Mexico, and Saskatchewan had been rendered with a “painterly-type feel,” inspired by the artwork in fantasy novels and Petro’s desire to make a game that would be more “appealing to women.” There were now no barriers to enjoyment. Play Mechanix had replicated the experience of hunting without all the un-fun parts: the schlepping to the camp, the spraying yourself with deer urine, the canned food and farty tents. This was hunting perfectly

distilled and democratized, which is why Petro wasn’t necessarily surprised when he began to get reports of vegan chicks in Brooklyn blowing the shit out of prong-horned antelope between sips of PBRs. The game was wish fulfillment, and it worked both ways. It let Americans who liked to hunt get pumped about actually hunting, which explained why hunting-supply company Cabela’s had a giant 15-foot version of Buck Hunter in its stores, and it let Americans who would never hunt in real life step into a costume and experience how the other half lives. It’s not that you get to be Sarah Palin for 10 minutes; it’s that you get to connect to an activity that you’ve been predisposed—selected, really—to experience as pleasure. “The bottom line is, certainly, we’re all hunters,” Petro told me.

“There’s something deep in our brain that that sort of thrill is there. If you go out and really hunt, it’s an adrenaline-filled experience. If you talk to guys that hunt, there comes a time when your target is out there, and you have to shoot that target—it’s a very tense moment, and I think you almost get that same kind of feel with our game…. We work hard at keeping that tension there.” And when your heart leaps into your throat as that fucking ram darts behind that tree, when your whole world for this split second is the size of the squirt of dopamine and the clipped breath and the fluttering hand and the warmth in the cheeks, you feel it, the thing that Darwin felt when he killed those wonderfully evolved birds, the creatures that would one day disclose to him the origin of life. This is why there are 200 million guns in private hands in America. It’s why you’ll never get them back.

Yes, sure, the game has its wacky, outlandish elements: the busty chicks in safari hats and short shorts who appear between rounds, the disembodied voice of George Petro himself that cuts in every so often to drawl encouragement or scorn (“Hope you got a big freezer!”), and the bonus rounds that let you shoot at windmills, frogs, UFOs, and moonshine jugs. But the core gameplay is earnest and serious. It’s actually hard to play Big Buck Hunter like a jackass. There are ground rules. For instance, before you can rack up points by shooting a “critter,” one of the tinier animals that bound across the screen, you have to shoot a bigger male animal. Also, if you shoot a female—say, a doe—your gun locks up. There is a proper order to things in Big Buck Hunter, a hierarchy of allowable violence, and if you don’t respect the hierarchy you will have wasted your dollar. The animals move quickly and duck out of 7 | VOL. 1, ISSUE 1

range behind trees and hills, making it crucial to narrow your aim to the “vitals”: the animal’s head and heart. “We’re trying to pull accuracy out of the player,” says Mark Ritchie, a Buck Hunter project manager with Play Mechanix.

Ritchie happens to be the only person on the Buck Hunter team who hunts deer in real life: twice a year, up in Wisconsin. Ritchie, 51, started designing pinball games straight out of high school, but found it hard to make a living after a while. He fell in with Play Mechanix, where he quickly became the go-to guy for questions about Big Buck Hunter’s realism and sporting appropriateness. “I was a pretty good guideline for them in doing things that were ethical,” Ritchie says. “They had an idea for a [bonus] game early on—shooting a street sign. I pooped all over that idea. That would be bad for hunting. Things like that, I would step in. Like shooting a protected animal … I’d say, well, that’s a horrible thing to do.

That just says hunters are maniacs, and we’re not.”

Indeed, aside from the critter bonuses, which reward you for overkill—strictly speaking, it’s not necessary to use a shotgun to kill a beetle—there is nothing maniacal about Big Buck Hunter. You don’t shred deer with Uzis and you don’t see any blood. “When you look at these other violent games,” Ritchie says, “where you’re exploding people’s guts and hanging them out to dry, this is like Romper Room.” But this is why Big Buck Hunter is potentially conscience-pricking in a way that more graphic games aren’t. Buck Hunter presents your quarry intact, the bucks expiring serenely, like Victorian ladies fainting on couches. While in another game, the gore of an annihilated body can seem to retroactively degrade it, making its slaughter seem justified, Buck Hunter doesn’t grant you this moral distance; it takes pains to present the animals as innocent creatures that were minding their own business before you showed up. Before you get to shoot at them, you have to stare for a few seconds at an image of the buck or the ram or the antelope standing frozen on a kickass bluff, looking all majestic. Then, after you take your shots, the game pauses, and on a trophy screen each painterly buck is briefly reanimated to show you, with a red dot, where you’ve hit him.

The ghost buck’s legs pump and churn while your score climbs by the thousands, and the look on his face as he’s suspended in midair is faraway and blank and genuinely creepy. The game doesn’t just simulate the physiological experience of hunting, it simulates the psychology of the confrontation, the

Big Buck Hunter Pro Open Season at Hi Fi in the East Village, NYC.

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BIG BUCK HUNTER

power imbalance between predator and prey. Buck Hunter is the rare game that works to reinforce a one-to-one relationship with something kind of fraught and dubious and sticky that you can also do in the real world. The feeling of killing a buck in Buck Hunter is less like the feeling of killing something in a videogame than the feeling of telling someone you love a lie. You don’t have to.

You do anyway. There’s a tiny thrill of getting away with it, followed by a mostly subconscious regret.

You justify it in your own mind and move on.

