interactivecinema.org

Interactive Cinema first appeared twenty years ago, but it did not form overnight. Instead it was the product of a long process that saw massively complex electronic machinery transformed into simple games with simple graphics. Technology continued to develop and the games evolved. The evolutionary process saw a progression from game environments that rewarded only "winning" to environments that rewarded immersion. This has been reflected in the changes game genres have undergone from the last days of the Golden Age of Arcades to the modern times of the console wars. In this time there has been a migration from interactive elements being the defining characteristics of an experience towards a hybrid definition based on both the interactive as well as the cinematic.

The interactive tradition is of tremendous importance to Interactive Cinema. In the simplest terms, the Interactive tradition is the sequential development of interactive products that compose the evolution from the lower levels of interactivity to the higher levels of interactivity that is taking new shapes every day. What concerns this portion of my study is the segment of the interactive tradition that runs roughly from 1961 to 1983. This time loosely encompasses what is known as the Golden Age of Arcade games. During this time period, the interactive tradition witnessed unprecedented advancements due largely to technological advancements but due also to increased public interest. The combination of the two resulted in an explosion in the sophistication of electronic entertainment that pioneered methods of interactivity never before thought possible. In retrospect, this seemingly unforeseen boom in the interactive electronic field was inevitable particularly in light of the creation of cinema early in the 20^th century.

In "The Myth of Total Cinema," André Bazin argues that the creation of cinema as we know it was based on a profound desire to reproduce the world in representation. Many of the earliest motion pictures were quite scientific in their objective reproduction of reality, but objective reproduction soon gave way to subjective reproduction; a scientific study of the motion of a horse would be replaced by a tense chase on horseback. The apparatus, which once strove to be an objective "eye," was rendered subjective by way of shot composition and montage editing. It is the subjective position that the apparatus assumed when recreating reality which became the dominant form of cinematic expression and took the medium beyond the simple utility of objective recording. The interactive apparatus has undergone a similar progression away from utility.

The concept of utility is central to the inception of the interactive apparatus. Many of the early examples of the interactive apparatus were solely built to expedite a utilitarian process. One of the earlier examples of the interactive apparatus is Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (Manovich, 21-22). Fitting the definition of interactivity perfectly, it accepted information which it then evaluated, and it eventually returned new information. Its goal was to perform calculations more quickly than conventional methods so that overall productivity would increase; in other words, it expedited processes of utility. More than that, it established utility as the standard operation and goal of computing technology.

As this technology continued to grow and began to resemble modern computers, the utilitarian standard remained strong. The high cost of the equipment made it available only to wealthy institutions and, even then, it was used for specific applications that could not be performed elsewhere. To further restrict the equipment, there was no way to display it to a public as the computers' "speech" –of numbers and words only, which held meaning for those to whom they (the computers) were speaking (numbers and words lack the flair and attraction of cinematic montage).

With utility remaining the focal point for the development of computing technology, equipment was designed to make the practical applications easier to perform. To that end, innovations aimed to both expedite processes and simplify the user interface, and these resulted in the most important advancement, which was the incorporation of real-time visual output via cathode ray tube monitors. A veritable tabula rasa, the cathode ray tube display was certainly capable of "speaking" in the traditional utilitarian alphanumeric language, but it could do far more than that when the goal was no longer utility.

As an instinct, play has been pervasive in human history and the desire to play exists outside of the utilitarian standard that is indicative of the early products in the interactive tradition. In Johan Huizinga's seminal text, Homo Ludens, he examines many aspects of society in order to reveal the integral role that play assumes. Certain disciplines, ludology in particular, have attempted to use the play theories of Huizinga to analyze videogames, but those efforts have been incomplete because, while they do help one to understand how a game functions, they fail to provide the context necessary to understand why the game was designed to function as it does. An examination of the evolution of the interactive apparatus as it grew from purely utilitarian to play-oriented reveals the development of a highly organized world. In the words of Huizinga, "all play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course." (Huizinga, 10).

The playground is of vital importance to the interactive tradition as the tensions between the intended design of the playground and its actual execution are the factors that shaped what was produced. With ever-present limitations, the playgrounds of interactivity, and even interactivity itself, were only able to grow in incremental stages that relied on the development of new technology seemingly unrelated to play.

