â’Asking the audience to order the top 10 gave us an opportunity to get their feedback on which design problems feel more and less relevant to them. So not only can game designers learn what researchers are thinking about games, but game researchers can also look at the list and gain an understanding of the issues at the front of the minds of game developers,â’ said Bogost.

The findings of the Game Studies Download 2009 are:

10. Stewart Woods: â’(Play) Ground rules: The social contract and the magic circleâ’ http://obs.obercom.pt
9. Jose Zagal and Amy Bruckman: â’Novices, gamers, and scholars: Exploring the challenges of teaching about gamesâ’ http://gamestudies.org/0802/articles/zagal_bruckman
8. Karen Collins: â’Game sound: An introduction to the history, theory, and practice of video game music and sound designâ’
7. Charlie Briendahl: â’Play to win or win to play? The material culture of gamingâ’
6. Gareth Schott: â’Relating the pleasures of violent game textsâ’
5. Jesper Juul: â’Fear of failing: The many meanings of difficulty in video gamesâ’
4. Matt Barton: â’Howâ’s the weather: Simulating weather in virtual environmentsâ’ http://gamestudies.org/0801/articles/barton
3. Betsy James DiSalvo, Kevin Crowley and Roy Norwood: â’Learning in context: Digital games and young black menâ’
2. Michael Nitsche: â’Video game spaces: Image, play, and structure in 3D worldsâ’
1. Susana Tosca & Lisbeth Klastrup: â’Because it just looks cool!â’ Fashion as character performanceâ”the case of WoWâ’ http://www.jvwresearch.org

What? “Grand Theft Auto” didn’t make the list?

Racing the Beam, The Atari Video Computer System

The book is the third by Bogost on video games and the first he’s co-written with MIT’s Nick Montfort. With this book, the pair begin a new series, Platform Studies, published by MIT Press, which will examine the role that various video game platforms have had on the industry and the culture at-large. Bogost and Montfort will edit the new series.

Q: Why did you decide to write about the Atari VCS?

It’s an extremely important piece of video game history, yet no one has written seriously about it in video game researchâ”or really even in popular culture. So to go back to the very first popular home video game system and look at it in detail, that was one of the reasons.

The second was to encourage historical studies of games and game systems more generally, for reasons that go beyond nostalgia. Itâ’s worth doing this not just to geek out on retro chic, hipster stuff. Rather, we ought to take the history of video games as seriously as we would take the history of any cultural object. The influence of the Atari VCS and its games on later titlesâ”including today’s gamesâ”is significant, extremely significant in our opinion and not obvious.

Q: Would you say that the limitations posed by this Atari had a big influence on how things were designed?

For sure. You see, any computer imposes constraints of some kind. But the Atari is a ridiculously bizarre computer, even compared to its contemporaries. There are lots of reasons for this. Some of them are financial, some of them have to do with the technology that was available at the time, some of them have to do with randomness and arbitrary decisions. When the Atari VCS was being designed in the mid-1970s, no one had any idea or thought that it would turn out to be as important as it did. Nor that it would be on the market for as long as it was (until the 1990s!).

Q: What did they think?

They thought they were making a video game machine that would play a few games derived from popular coin-ops for a couple of years in the marketplace.

But arguably, it ended up being the foundation of home video gaming. And not only that, but the foundation of many conventions and genres present in the games that we still play today.

Q: How did that happen?

The video games of the early ’70s were tavern games, really. This was still before video arcades became popular. But Bushnell, Atari’s founder, saw taking this stuff home as an opportunity for Atari to reach a broader audience. So the company introduced a version of Pong for the home.

But then, once you bought one Home Pong machine, you don’t need another one. So they could only sell one product to each household; it seemed like a missed opportunity. So Atari set out to create an interchangeable cartridge system: they would sell the system once and then sell many cartridges, like razors and razorblades. This is really the foundation of the way that the first party publishers like Microsoft and Sony see video game sales today.

But still, Atari had no idea later programmers would use the machine in the ways they did. The techniques they developed influenced later games in interesting and important ways. And somehow through a kind of strange telephone game of influence, games that were made under the constraints of the Atari wound up underwriting conventions of later games, in ways we now take for granted.

Q: For example?

One example we talk about in the book is the “adventure” game. Adventure, from 1978, was the first graphical adventure. It was an attempt to transfer the text-based adventure Colossal Cave, which was played on PDP minicomputers. The designer of VCS Adventure, Warren Robinett, was enamored with Colossal Cave and insisted on somehow taking the experience that he enjoyed in that game and making it work on the Atari VCS. He did this by re-imagining text commands and areas of space as movement onto and off the television screen. It was a pretty remarkable feat in 1978.

But it also led to later versions of the same genre of graphical adventure: games in which you have a character who moves around a space larger than the screen, who has tools that he can use and objects that he can pick up. The adventure game arguably remains one of the top genres of games today. Sure, they look pretty differentâ”they’re 3D now, and much more complex â” but they still owe a debt to Robinett’s Adventure, whose features were influenced strongly by what the Atari VCS hardware could do easily.

Q: Which, would you say, were some of the first games to copy that idea?