A lot of innovative game designers are striving these days to create morally complex videogames, and they’re mostly doing it narratively, by crafting little Sophie’s Choices in game worlds—choices that engage the players’ ethical brains and make them question the consequences of their gameworld decisions. The holy grail of the more artistically ambitious side of the profession is to make the gamer experience sophisticated emotions in a one-on-one confrontation with a piece of art.

But Big Buck Hunter is a morally complex game without even trying to be, because it’s something unique in the game world, a powerful combination of visual style, gameplay, tactile feedback, and environment. It’s a social game embedded in the ultimate social environment: the bar. “We didn’t want to make this game something that was—how do I want to put it? —something that required all your attention,” says George Petro.

“The old-school games, they require all your attention. You’re antisocial. But we wanted a game that won’t overtake the group and can fit in with the party.” This is what gives Big Buck Hunter its under-the-skin power: the gap between what you’re being asked to do and where you find yourself doing it. Here’s a game that simulates a violent act against an innocent life, recreates the tension that makes that act enjoyable, and then turns it into casual mid-bar-chat entertainment. It plunges you into an older, weirder human experience, then yanks you back out to your beer and your buddies. For just as long as it takes to discharge your dark wish from a distance, but no longer, it loans you a gorgeous gun.

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PAUSE

Ben Fry / benfry.com

On paper, the code stored in a Q*bert cartridge hardly resembles the arcade machine with its candy-colored mascot. The game turns out to be underpinned by ghostly bytes and a tangle of instructions, painstakingly arranged for your fun.

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PAUSE

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THE BIG CHILL

T

BY MITCH KRPATA ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH JACOBY

Before Abu Ghraib, there was Chiller

he entrance to the Fun and Games arcade in Framingham, Mass. makes visitors feel like they’re boarding a spacecraft. Silver doors with nearly opaque window panels slide open to reveal a metallic catwalk, which is surrounded by strobing lights that suggest you are entering hyperspace. For a kid, it makes you feel like you’re blasting off from the drab strip malls of Route 9 on an intergalactic adventure. That’s before you step inside to find that the place feels like— well, like a dingy video arcade.

When I was young, the arcade had a dubious reputation. You didn’t go there after dark, and

Lacking a story, lacking any semblance of skill, lacking the slightest sense of taste, Chiller resembled nothing so much as snuff. rumors of gang activity ran rampant among my classmates. Never mind that I never encountered so much as a raised voice in there—in the gloomy atmosphere of the place, the rumors felt true. The sensation was bolstered by the arcade’s collection of violent games, games my parents never would have allowed in our house. But in the darkness of the arcade, with three kids to track, my dad cast a blind eye.

Along the back wall, nestled alongside the rest of the old and forgotten machines, was the most gruesome and pointless videogame I have ever played. Chiller was an early light-gun game, made in 1986 and still lingering in Fun and Games in the early 1990s. To call it “horror-themed” would be accurate, but unduly complimentary. Cultural warriors would make hay in later years of calling games “murder simulators,” but Chiller was something even worse: a torture simulator.

The game, such as it was, was a simple memory exercise. Prior to each of the game’s four levels, you were shown an array of targets that would appear onscreen. To progress, you’d have to shoot them all within the time limit. Or you could ignore the targets altogether and focus on obliterating the naked, manacled prisoners who populated each level.

Because I ignored the targets, I never advanced past the first stage, which took place in a dungeon.

I remember it well. The floor was festooned with dismembered limbs, and three severed heads lined a shelf. One crudely drawn human body was

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THE BIG CHILL

shackled to the wall. You could blast off chunks of his flesh until only a bloody skeleton remained.

Another was trapped in a guillotine; a well-placed shot would drop the blade. A third victim, on the right-hand side of the screen, was kneeling with his head in a vise. Shooting the screw a few times would pulp his head.

For a pre-adolescent kid, the illicit thrill was irresistible. Let the other kids in the arcade play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was taking care of the real business. One of the true joys of childhood is the feeling that you’re getting away with something, and for a time, that’s how I felt

playing Chiller: like I’d snuck out of the house after bedtime and nobody had noticed.

But the feeling soon faded, to be replaced by a growing sense of unease. Lacking a story, lacking any semblance of skill, lacking the slightest sense of taste, Chiller resembled nothing so much as snuff. I may not have consciously known that at the time—but, as I flayed alive each virtual soul, I felt it. Violent videogames were a part of my DNA by then, but always I played as the good guy. Always I fought the forces of evil.

The best games transport the player to another realm. The worst games do, too. It hardly mattered that the graphics were amateurish even for the time, or that the soundtrack consisted of a looping digital organ piece, a cackling ghoul, and overmodulated screams. Nor did it matter that, considered purely on ludic terms, this was one of the lousiest games ever made. Playing Chiller, I could tell that some threshold had been crossed— that I was standing in the darkest corner of a very dark place. It had no reason for being, except to immerse me in a world of extravagant violence, asking only for a quarter, and a willingness to pull the trigger.

The name was accurate. I was chilled. Quarters depleted, I located my dad and waited for my siblings to finish playing their own games. When we left the arcade, through those spaceship doors, the sunlight was blinding.

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mONdaY mORNING

BY ZACK HANDLEN ILLUSTRATION BY EÓIN BURKE

Loading…

>BEDROOM You are in bed, asleep. No dreams. The alarm goes off, you wake up, it’s 6:30 a.m. >GET OUT OF BED You try to sit up, but you’re too tired. Doesn’t seem much point in it. >GO TO SLEEP “TO SLEEP” is not a recognizable location.

The alarm continues to sound.

It is very piercing. >HIT SNOOZE BUTTON The alarm stops. You doze.

Outside, the sun hasn’t come up yet. Without the alarm clock, it could be any time at all.