The Programmed Data Processor (PDP) line of computers produced by Digital Equipment Corporation, represented one of the first major steps towards immersion. This was largely attributable to the fact that it boasted increased speed and ease of use. While such qualities certainly helped it run practical business and research applications more easily, they also affected the interactive process tremendously by allowing it to accelerate. Even so, the first PDP, the PDP-1, was clearly designed for utility. At a costly $120,000, the PDP-1 was only available to large institutions that had very specific uses for it, which meant it was "used by its purchasers to pioneer timesharing systems, making it possible for smaller businesses and laboratories to have access to much more computing power than ever before." (The Story of PDP-1). More importantly, it was because the interactive process has been simplified and strengthened that such access produced results.

The user spoke to the computer in a number of ways and that information was then processed much faster than before. With its cathode ray tube monitor, the computer spoke to the user in a more direct and efficient manner than printed papers, and the user could evaluate the information faster and respond. All three steps of the interactive process --listen, think, speak-- were present and all three were faster than they had been before. But rather than show the complex calculations that a computer could perform, visual displays were created that translated the calculating power into images. With ease of use being an important aspect of the PDP-1, the ethics of play were then subsequently realized in the form of the software demonstration, which was designed to give people unfamiliar with computers an opportunity to see the capabilities of the apparatus. When compared to the rigorous problem-solving functions that had been the traditional tasks, the different agendas of the two are quite clear.

The duality of play and utility is plainly evident in J.M. Graetz's look at the ethics of demonstration (Graetz, 42-48). According to Graetz, when designing a demonstration for a computer, the program must comply with three conditions, which are as follows:

1. It should show off as many of the computer's resources as possible, and tax those resources to the limit.

2. Within a consistent framework, it should be interesting, which means that every run should be different.

3. It should make the viewer a participant -- in other words, it should be an interactive game.

(Graetz, 42-48)

Once it was decided that the PDP-1 would be used to create a playground in accordance with the criteria listed above, the first step was to establish the rules of the world. Since the apparatus was not intended for such a purpose, the rules remained quite simple in order to create a stable and fluid world.

The resulting product of these constrained conditions was Spacewar!. Though Spacewar! was designed as a software demonstration of the computer’s power, it is now recognized as one of the first videogames and existed very much in the tradition of play. The playground was composed of a realistically modeled star field with a "heavy star" in the middle. Apart from providing a visually pleasing arena, the grounds themselves also dictated behavior within the world. A "heavy star" in the center of the playground acted by exerting gravitational forces on the participants in the world as well as being a point of destruction.

The two players each assumed command of tiny space ships. Their speech was limited to thrust, fire weapon, turn, and hyperspace. By "taxing the resources of the PDP-1 to the limit," Spacewar! would immediately evaluate the speech of the player and then respond with the proper visual output display. The result was a dynamic play experience that existed in a world with explicit laws that the players could not violate. With the form thus established, the only thing remaining was to define the goal.

The contest is a form of play that has been pervasive throughout history. It is best illustrated in ancient Greek culture where language itself differentiated between other forms of play -- paidia and adurma- - and the contest -- agon (Huizinga, 29-31). Much has been said regarding this simple linguistic distinction, but the most important quality to note is that play labeled paidia or adurma and play labeled agon have one major distinction that truly sets them apart. An agonistic experience ends when a winner is determined, as it is a contest to perform a task better than the other competitors, whereas the paidia and adurma, which could range from a religious ritual to a child role-playing and more, have no true victor upon completion, and even the goals themselves, which are essential to the contest, become much more vague.

Though the goal of Spacewar! was simply to kill your opponent (virtually speaking), its intentions were much deeper. The playground was intended to be a way for players to immerse themselves in the worlds of the science fiction novels which inspired Alan Kotok, Steve Russell and J.M. Graetz, the creators of Spacewar! (Graetz, 42-48). However, the limited technology prevented a completely free-form playground. Instead of a romp through a limitless Universe, the playground was constrained to a single repeated conflict in a static world.

In its final form, Spacewar! was a playground exhibiting traits of an agonistic experience while striving for those of a free-form play experience. The victory conditions establish the contest quite clearly as does the player's vocabulary. However, the addition of a background of stars provides a dimension that is extraneous to the contest. Though the star field was included to give the players some sense of movement, the background could have been anything, but as it turned out, there was a deliberate intention, as the title indicates, to situate Spacewar! in space. In other words, in addition to the agonistic goal, the playground aimed to immerse the players in a world, which is an aim that is indicative of a free-form style of play.