There was a Raiders of the Lost Ark game for the Atari several years later, which took the same principles, the same fundamentals that Robinett had developed and made them much more complex, arguably better. Ultima borrowed from it too. The Legend of Zelda is probably the most obvious in importance. And from there, the genre just spirals out of control.

But the way that Adventure had to introduce the player and the marketplace to these conventions, that now are old hat, is kind of interesting. If you look at the manual for the game, even the idea of moving a character to the edge of the screen, and then the screen changing as if you were moving to a new screenâ” it wasn’t obvious. It had to be explained in intricate detail. But by the time we get to Zelda, everyone knew how this convention worked. Those conventions get built up over and over, one on top of another, both as technology changes and as other kinds of design choices become conventional.

So Adventure is an example of the fundamental work we tried to do in the book: to show how the hardware platformâ”the machine itselfâ”had a strong influence on the way that programmers made things for the machine. And that the games born of that material influence went on to have a strong influence on later games, sometimes in direct ways and sometimes in indirect ways.

Q: So would you say that a lot of the limitations provided by the computer led to creativity?

Yeah, the reason that this machine was so successful, so popular for so long, and that so many different kinds of games were made for it, is because it can do so little. It’s a very simple computer. And rather than becoming a limitation, it forced programmers to constantly reinvent ways of making things new on the machine. Everyone had their own style. Someone like David Crane, who made Pitfall!, his whole approach to making games was about trying to get this computer to do something it hadn’t done before. Others had different strategies.

Q: Why was Atari so much more successful than other video game systems of the era?

In some ways, it was just luck. They were in the right place at the right time, with the right backing after Warner bought them to create and market an interchangeable cartridge home video game system that proved flexible enough to remain popular for a long time. They were able to become really aggressive and to develop this idea of home video gaming well. In a lot of ways, that selling point is exactly the same as the one Nintendo has been using with the Wii.

Q: So is this interest in Atari just nostalgia?

It was important to us to rescue the Atari from the cesspool of nostalgia. It’s not that nostalgia is inherently bad, but we wanted to combat the idea that the Atari VCS is a useless thing, a relic, a throwaway retro fetish object. That’s an attitude that I think is too prevalent in technology and media in general.

One of the reasons I like to program the Atari is to understand what that practice was like. I try to treat Atari games as a form in their own right, rather than as geekery or an attempt to develop my tech chops. It’s a living creative practice that involves specific activities. Understanding what they are is both interesting and gratifying.

Q: Tell me about the Platform Studies series that this book belongs to.

Nick and I are editing the series of which Racing the Beam is the first book. The series invites books about computer platforms of all kindsâ”from video game systems to personal computers to programming languages. We seek work that explores the relationship between hardware and software systems and creativity.

We’ve entered a new era in digital media scholarship, one in which people are really combining the two worlds of computing and the liberal arts, in which people have a depth of experience in both technical and cultural matters. So I’m excited about providing an avenue for such work. We’re really just at the beginning of it.

Q: So do you think being able to play these games of yore, like we can with Wii’s virtual console among others, is going to change the way we look at them?

It’s great. It’s great in part because it means that those games are just more readily available. The analogy I always use is that of a dad sitting his kid down to watch John Wayne westerns. The handing down of cultural memory is only possible if the works are available and can be viewed.

But we have to remain vigilant about understanding the connection between these old games and the hardware that originally played them. There are some aspects of the Atari and the Nintendo Entertainment System that you can’t completely recreate in emulation, let alone on a modern 50″ LCD television. Actually, in this regard, one of the Georgia Tech Computer Science capstone class groups is working on a set of revisions to the Atari VCS emulator, to try to recreate some more of the appearance of those old TVs.

Ian Bogost is also the author of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames and

â’Images of disaster haunt the American national consciousness and dominate the media,â’ says Emily Godbey, National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at Albright College in Reading, Pa., who is writing book on â’American Rubbernecking,â’ which examines how representations of disaster have become a part of popular American visual culture.

â’No one wants to be in a disaster, but we all want to look at it â’“ and will pay to see it,â’ she says of a tradition that began in the 19th century.

â’Disasters are certainly not new, but attitudes towards them in the late 19th century certainly were. At that time, American audiences started to view horrific events through the lens of leisure, entertainment and the pleasures of the senses.â’

â’They paid for tickets to see plays and movies about accidents and disasters. They bought books, newspapers and postcards. They even paid to see staged train crashes,â’ she says.

Of course, part of it is related to psychology. â’We like activities that bring us right up against the reality that we wonâ’t be here forever,â’ she says. â’But the desire to see ruin and catastrophe is also linked to the development of a capitalist economy, a growing dissatisfaction with the routine life resulting from the industrial revolution and a subsequent desire to buy thrilling experiences as an antidote to boredom,â’ she says.

â’Nineteenth century audiences learned that â’“ at least from a comfortable chair â’“ disasters and accidents are thrilling, even enjoyable,â’ she says. â’Those early consumers have a lot in common with contemporary American audiences who see blockbuster films with explosions and dangerous car chases.â’

Personal Note

I look, just in case I know them.