It is 6:37 a.m. The alarm goes off. >TURN OFF ALARM The alarm stops. You go back to sleep. You were up too late last night, although it’s nearly impossible to get out of bed anymore even under the best of circumstances. You fall back into a dream you were having, except you were drunk when you were having it, and you aren’t drunk anymore. It’s less like a dream and more like turning back and forth and trying to swallow cotton.

The phone rings. It is 10:40 a.m., and you are uncomfortably warm. >ANSWER THE PHONE It’s your boss, at your job. This is the fourth shift you’ve missed this month at your job. You are now fired. >APOLOGIZE TO BOSS I don’t know the word “apologize.” Also, your boss has hung up.

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>GET OUT OF BED The floor is strewn with clothes you should’ve washed over the weekend. North, there is a door to the hallway. West, there is a door to your closet. >WEST There is a box of Magic: The Gathering cards on the closet floor. Lots of swamps. There are two sweaters on hangers, one brown, one slightly less brown. There is a backpack on the top shelf. >TAKE BACKPACK It rattles. There's a flashlight inside. >TAKE CARDS Grow up. >TAKE BROWN SWEATER You take the slightly less-brown sweater, because the other one has holes in it. Then you pick up pants and underwear and socks off the floor. They are reasonably clean. >N HALLWAY Your roommate's door is closed. He's snoring, and there is somebody else snoring with him, so that girl at the bar last night probably came home with him. You can't really remember.

Sunday night is a stupid time to be at the bar anyway. To the east, the bathroom door is open.

North is the living room and kitchen. South is the bedroom.

>E BATHROOM There is a sink. The coldwater tap is caked with dried toothpaste, and pieces of floss dangle from under the mirror over the sink. The shower curtain is closed. The toilet is

open, and there is something unspeakable in the bowl.

>FLUSH TOILET It’s clogged. Gray, lumpy water bubbles over the lid.

>GET PLUNGER You look for the plunger, but it’s not under the sink. The bubbling has subsided, and now there’s just a smell. You have to vomit.

>VOMIT INTO TOILET Ew. No, you probably don’t want to get your face near that.

>VOMIT INTO SINK You throw up into the sink.

The smell gets worse. You’d like to shower, but the thought of trying to get clean near whatever is in the toilet makes you want to throw up again. You quickly change your clothes and brush your teeth long enough to get the smell out of your mouth.

You’ll have to call a plumber, but you don’t have a job anymore, and you can’t really afford it. Maybe you could call your parents, if they were still answering your calls. >W HALLWAY The snoring has stopped. They’re making noises right now that sound like, well, how would you know? You haven’t had a girl over the whole time you’ve lived here. They’re probably just playing a really exciting game of “Imitate Your Favorite Farm Animal.” >N LIVING ROOM AND KITCHEN It’s a city apartment, so there’s not a lot of distinction between the two rooms, just a waisthigh wall that blocks off the cooking-and-food-prep area 93 | VOL. 1, ISSUE 1

from the eating-and-sitting place. There is a rug on the living room floor, kicked up at the edge, and a futon couch, and a coffee table with some bills and a copy of Maxim you bought ironically. You hope. The TV is the biggest thing in the room, a 42-inch high-def LCD that you're still paying off. You and the roommate bought one of the gaming systems together, but the other two are yours, as are most of the games. You used to make more money before you moved here, and you've never had anything worthwhile to spend it on. DVDs are stacked on shelves and a window-sill to the side. You can sell some of these things back to the store, make enough money for a couple weeks’ groceries. You’re having a hard time working out what to do next. Your life has become terribly improbable all of a sudden.

The kitchen is surprisingly clean. There is a box of empty beer bottles on the oven, and a couple of empty Miller Lite cans on the counter, but the sink is clear of dishes, and there aren’t any obvious stains. There is a coffee maker by the sink.

The refrigerator is in the far corner, and there are multiple cupboards above and below the counter-top.

South leads back to the hallway. This is a basement apartment, and the window shades are pulled low. You hear car horns outside, and someone cursing in French.

>FILL COFFEE MAKER WITH WATER You take the coffee pot off the burner, fill it to the eight-cups line, and pour the water into the back of the coffee maker. Some of it leaks out the side.

training to damn anything.

>OPEN CUPBOARDS You open every cupboard.

There is a box of salt, three cans of peas, paper plates, cumen, measuring spoons, coffee filters, mugs, glasses, and a three-yearold container of grits.

>FUCK YOU Oh, that hurts. You type your mother with those fingers?

>MAKE COFFEE With what?

>FIX COFFEE MAKER Right. We’ll just get MacGyver on the phone, he’ll talk you through it.

>USE COFFEE MAKER TO MAKE COFFEE The coffee maker is empty.

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>PUT COFFEE FILTER IN COFFEE MAKER Done. >OPEN REFRIGERATOR It’s mostly empty. One beer left, a bottle of ketchup, two empty milk jugs, and a milk jug down to the last swallow. There is also a bag of generic grocery-store coffee beans. >POUR BAG INTO COFFEE MAKER Done. There is only a handful of ground beans left. >TURN ON COFFEE MAKER Nothing happens. >CHECK PLUG The coffee maker is plugged in. >PLUG COFFEE MAKER INTO DIFFERENT OUTLET Done. >TURN ON COFFEE MAKER Nothing happens.

>DAMN IT You lack the appropriate clerical

>SHIT You are in the kitchen. Anyone could walk in, and you're wearing reasonably clean underwear.

>CUNT Eight years-old, out at recess, he grabs you before you can reach the swings and drags you, yelping, over to the big pine tree at the edge of the kickball field.