I define a videogame as an experience that exists primarily as a virtual contest. The structure of Spacewar! as a primarily agonistic playground situates it in this category. As Spacewar! shows, videogames can have immersive elements, but lacking the ability to properly utilize them via montage, the experience is unable to overcome its agonistic imperatives.

The dichotomy between contest and free-form established by Spacewar! is an essential factor that guided the interactive tradition as technological improvements made further development feasible. In the interactive entertainment products that came out after Spacewar!, this dichotomy achieved a dynamism that changed the common foundation of the playgrounds with each new technological innovation. The technology advanced and became more adept at creating immersive environments, but this aspect of technology developed at a much faster rate than that which determined the speed of participation in the interactive process. This differential resulted in a slow but definite separation of the game worlds that would take some time before playgrounds that combined the competitive nature of the contest with the immersion of free-form play were eventually produced.

It is important to note that the development of technology was not the only factor that guided the progress of the interactive tradition. In addition, one had to consider the interactive capabilities of the user. This was quite evident in 1971 when, inspired by Spacewar!, Nolan Bushnell created an arcade version of it called Computer Space. Bushnell had envisioned an entertainment industry in which games like Computer Space would replace the traditional pinball machines and jukeboxes and since Spacewar! was unbelievably popular where it was available, he assumed that the popularity would easily translate. Despite the fact that Computer Space, like its predecessor, pushed the technology to the limits, Computer Space was a complete failure. Bushnell had expertly emulated the original, but had failed to realize that the audience that made Spacewar! so popular was not the same as the audience that had Computer Space thrust upon them.

If you were able to play Spacewar!, you had access to a mainframe computer, which meant that you were most likely in an academic institution and had come into contact with computers before. Therefore, when you had the controls put in your hand, you were already familiar with the interactive process and you were ready to speak to the computer. In contrast, the public that encountered Computer Space was used to reactive media, not interactive media. When confronted with the many controls that allowed players to "speak" to the apparatus and participate in the interactive process, they were turned off by the alien nature of the process (Sellers, 14). Though the players were familiar with agonistic struggles, the victory conditions were only part of the playground.

The result of this failed attempt at public interactivity was that the industry realized that electronic "bells and whistles" were not enough to sell a product if the audience was unable to communicate with it. When Spacewar! was developed, the concern was how far the apparatus could be pushed because it was assumed that everybody was already familiar with the apparatus and its process. Since Computer Space was virtually the same game as Spacewar!, it inherited the principles of demonstration that assumed the audience could keep up with the technology. However, Computer Space revealed that in addition to waiting for the technology to catch up to the dreams of the creators, now the audience had to be introduced to the interactive process. When Magnavox released the Odyssey in 1972, the mass audience got its first chance to really embrace the new technology.

Interactive technology was not something the private citizen had access to in 1972. Computers were either in places of business or high-end laboratories. The Odyssey aimed to change this by creating a device that a family could take home and use with their television set. By offering experiences that ranged from a Ping-Pong game to various sporting games, the content was both simpler and more familiar than an outer space battle. Furthermore, the level of speech required of the users was very low, but what is most important is that the duplicitous nature of the playground is still evident.

Although the interactive apparatus was now in the home, it was less versatile than the more powerful mainframe computers. This meant the playgrounds had to be simplified. The Odyssey was only capable of permitting limited user-speech and this could not contribute to a deep playground. However, the push to create immersive environments instead of simple contests is evident in how the designers supplemented the hardware. Most of the games were very contest-oriented as the technology was unable to support much more at this point, but the Odyssey came packaged with acetate overlays for the television. If the Odyssey could not create a astronomical wonderland like Spacewar!, one would be artificially constructed. Since the Odyssey was capable of making light appear on the screen in very precise ways, by placing the acetate overlay over the lights, the illusion of very detailed worlds was effected.

This physical superimposition helped to compensate for the technical limitations by offering the player detailed (non-digital) graphical worlds with which the player could seemingly interact. Instead of an abstract playground changing colors according to user input, those colors were given meaning. In a game called Firefighter, which was produced for the developmental predecessor to the Odyssey, the actual mechanics of the game had the players rapidly press a button to make the screen change from red to blue before a timer expired. On its own, this is very much a race in which the only goal is to beat the clock. However, an acetate overlay was designed that depicted a house. Though still very much a contest, the context provided by the acetate overlay gives the contest an element of free form play.