According to Joe Samuel Starnes, visiting assistant professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, “You don’t have to look far to see struggling businesses, but newspapers have been going down for a while because of the loss of advertising revenue and readership.”

In response to the newspaper industry’s decline, he said, “It’s concerning because our democracy needs good journalism, and newspapers have supplied and supported a majority of our country’s high-quality reporting in the past. If they go away, I don’t know if blogs or news sites will be able to replace that.”

Newspapers are the best places for good journalism, Starnes said, because they have the manpower and resources to uncover and distribute vital information.

“There are blogs that do some interesting things, but for the most part I think it’s dangerous for democracy to rely on these smaller news sites, because then there are fewer reporters knocking on doors and digging up stories. That’s the worst part of seeing newspapers decline.”

He continued, “Blogs usually employ a handful of people, or just one person, whereas a larger news agency has a bigger staff. Good, investigative reporting is expensive and needs a skilled workforce.”

It all comes down to money, and when people started realizing they could advertise for free on Web sites such as craigslist.com, they stopped relying on the classified section of the newspaper. Furthermore, Starnes said that many people don’t read the print versions and instead turn to the Internet for their news.

However, at the classroom level, Starnes hasn’t seen a decline in journalism’s popularity. “There will always be a desire to write, read, and learn how to tell stories. Reporting and journalism will need to transfer to the Web, so the challenge for these businesses will be to figure out how to do that successfully.”

NOTE: Starnes currently teaches several journalism classes, writes freelance for the New York Times, and has more than 20 years of experience in the newspaper and public relations industries.

Personal Note

There will be no bailouts for any media, but there will be bailouts to those who are are not able to read. I can only assume that those who unable to comprehend or read a mortgage contract are the ones who are loosing their homes.

Come on . . . bloggers!  I would like to hear about those millions who are loosing their homes because of the interest rate rising?  I do not know one person, personally, who is loosing their homes to the mortgage crisis, not one.  The homeowners I know . . . know how to read.  Read a contract.

They understand what it means to have a fixed, adjustable or interest only mortgage.  The homeowners I know have the ability to pay for their home, unless extreme life changing events befalls, and will manage their income accordingly.  Those who bought home without the means to maintain their budget to save 20% to refinance probably have 50″ television sets, new model cars or fully furnished homes.  Instead of saving for 20% over a couple of years  . . . . they just spent it.

I have to assume that newspapers and mortgage crisis are two separate issues.  Because there is no way a newspaper reading individual can be part of the mortgage crisis.  If you can read a newspaper and comprehend then you can read a mortgage contract and comprehend.

“The messages are very flirtatious and have nothing to do with the television show,” said Herring, a professor in the IU School of Library and Information Science. “In the linguistic marketplace there have always been different values associated with standard and non-standard language, and here we have found results that are paradoxical, that are the opposite of the recognized socio-linguistic gender patterns.”

Women use standard language more than men, in part because it is seen as a type of symbolic currency used to acquire upward mobility, the preponderance of research has shown.

“Women have historically used standard language when they are social aspirers, or want to be perceived as above their station,” Herring said. “Men talk more; women are more polite.”

But that historical footnote falls apart under the influence of computer-mediated communication such as short message services (SMS) and text messaging, the researchers found, after looking at 1,164 gender-defined messages posted on-screen during the real-time Italian music video program.

Expecting findings consistent with past research on gender-patterned public communication, Herring and Zelenkauskaite were predicting men would post more and longer text messages, and that men would also employ more non-standard techniques. Instead, the opposite was true when it came to communication within a new, convergent medium that mixes interactive television (iTV) with SMS or texting.

The study found women used more non-standard language such as abbreviations or expressive insertions that represented characteristics including enthusiasm, sadness, emphasis and individuality. And while women were both more economical and expressive, they also came closer to maxing out, or did max out, on the 160-character message limit more often than their male counterparts.

“Since iTV is based on texting, which was marketed extensively in Europe, it is extremely popular,” said Zelenkauskaite, a doctoral student and native of Lithuania who has spent more than two years studying at Italian universities. “Since cell phones in Italy experience some of the highest levels of penetration in Europe, it is an ideal country to study iTV.”

Now the researchers say they want to explore whether they could identify similar amounts and types of non-standard language in text-messaging when different topics available for interactive, public discussion — like politics or news-oriented programming — are studied.

“There are news shows in Europe where viewers can comment through iTV but we have not analyzed any of those yet,” Herring said. “There are different linguistic marketplaces, and politics is one of them, just like dating is.”

Personal Thoughts

Just maybe it is because the phones are getting smaller and women hand are smaller than men? Women have more of an ease texting?  

It is funny how shorthand is old business, but texting few almost Hebraic wording is now the ‘in fashion’.  Don’t get me wrong, LOL is a constant use in my email communications to casual friends and family.  

Does this mean instant messaging is out of style?  Sitting around for hours communicating with another person hiding behind a keyboard finally out?  Yeah!!! But what is in?

Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, and Plazes are now the ‘in’ communication tools. Just in case you feel that you just can’t get your message in 140 character or less try Twonvert – an online tool that will convert your tweets into SMS shorthand language and allows you to say more with less characters!