Your shirt pulls up and your shoelaces tangle and you nearly fall, but he pulls and yanks and then your face slams into bark like sandpaper so coarse it could grate steel. He pushes and grinds and your nose bends to one side. Blood leaks through your nostrils and you can taste it, mixing with pine sap and crumbs of tree skin, and it's making this gummy substance in your mouth. You cry, and now there's snot. “Fuck it,” he says, “Fuck the tree,” and kicks your legs out and you flail at the tree trunk. He won't let go of the back of your head. He presses. You imagine your skull breaking like an egg, brain yolk spilling onto the dirt and sand.

You scream the only word you can think of, the worst word, the word you scratched in the church pew when no one was looking and that means you're going to Hell. He kicks you one more time in the ass, and it hurts to sit for a week. Recess ends, and when you get home from school, you play Super Mario Bros for three hours and when your brother wants a turn, you call him a retard. Mom makes you go to bed early.

MONDAY MORNING

>LOOK LIVING ROOM AND KITCHEN Sink, oven, open cupboards, rug, couch, coffee table, semiironic mastubatory aid, vastly self-indulgent toy collection. Not much has changed. South leads you back down the hall. >S You take a few steps, then stop.

It’s starting to sink in. You’ve got $36.65 in your back account, and the crap job you’ve been complaining about for months is gone, and now you’re going to have to figure out what’s next. It would be nice to stop and take a moment before you go bolting out the front door, right? There are options. There have to be.

Your roommate could float you some cash, and you could get an extension on your debts— again—and there’s always some other crap job you can shuffle into. Maybe this is for the best.

Maybe you were subconsciously trying to make all this happen; maybe you meant to sleep in so much. Wouldn't it be nice if that was how your arbitrary failures worked—if there were some sort of plan, a way to justify yourself. >SIT DOWN ON COUCH Yeah, that’s a good idea. >TAKE A DEEP BREATH Inhale. Exhale. Plenty of air around, anyway. >LOOK This is not the sort of room that gets better the more you see it. There’s a rug on the floor, bunched up and half-stuck under the coffee table. There are lots of games and movies.

Somebody should vacuum sometime.

In his room, your roommate and his friend engage in

simultaneous keening. Or something.

>EXAMINE RUG It’s cheap and dusty.

>QUIT GAME Oh, right. That’s real mature.

>PULL RUG BACK It’s stuck on the coffee table.

>QUIT Well, nobody’s exactly shocked that’s your big move, but we were hoping for more. Has it ever occurred to you that your lack of patience, your refusal to stick with a project past the initial infatuation of discovery, is the reason that so much of your life is intransigent, rooted in moments that provide instant gratification, but never a lasting sense of security and peace?

>MOVE COFFEE TABLE The magazine falls off and slides under the couch, where hopefully no one will ever see it again.

>Q No, that’s overly harsh. Also, it’s a kind of wish fulfillment, because it pretends that everything about your life that’s disappointing or inconclusive is your fault. It gives you this illusion of complete control, as though all your choices had consequences that could be quantified, mapped out, entirely comprehended. Sure, if you’d gone into work this morning, you could’ve held onto your job for a few more weeks.

Probably. But it’s not your fault that the coffee maker is broken, or that somebody clogged the toilet. It’s possible to accept responsibility without embracing self-flagellation. These things just happen. She didn't call back because she wasn't interested, and that has nothing to do with you. >QQQQQQQQQQQQ All right. If that's what you want… >LOOK Couch. Movies. Games. Rug.

>PULL RUG BACK You pull the rug back. There is a trapdoor underneath. >OPEN TRAPDOOR It’s locked shut. You’d need a key. >CHECK BACKPACK Right, you still have that!

Nothing in it but the flashlight, though. >S HALLWAY Your roommate and his friend have gone quiet. The bathroom is to the east. >E BATHROOM You don’t quite recognize the face you see in the bathroom mirror. The toilet squats like a murdered troll. The shower curtain hangs limp, vaguely opaque. >OPEN SHOWER CURTAIN The tub is stained yellow from too much use and too little cleaning. There is a dagger in the tub, and a book titled HELPFUL TIPS THAT WILL BE HELPFUL. >TAKE DAGGER The blade is slightly curved, and spackled with rust. >TAKE BOOK It bulges with notes and mildew.

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>PUT DAGGER AND BOOK IN BACKPACK Done.

>UNLOCK TRAP DOOR The key sticks at first, but eventually clicks home.

>D You take another step. It’s getting cooler again.

>OPEN BATHROOM MIRROR It doesn't open.

>OPEN TRAP DOOR Stone stairs lead downwards.

This is impossible. Your apartment is basement-level.

There should be nothing down there but concrete and bedrock and whatever dead Indians the city was built on top of. A breath of hot, sticky air pushes up the stairs and clogs your nostrils, and you shiver. There is rich blackness below, and although you can’t see for sure, you sense impossible depths; a winding stair that descends past all reasonable limits; dungeons and treasure and slathering monsters whose touch brings red fever, boils, death. There will be so many rooms to explore, so many corridors and turns, and you never had a head for distance; and there will be traps. Step in the wrong place, the ground disappears and knives replace it.

If you miss a clue, you’ll die an hour later never knowing your mistake. And for what? For gold and magic and possibility. You’ll probably never be able to find your way back, even if you do survive.

>D You take another step. There is a great space beyond you, and the slow flapping of giant wings.

>OPEN SINK CUPBOARD It's empty. >OPEN TOILET Oh, it's gross. It's so very, very gross. A …… mass of substance of stuff, every different shade of brown, from yellow to black.