The majority of the games released with the Odyssey placed the focus on agonistic experiences. Though games like Volleyball and Soccer may seem to offer little in the way of an environmental immersion, the Odyssey also included a game called Haunted House in which, with the help of an acetate overlay, the player explored a haunted house. Despite a lavishly illustrated house, the interactive process was weighed down by the required use of peripheral items such as playing cards. This added an additional level of complexity not found in the straightforward and familiar contests. For new players (which were the entire audience at this point) simple interaction was prized.

The Odyssey sold well and it certainly garnered quite a bit of attention, but its scale was simply too small. Despite all the media surrounding it, it simply didn't reach enough people. When PONG was released months after the Odyssey, there was nothing novel about the game itself, which looked almost identical to the Odyssey Ping-Pong game. Also like the Odyssey, PONG was designed for an audience unfamiliar with interactivity. Instead of pursuing the home market, Bushnell, now head of the newly formed Atari, pursued the same vision of arcade entertainment that he had when he designed Computer Space.

In order to reach the largest audience possible, PONG combined the simplicity of the Odyssey with the accessibility the Odyssey's price tag could not offer. By adopting the pay-to-play ethic of the coin-operated machine industry, the investment by the player was minimal. Furthermore, by hiding the intimidating machinery beneath a colorful cabinet, PONG seemed like nothing more than a fancier version of the very familiar pinball machine.

PONG was unveiled as a purely agonistic environment with a very simple interactive process that a person could learn to become a part of in moments. The instructions simply read, "Avoid Missing Ball for High Score." The playground featured only the "paddles" and "ball," a center line and scores for each player. Even the controls had a minimalist feel as they were simply two knobs that controlled the vertical movement of each player's paddle.

The true success of PONG was not its monetary profits, but what those profits represent. Every quarter was one more person that had learned to participate in the interactive process. The drawback of focusing on a user-friendly experience resulted in PONG sacrificing both visual detail and interactive depth. Not only had Ping-Pong games such as PONG had been designed as early as 1955, but even the decade-old Spacewar! boasted a more immersive playground. Yet by creating such a simple playground with such a simple goal and by making it easily accessible, people were more than happy to interact with it. Their vocabulary may have been limited to "up" and "down," but they were speaking, thinking, and listening.

With the audience now actors in the interactive process, the industry was at an interesting junction. Instead of using the advancing technology to teach the audience to interact at a higher level, designers regarded PONG as a simple formula for success and sought to use it for adding complexity to the contest. Even so, with the evolution of the playground, the interactive process managed to be deepened as well.

The first games that strayed from the PONG formula did so by primarily by expanding the playground. Tank, released by Kee Games, is based on the same principles as PONG, but its playground had a more complete feel than the cold black void of PONG. In this playground, the players controlled what amounted to moving paddles (the tanks) that could shoot at each other. Like Spacewar!, the goal was to eliminate the other player. However, the actual playground was composed of a number of walls that acted only to block shots and impede movement. While certainly not back up to the precise realism of the star field in Spacewar!, the "battlefield" showed clear signs of immersion in addition to utility.

In 1975 technology took a large step forward with the introduction of the microprocessor. The microprocessor offered the game industry power vastly superior to that provided by the old hardware and it was used to create even more derivatives of PONG, only this time with graphical playgrounds that began to approach the original success of the Spacewar! star-field. The first game to utilize a microprocessor, Gun Fight, was produced by Bally/Midway based on a game by Taito. Gun Fight put each player in the role of a gunfighter and the last player standing was the victor. The gameplay was still very derivative of PONG. However, instead of the traditional playgrounds in which the world was rendered in very simple digital blocks, the microprocessor technology -- in addition to speeding the interactive process -- allowed for much greater detail. The playground was populated by reasonable facsimiles of cacti, trees and even a moving covered wagon. Though very generic, the player characters also actually resembled human characters.

