[1]
Advert for Laser Squad, Krisalis Software Ltd.
[2] The term `phantasmagoria' was invented
in the early nineteenth century to describe exhibitions of optical illusions
produced by magic lanterns, so its use here seems apt.
[3] It was many years between the making of Star Wars
and LucasArts issuing an `official' game of the film. This allowed many
other companies to program their own space- combat games based loosely
on the film.
[4] Advert for Links 386 Pro published by U.S.
Gold.
[5] One of the first games to employ fractals
for generating landscapes was Midwinter 2: Flames of Freedom produced
by Rainbird in 1992.
[6] Theodor Adorno, `The Schema of Mass Culture', The
Culture Industry. Selected Essays on Mass Culture, London 1991, p.
81.
[7] Ibid., p. 82.
[8] Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged
Life, London 1974, p. 201.
[9] In discussing chess Roger Caillois notes that the
game takes on an independence in relation to the individual player who
inherits a history and a practice of the game and is aware of their own
small part in a continuum of chess playing. In computer gaming there is
no comparable formalisation or recording, but the autonomy of game from
player is solidified and made evident. Caillois, `L'Imagination rigoureuse',
Cases d'un échiquier, Paris 1970, p. 39.
[10] Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, trans. John Osborne, London, 1977, p. 197.
[11] Benjamin, "Hashish in Marseilles", Reflections,
New York, 1986, p. 142.
[12] Paul Presley, review of B17 Flying Fortress,
PC Review, no. 12, October 1992, p. 60.
[13] Anon., `News', PC Review, no. 3, January
1992, p. 10.
[14] Gilman Louie, "Foreword: Operation Desert
Storm", Falcon 3.0 Flight Manual, U.S.A. 1991, pp. ix- x.
[15]Cited in David Sheff, Game Over. Nintendo's Battle
to Dominate an Industry, London, 1993, p. 375.
[16] Ibid., p. 285.
[17] The games company Spectrum Holobyte, for example,
also makes military simulators.
[18] Real history, even when rewritten by the player,
is not necessarily sufficient and some games use sci- fi departures from
realistic reconstruction. Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, published
by U.S. Gold, for instance, has the player fighting or operating experimental
German planes that (thankfully) never flew.
[19] Paul Virilio has explored the relationship between
visualisation techniques and military action in War and Cinema. The
Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller, London, 1989. Now
computers as well as people `see' and instantly act on the data they receive.
Jean Baudrillard's notorious views on war as simulation, produced in response
to events in the Gulf, are dissected by Christopher Norris in Uncritical
Theory. Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War, London, 1992.
[20] Jean Baudrillard, `The Political Economy of the
Sign', Selected Essays, Cambridge, 1988, p. 81.
[21] There is an ever lessening engagement of the player
in peripheral activities such as note taking, map making, even remembering
and thinking, which used to be essential to many games. These functions
are increasingly taken over by automated facilities, and help keys.
[22] See the jokey article about the personalisation
of computers by Michael Hewitt (`Sounding Off', Personal Computer World,
November 1992, p. 175). He rightly points out that this phenomena is only
seen with computers and does not extend to toasters or washing machines.
[23] A doubt about this point is that, as programs become
more complex and the interrelations between modules of code ever more numerous,
bugs become much more difficult to detect and control.
[24] There are a few sleazy games of a mild character
marketed by the major software houses but sex, as opposed to Hollywood
romance, is a subject generally avoided.
[25] This is for the game Obitus published by
Psygnosis.
[26] Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in
the Era of High Capitalism, London, 1973, p. 135.
[27] Adorno, `Free Time', The Culture Industry,
p. 164.
[28] Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 130- 1.
[29] There is an exception, when a character's action
actually ends the game within a certain time limit, which the player generally
knows of in advance. Then this character is allegorised into the principle
of that act, whether destroying the universe or forcing the princess and,
above all, ending the game.
[30] See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama,
p. 175.
[31] See Angus Fletcher, Allegory. The
Theory of a Symbolic Mode, New York, 1964, pp. 174- 5.
[32] Ibid., p. 176.
[33] At the time of writing the much- hyped Windows
95 has just appeared which Microsoft claim will run DOS games without
crashing and will allow programmers to write advanced games directly for
the new system. It is too early to tell whether these claims are justififed.
[34] There are of course other devices:
`false DOS' keys which apparently return the player to the operating system,
programs for hiding entire directories and silencing noisy games.
[35] Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires:
How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition,
and Still Can't Get a Date, London, 1992, p. 14.
[36] Benjamin, letter to Adorno, 9th December 1938,
in Aesthetics and Politics, London, 1977, p. 141.
[37] See Rolf Tiedemann, `Dialectics at
a Standstill', in Gary Smith (ed.), On Walter Benjamin. Philosophy,
Aesthetics, History, Chicago, 1983, pp. 278-9.
[38] Recent studies show little or no gender difference
in expressed interest, type of game played or length of playing time among
children. See Christine Ward Gailey, `Mediated Messages. Gender, Class
and Cosmos in Home Video Games', Journal of Popular Culture, vol.
27, no. 1, Summer 1993, p. 86. Sheff notes that 46% of Western Game Boy
players are adults (Game Over, p. 339.) Another study, published in 1983,
found no significant differences in male and female attitudes to video
arcades, though there were markedly more males actually playing the games
(see Sidney J. Kaplan, `The Image of the Amusement Arcades and Differences
in Male and Female Video Game Playing', Journal of Popular Culture,
vol. 17, no. 1, Summer 1983, pp. 93- 8). This situation has changed a good
deal since, and is still doing so.
[39] Benjamin, `Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth
Century', Reflections, p. 162.
[40] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt,
London, 1984, p. 125.