There are lumps. >EXAMINE SUBSTANCE Ah, er, are you sure about that? >EXAMINE SUBSTANCE You poke around a bit, convinced you’ll never eat, drink, or touch anything else for the rest of your life. You’re about to give up when you find a lump that is harder than the rest. >TAKE LUMP You pull it out. >CLEAN LUMP IN SINK Once the … ugliness washes off, you find a silver key with a smiling face carved in one end. >W HALLWAY A bed creaks in your roommate’s room, and feet hit carpet.

Well, “needs” sounds a bit desperate, and we’ve learned from past relationships that getting too clingy is a real turn-off. Ok let me try again.

>LOOK It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

KILL SCREEN DESIRES YOU Is that better? No, no. That won’t do. Too Danielle Steel/ Harlequin and again, we shouldn’t come on quite so strong. But we’re worried that you don’t know how much we care and it’s been so lonely all this time while you’re on the road. We have needs after all.

KILL SCREEN REQUIRES YOU Slightly collegial, but in a good way. Like on an invitation.

Ok, I think we can do this.

KILL SCREEN HANKERS FOR YOU Too folksy.

KILL SCREEN HUNGERS FOR YOU Um.

KILL SCREEN LACKS YOU KILL SCREEN COVETS YOU KILL SCREEN MISSES YOU KILL SCREEN WILL DIE FOR YOU

>DOWN You take the first step. Your roommate is in the bathroom, and you hear him screaming something and calling for you to help clean up the mess.

Please help Kill Screen overcome its issues. Give it money so it can grow. A happy Kill Screen is a healthy Kill Screen.

Here’s how to join our ranks:

>DOWN You take another step, then another. When you’ve gone deep enough, the trapdoor slams shut behind you. >DOWN You take another step.

MONDAY MORNING

X000289NNL

96 | KILL SCREEN

KILL SCREEN NEEDS YOU

>DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD You reach the bottom of the stairs.

Kill Screen (Issue One) (Kill Screen, 1) New

>N LIVING ROOM AND KITCHEN The trapdoor is made of wooden planks, and the wood is sweating, although it is not warm. An ambulance drives by outside, siren screaming, but the sound fades quickly. It is impossible to compare those two things, the trapdoor and the siren. They do not connect in any recognizable way.

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Issue 2, Volume 1 — 1

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by RYAN BRADLEY illustration by SARAH JACOBY

THE YOUNG AND THE SCORELESS Toddlers step out into the world of consoles We enter this world a wondrous bundle, 100 billion neurons strong and bearing more synapses— those flashpoints of memory and sensation—than the adults we will become. As we grow older, get responsible, go to the supermarket, learn to drive, get a job, pay taxes, get married, and maybe even have kids of our own, we kill off these synapses. By this measure, when we are born we are more conscious of our world than we will ever be. This is why neuroscientists who study babies call their subjects “little Buddhas.”

24 — Kill Screen Magazine

We’re born blindingly conscious but grasping, handling more raw data than we’ll ever deal with again. Our pre-frontal lobes aren’t yet fully formed, and they’re what sorts everything around us, focusing our senses. Maturing, then, is just a way of figuring out how to block external stimuli—but our lobes aren’t finished growing and aren’t in full use until we’re 20. When we’re very young we don’t know thought, can’t connect the dots. One way to approach the mind in its early development isn’t as a singular thing, but a series of islands. In other

words the brain isn’t a mind yet, it’s just a brain. But when we are born we’re more aware and learning faster than we ever will again. Researchers, comparing the brain scans of babies to adults, have found that the only grown-up experience that even approaches this awe-inspiring awareness that we feel as infants is when we watch a really, really good movie or play certain videogames. Only then is the back of our mind lit up like a child’s. Only then are we so fully immersed in a world that isn’t really real.

So, if playing a videogame is a glimpse into our own infancy, what is it like for an infant to game?

In the last 10 years we—and by “we” I mean scientists and academics—have made a fundamental shift in how we think about babies. Parents have known for a while that infants lead inner lives so mysterious that we can only guess at their complexity. But back in what psychology professor Alison Gopnik calls “the bad old days,” the assumption “that newborn babies were crying carrots, vegetables with few reflexes” was the norm. In the past 10 years, Gopnik continues, “we’ve not only discovered that children have these imaginative powers—we’ve actually begun to understand how these powers are possible. We are developing a science of the imagination.”

As psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and the rest of academe were changing their approach to young kids, the kids who had grown up with videogames hit their late 20s and early 30s.

Some got jobs as game designers, and some had kids of their own. Some of these designers began building games for their kids. Eric Jorgensen is one.

Jorgensen, the lead developer for Microsoft Windows AdCenter, is a father of six. Almost 15 years ago, when his two oldest sons still liked climbing onto his lap while he worked, Jorgensen created a videogame for them. “It was entertaining, that was the main goal,” he says. “Really it was a keyboard banger.”

The program was called Flabbergasted! and it was a drawing platform—kind of. Some pictures moved, and some of the keys launched fireworks.

Punch other keys and a swarm of bees would move across the screen, hit more, and everything would melt into psychedelia. There weren’t points, goals, or any definitive end. It was, like a lot of games for

the very young, fairly difficult to describe. In its colorful randomness, Flabbergasted! predicted the shape of things to come.

Keita Takahashi is holding a scarf aloft, triumphantly. “This is Boy,” he declares. Cameras flash. A quiet murmur descends. Takahashi pauses for effect. He’s introducing his latest project, Noby Noby Boy, at the Game Developers Conference, the industry’s annual prom held in San Francisco. It’s 2009 and the skinny 30-year-old developer, with his mop top and puffy, oversized jacket, looks childlike in this roomful of murmuring adults and flashing cameras. He grins, puts the scarf down, and explains.