It was at this point in time that there began a noticeable fracturing of the playground between the free-form elements and the agonistic elements. The microprocessor technology that drove Gun Fight clearly illustrate this split. The gameplay stays firmly grounded in the agonistic model of PONG. However, instead of the oppositional walls of Tank, the obstacles in the playground are now integrated scenery. The obstacles could have easily existed as strictly utilitarian pixels, but the designers made a conscious decision to include objects that created a certain atmosphere. As such, a very specific theme is created by the scenery and the barren agonistic playground of PONG and its followers has been transformed into a visually immersive playground with agonistic imperatives guiding the interactive process.

Based on the examples I have presented so far, it may seem that interactivity was progressing along a trajectory with no deviation. While this is generally true of the arcade releases (for which profit was the most important factor), like any other media there will always exist an independent movement. For this period of the interactive tradition, the independents existed in the same place the previous period began: an academic institution.

In reevaluating the image-intensive approach that taxed the machinery to the limit when creating a real-time interactive process, a new breed of experience was developed by slowing the process, allowing for a more complex world (Adams). The way this was accomplished was by forgoing a graphic approach for the playground and, instead, presenting it as a text-based world. Accordingly, the interaction on the part of the user becomes typed commands rather than manipulation of controls. The result of this slowing of the interactive process is that more of the computer's resources could be invested in creating a world. The first game to use this approach was Colossal Cave Adventure.

Colossal Cave Adventure was designed with a primary focus on immersing the player. The creation of Will Crowther, Colossal Cave Adventure combined his love of spelunking with his love of role-playing games. The game worked by presenting the player with a textual description that introduced the player into the world. The player would then type in commands. The computer would respond to the user commands by displaying an appropriate new text. Colossal Caves Adventure was quite different from the agonistic playgrounds found in the arcade. While some agonistic elements were included in the game, such as a scoring system, the game was only a single player experience with the emphasis placed on creating a world for the player.

Colossal Cave Adventure was about exploration. The world had been built and, by navigating and discovering the world via the interactive process, the player became part of that world. In addition, the interactive vocabulary of the player increased dramatically. By way of a text parser, the player could use simple English statements that the computer heard and translated. While much has been written on the medium that grew out of this game, the most important contribution Colossal Cave Adventure made to the interactive tradition was that it proved the entire game world did not need to be immediately viewable to the player. In other words, exploration could be part of the experience and playgrounds need not be immediately known to the player in its entirety. As Colossal Cave Adventure grew and mutated on mainframe computers far and wide, the mainstream arcade industry continued along the image-heavy path that constrained it to simple contests. The technology, still improving, permitted deviations at the level of the playground.

Like the independent movement, the arcade designers were seeking ways to rethink their designs even without breakthrough new technologies. Like the independent movement, the obvious solution was to only present the player with a portion of the playground at any one instant. The evolution of the graphic playground took a large step forward in 1978 with the release of Atari Football. The title alone clearly indicates that this is an agonistic experience. The visuals are composed of a top-down view of a simplified playing field populated by X's, O's and various statistics. What Atari Football does that elevates it above the other sport simulations released at that time is to create a playground that had boundaries extending beyond the screen. The viewable area of the virtual football field comprises only thirty yards of virtual space. That means that, at any one time, seventy percent of the playground exists outside of the realm of the visible. In a sense, Atari Football represents a simplified visual realization of the playground of Colossal Cave Adventure. Atari Football is a strictly agonistic world and Colossal Cave Adventure exists much closer to free-form play. Despite such differences they both show that there is a strong push towards more immersive playgrounds. Regardless of the technological achievement of Atari Football in 1978, that year is best known for Space Invaders, which was the first true gaming phenomenon since PONG.

The ingenuity of Space Invaders was that it pushed the boundaries of the playground by grafting a new agonistic element to the traditional agonistic playground that expanded the audience of the agon dramatically. By continuing to exploit any and all technological advancements, the designers were able to create the hi-score. The hi-score simply displayed the highest score achieved by defeating the space invaders. This meant that the "head to head" contest of PONG was forced into decline. In its place was a game played by one person at a time, but the contest was now with the entire gaming population as the score was the only measure of a lasting victory and it could always be broken. In other words, the scale of the agon shifted from a "match" logic to an "event" logic; that is, from a contest that determines a winner based on direct competition against an opponent to a contest that determine a winner based on all competitors performing an identical task. But even as the agonistic elements of Space Invaders made it the highest grossing game ever made at that time, something else was clearly at work in the playground.