In games, he says, there are carrots and sticks, rules and scores. Even in his last strange creation— the Katamari Damacy series—there were goals and a time limit. “I wasn’t happy,” he says of Katamari.

“It felt like a formula, and I felt betrayed.” Then Takahashi perks up. “I wanted to throw these rules off and start from scratch, start from the beginning.

I wanted to find out what games should mean.”

Games mean play, and when we are young that’s pretty much all we concern ourselves with. It’s a strange thing, evolutionarily. Play, Melvin Konner writes, combines “great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness.” Konner is an anthropologist and neuroscientist at Emory and the author of The Evolution of Childhood, a mammoth text that compiles decades’ worth of research on the very young mind. Play is all kids do besides sleep and eat. All the hunting and gathering, all that nasty business of actually surviving, is being done for them by their worried parents (or worried village).

Even though play may appear pointless, Konner believes that it is vital. When we play, we sharpen our motor skills, take risks, and try things we wouldn’t otherwise. In many ways, how we play is what makes us human.

Takahashi, too, is concerned with the roots of play. At GDC he describes watching children absorbed in their handheld games on the subway in Japan. “They aren’t really playing, just consuming,” he says. Takahashi hates to see these kids sitting there, not talking to their parents, just as he hates the word for people who buy his work: user. Games, he says, are meant to be played—what does it say

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 25

about us if we’re just using them? It says that game developers are not doing their job, and that games need to be better. Near the end of his presentation Takahashi gets to the heart of what he wishes to create—a return to a child-like, exploratory mind.

A return to pure play. “It feels like everything is so controlled by systems. It feels like something is tying me up. The word nobynoby means to not be constrained, to be mentally and emotionally liberated.” His new game, he says, will do just that.

From where I’m sitting, Jackson Milott does not seem to like Noby Noby Boy at all. Jackson is three years old and really into fish right now. He’s staring into an iPad, his face contorted in what I can only guess might be concentration, or maybe frustration. He’s clutching a plastic clownfish, and I do not see him let go of it once. Jackson looks up at me, then back at the screen, and then slams his free hand down on it, flat. Underneath his palm is Takahashi’s creation, the boy who looks a lot like a scarf.

Noby Noby Boy is, as promised, lacking in carrots and sticks. The scarf-boy gets flung around with the flick of a finger, wrapped or bounced off strange objects (windmills, giant robots) that fall or sometimes drift into place from off-screen. That’s about it. Oh, the scarf-boy can grow longer, too.

This growth is, actually, a bit of a carrot—but the complexity of growing one’s boy and unlocking worlds and linking those worlds to the worlds of other players through the internet, and in doing so expanding the Noby universe, well, it’s beyond my ken and definitely beyond Jackson’s. What’s immediately important for Takahashi and Konner and Gopnik and me is that Noby Noby Boy is failing to capture the imagination of this three-year-old.

Jackson actually wants to go back to something a lot less abstract, something that would disappoint all the researchers and game developers who have spent a lot of time trying to parse the infant mind.

He wants to play Monkey Lunchbox, a game that rewards, literally, with carrots. By Takahashi and Konner’s standards, it’s a game that isn’t really play at all.

So we go to Monkey Lunchbox, because Jackson is the boss. I watch him match pieces of fruit and giggle when he gets it right and giggle more when the monkey does a little monkey dance when his lunchbox is full. His father, Jon, tells me that Jackson already knows this game—that he’s played it before, in fact, on Jon’s phone. It’s the familiarity, Jon thinks, that Jackson likes. He knows he can do the things to get the monkey to do the dance. But this only lasts a short while.

We move on to something that has a bit of Jorgenson’s Flabbergasted! in it. Something that is, like any successful game for the very young an empty vessel: no carrots, no sticks. What KidArt has, beyond finger-paint and a blank slate, are stickers—of fish! There’s even one like the clownfish Jackson is still clutching. He’s into it.

Play can be serious business, and Jackson goes quiet for awhile, adding schools of clownfish to his finger painting. When we are young and our brain is a series of islands, minds adrift in the sea of our skull, we play to make sense of the world. Sometimes, when we figure things out and unlock this new world’s secrets, we go back and repeat, just to make sure. This is probably why Jackson picked Monkey Lunchbox—he’s familiar with its rules.

Gopnik takes this idea one powerful step further: We play to imagine what could be, to create rules

This, then, may be why Noby Noby Boy failed for Jackson—there’s too much of Takahashi’s fertile mind in it. Maybe this is why Jackson looked so frustrated: he was peering into a world that wasn’t his, while he’s still figuring out the world around him.

26 — Kill Screen Magazine

It’s play that allowed us to walk out of the Great Rift Valley and conquer the world and then some.

No play, no imagination, no rocket to the moon.

and terms for the future. We play, in other words, to imagine and to invent. It’s play that allowed us to walk out of the Great Rift Valley and conquer the world and then some. No play, no imagination, no rocket to the moon. Because children don’t have to worry about day-to-day survival, Gopnik explains in her book, The Philosophical Baby, they “don’t choose to explore only the possibilities that might be useful—they explore all the possibilities.” Because of play, “we can consider different ways the world might be, not just the ways the world actually is.” How it is for Jackson right now is very, very fishy.

But that’s just right now. What’s important, Jorgensen likes to point out, is that the child is the creator, that the world is his own. This, then, may be why Noby Noby Boy failed for Jackson—there’s too much of Takahashi’s fertile mind in it. Maybe this is why Jackson looked so frustrated: he was peering into a world that wasn’t his, while he’s still figuring out the world around him. I’d slam my hand down upon this impostor’s imagined world, too. But I’m being a little unfair to Takahashi. His game wasn’t really created with a three-year-old in mind, and Monkey Lunchbox was. Besides, Noby Noby Boy is a hit with adults, in its own strange and cultish way.

Takahashi’s creation may be a valiant attempt at returning adult gamers to a childlike mind, but this is a nearly impossible thing. Scientists and academics who study small children, who know better than anyone the intricate mysteries of the very young, often talk about how much they would give to experience the world as their subjects do. Some say they’d give back all the awards and accolades they’ve ever received to be able to be three years old for just one

hour. By attempting to construct a world of pure, childlike play, Takahashi was unknowingly setting out to build a sort of baby-gamer Tower of Babel.

“The more we seek out neat ideas, the worse we are at finding them,” Jorgensen says. “The classic example is taking your kids to the store and buying a cool toy, and when you bring it home, they spend all their time playing with the box it came in.” Behind Jackson, dominating the Milotts’ living room, is a refrigerator box. It’s turned on its side and cut open in places. It’s a fort, or a castle, or a house, or an empty box. “We thought he’d get sick of it eventually,” Jon tells me. “That was five months ago.”

Takahashi has, for now, given up on videogames. “I find the idea of working in the physical world far more exciting than working in a virtual one,” he recently told the BBC. “I feel like having something physical makes it easier for me to communicate what I think is fun to people.” So he’s designing a playground in Nottingham, England. “I’ve had to return to my six-year-old way of thinking,” he said.

Jorgensen, too, is moving on, but in a different sense. As a parent, “there’s still something that doesn’t quite sit right when I watch my kids staring at the screen for too long.” What excites him is the possibility of creating videogames without screens or buttons for kids to play in. Microsoft is working on its Kinect console, a controller-less environment where body and voice rule. Jorg Neumann, Kinect’s studio head, studied the gestures of three-, four, and five-year-olds to come up with a universal language of motion for the system. In Kinectimals, Kinect’s flagship game for kids, Neumann (who has a nine-year-old) says that “as you move around a playroom in the game, the room changes with you.

There’s no time limit, you can’t fail. Most games are so static, but this is pure physicality.” What really excites Jorgensen about Kinect, though, is that it can create soundscapes, so suddenly a living room is an instrument, the couch and the coffee table its valves and keys. Jogensen believes developers can do better, work harder, to keep up with the young mind. That it’s the kids who are the real artists, the real creators, standing in the living room conducting invisible orchestras, wide awake and dreaming.

It’s us, the adults, who need to just try to keep up.

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 27

As a programmer I’ve always felt there is a connection between poetry and programming. Both try to express an idea concisely within a constrained environment. Consider the humble haiku. If I said to you, “I played Donkey Kong,” you’d probably say, “So what?” But if I say it within the constrained system of the haiku, you might get something like this: Monkey throws barrels He has taken Princess Peach For love, I must climb The meaning is the same, and yet the act of expressing that meaning within the five/seven/five-syllable constraint creates an interest—or, dare I say, a beauty—that didn’t exist in the unconstrained statement.

Why is that?

Other poetic forms add further constraint. Consider one of Shakespeare’s favorite forms: the sonnet. Now we have limits on the number of syllables, the meter (the beats in the words), and the rhyme! A classic sonnet is three sets of four lines in iambic pentameter (every other syllable must be a beat, and there are five beats per line). The first and third lines in each set rhyme, as do the second and fourth. The sonnet ends with two final lines that rhyme. Here’s an example that follows most of these constraints: “That Lake” What secrets does that lake contain Beneath its dark and murky waves?

What ancient warriors wracked in pain Still twist in sunken muddy graves?

Within its depths what creatures swim Unaltered since the early days?

Upon its floor what scuttling grim Crustaceans wend their drunken ways?

by ED FRIES ascii art by JUSTIN RUSSO

THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER The creator of Halo 2600 finds beauty in constraint 78 — Kill Screen Magazine

Your eyes, like placid pools of ink Disguise the fires burning deep.

Arise! Come to the surface. Drink The air and put the past to sleep.

What secrets does that lake contain Beneath the ripples of your brain?

The author has to pick words that approximate the intended meaning while still conforming to the rules of the form. But by working within that constraint, the solution to the puzzle has at least the potential to be more than a simple expression of an idea. First, it takes a certain

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 79

cleverness to meet the constraints of the system, and that is appreciated by the audience. But the constraints can also force the author to leave space for interpretation that might not otherwise exist.

What was that poem about, anyway? A lake? A girl?

Evolution? Consciousness?

Sometimes, just by looking for solutions to the rules (such as finding matching rhymes or proper meter), the author is led down paths they did not expect, and the poem takes on a life of its own.

Sometimes the poet may feel that they are not the creator at all, but just along for the ride!

Likewise, all programming involves expressing ideas within a system of rigorous constraints. The programming language dictates a syntax that must be followed. With poetry, I can bend the rules a bit; perhaps fudge the meter to use a word I like, or use a half-rhyme—but not with a program. It either compiles and executes, or it does not. In addition, the programmer must live within the constraints of the machine. There is only so much memory; only so much time before the next frame must be drawn on the screen.

So the programmer finds themselves in a similar situation as the poet, trying to live within the constraints of the system while trying to accomplish something with their art. And, like the poet, the very act of living within the constraints may lead program-

mers to places they did not anticipate or intend.

The Atari 2600, released in 1977, was the first mass-market videogame console. The machine gives the programmer a mere 128 bytes of random access memory; by comparison, an Xbox 360 has 4 million times more memory. The entire screen is drawn using only five bytes: two-and-a-half for the playfield, two for the two sprites, and a few miscellaneous bits for the missiles and “ball.” The program must fit in 4,096 bytes of read-only memory on a cartridge. (A 360 disk holds 2 million times more).

Yet the screen has an effective resolution of 40x192 for the playfield and 160x192 for the sprites.

How? By demanding that the programmer draw the screen one horizontal scan line at a time. By changing the values of the five bytes that represent various forms of pixels (as well as a few others that control properties such as color), on a line-by-line basis, any number of interesting displays can be created.

Which is not to say that it is easy. The Atari 2600 has a very slow microprocessor. In the time that it takes for the electron beam to draw one horizontal scan line and return to the beginning of the next line, there is only time for 76 machine cycles on the Atari processor. The simplest instructions take a minimum of two cycles, and advanced commands can take five or more. So, in the end, the programmer can only do about 20 things, such as loading

a value from memory, or storing a value into one of the display registers, per line. Think of it as the programming equivalent of iambic pentameter.

Given all of that, you hopefully are beginning to realize that to do anything at all interesting on the Atari 2600 requires some incredible programming magic. The kernels (or core display drawing routines) of any of the Atari 2600 games you’ve ever played are only possible through the use of some outrageous feats of coding.

Take the original Combat cartridge that shipped with the 2600.

The programmers, Joe Decuir and Larry Wagner, were trying to live within their allocated 76 cycles per line, but they had a lot of work to do. They had to draw the maze that the tanks navigate through. They had to draw the sprites for both of the tanks. By the time they had done those things, they had very few cycles left, and yet they had still more work to do. They had to draw a bullet for each of the tanks. A reasonable piece of 6502 assembly code for that would look something like this:

LDA #0

; 2

this number is the cycle count for this instruction

CPY yPosBullet1

; 3

compare the current scan line (held in the Y register) to the y position of the bullet

BNE NoM0

; 2(3)

branch takes 2 or 3 cycles depending on whether the values matched or not

; 2

need to set second bit to turn on bullet

STA ENAM0

; 3

turn on (or off) the bullet

LDA #0

; 2

now repeat for the second bullet

CPY yPosBullet2

; 3

BNE NoM1

; 2(3)

LDA #2

; 2

LDA #2 NoM0

When working within such an incredibly constrained system, elegance is no longer optional. It is required.

80 — Kill Screen Magazine

NoM1 STA ENAM1

; 3

turn on (or off) the bullet

That’s a total of 24 to 26 cycles, depending on the situation, and 20 bytes of code. But the programmers didn’t have 26 cycles. That would use up a third of all the time they get to do all the work on the line.

So they did something crazy:

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 81

LDX #ENAM1

; 2

load X with the address of the ENAM1 control register

TXS

; 2

point the stack at ENAM1 (?!)

CPY yPosBullet2

; 3

CPY will set or clear the Z flag

PHP

; 3

Push the processor flags onto the stack. The Z flag is the second bit. (!)

CPY yPosBullet1

; 3

PHP

; 3

Stack is now pointing at ENAM0 so just repeat

On the 6502, the stack lives in the first 256 bytes of memory. It typically starts at the top (memory location 255) and grows down toward zero. But in kernels there is rarely time to use the stack at all. Just to call and then immediately return from a subroutine would use up twelve precious cycles. So the programmer behind this code thought to use the stack for something else. The registers that control the state of the missiles also live in the first 256 bytes of memory. He pointed the stack at the second of those registers (that’s the first two instructions above). Then he does a CPY instruction that compares the Y register (which is holding the current scan line) to the y position of the missile. If they match, the Z flag (which stands for “zero,” or in this case “equal”) in the processor will be set.

Now, the final bit of magic: He uses the PHP (PusH Processor flags) instruction.

This instruction is meant as a way to save and load all the flags of the processor—for example, to preserve them when handling an interrupt. But this programmer knows that the Z flag is the second bit of the flag word that will be pushed on the stack, and that just happens to be the bit we need to set to turn on (or off) the first missile. As an added benefit, since this is not just a simple store to the location but also a push onto the stack, the stack pointer will be decremented and will now point to a new memory location: the register that controls the other missile. So we can simply compare and push again to turn on or off the second missile.

82 — Kill Screen Magazine

The solution used only 16 cycles and nine bytes of code! This does the same thing, but in much less space and time. It also always takes the same amount of time to execute (16 cycles), which can be important when you’re trying to keep track of the electron beam.

(If you are a programmer, see the sidebar for a short explanation of what’s going on.)

In writing my own game for the 2600, I find myself bombarded by beautiful code such as this every day, much more than in the regular programming I do. When working within such an incredibly constrained system, elegance is no longer optional. It is required.

But what is elegance? Maybe constraint creates the possibility for perfection; and as humans, we perceive perfection as a form of beauty? The solution I gave above for drawing bullets on the 2600 screen is not just a good solution; it is the best possible solution. I guarantee it. There is no smaller and faster way to do it.

Does this underlying beauty show through in some way to the end user? I don’t know. But I do know that constraint can lead the author in unexpected directions, resulting in solutions that even the creator did not expect. If you could somehow measure the variety in the first 100 games published on the Atari 2600, and compare it to the same measure of the most recent 100 games published for modern consoles, the 2600 would win, hands down.

Perhaps the “sameness” that we feel from games today derives, at least in some small part, directly from the power, ease, and freedom we enjoy?

Modern consoles are wonderful things, but without constraints, perhaps some of the poetry is lost.

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 83

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