With the graphic capabilities increasing, the visual detail that had previously been given to scenery began to be used to make the characters in the game better defined. Though Gun Fight used the microprocessor technology to give the player both a setting and two basic gunfighters, the visuals remained somewhat lifeless. Space Invaders managed to breathe life into the graphics when the designers created a domineering wall of space invaders that was unlike anything encountered before. The agonistic impulse to save the world from the invaders was still present, but the unique and animated invaders were teeming with a kineticism that made them appear so much more alive than characters in contemporary titles. Since Space Invaders was eventually an enormous success and, like PONG, became the immediate object of replication as people rushed to cash in on its success. While many clones of Space Invaders were released, they were simply derivative versions with no real ingenuity.

Although the technological advancements were generally developed in a cumulative fashion (building on one another), it is important to note that the desire to create a more immersive playground through new technology was so powerful that some technologies that existed along parallel paths were developed and utilized. Vector-based graphics, which allowed for more immersive playgrounds, were developed for gaming as an alternative visual display. While appearing sparser than raster graphics, the use of outlines rather than shapes permitted vector-based graphics to achieve a level of complexity that was not possible with raster graphics. This meant that the playground itself was more complex and, with the proper design, more immersive. In the1979 smash, Asteroids, the appeal of vector-graphics was quite clear as the vector-based graphics allowed Asteroids to showcase a well-articulated space scenario in full motion. While this contributed greatly to Asteroids success, Asteroids also built upon the high-score device in Space Invaders by allowing the players to input their initials. The combination of the two clearly shows the continual progression of the agonistic elements even as the playgrounds grew to depend on free-form play elements.

The simulation exists very much in the area of free-form play. There is no "victory" in a simulation, only successful play. Though largely created and used by the military, the 1979 release of Speed Freak brought the simulation roaring back into style. That isn't to say the simulation had ever gone out of style, though. In 1976 Atari released Night Driver. Using very simple raster graphics a somewhat first person perspective was created as the player drove down a black screen between lines. A small vehicle overlay gave the feeling of driving a car, but other than that, the playground was devoid of immersive qualities. In 1979, Vectorbeam created Speed Freak.

Speed Freak is a racing game (a contest), but at the same time it is a simulation. The rules of the game make it imperative to win, but the playground makes it imperative to experience. When compared to one another, Speed Freak looks very much like a vector graphics version of Night Driver. Both feature the same near first person perspective and both feature vanishing point perspective in the road. However, by using the vector graphics, the world of Speed Freak is able to populate the world. Apart from roadside scenery, there are also oncoming vehicles. Instead of a raster-based image that somewhat resembled a vehicle, the vector graphics allowed the creation of three-dimensional wire frame models that were clearly cars. The result is a world that approaches a level of verisimilitude that the raster based graphics could not compete with. More importantly, the agonistic imperatives of the race were beginning to be eclipsed by the powerful immersive qualities of the scenery.

Graphics do go a long way in bringing the player into an experience, but it is not always the quality that is most important. Instead, the location of the player's perspective can affect the experience dramatically. While players had traditionally viewed games from an outside perspective, the apocalyptic tank battles in Battlezone removed the distance, and what the player saw was what the player character saw. The fact that what the player character saw was a world of color vector graphics that boasted a level of completeness far beyond either Asteroids or Speed Freak made the immersion more powerful. In other words, when the enemies in Battlezone fired at what would traditionally have been the interactive avatar of the player, they were really firing at the player.

The first-person perspective of Battlezone provided the player with the perfect view of the changing playground. Playgrounds still existed as agonistic environments, but there was a push towards an environment that went beyond mere extraneous scenery and approached the level of a realized world. Battlezone came quite close to this ideal as it presented the player with a virtually complete world. Reminiscent of such playgrounds as those found in Colossal Caves Adventure and Atari Football, the first person perspective only allowed the player to see a small portion of the world that existed. Furthermore, instead of opting for a complete utilitarian world where all efforts were put into the agonistic elements, Battlezone included surreal background images of mountainous terrain and a luminous moon. Though they existed solely in the background and could never be approached, the effect on the player was that one was actually in the titular battle zone. Of course, this means that in addition to being immersed, you are bound to the agonistic goals of the world, which amounts to kill or be killed. Despite the fact that Battlezone pushed the technology to its limits in search of a free-form playground, it still existed as an agonistic playground all too similar to even the raster-based playgrounds.

In 1980, the videogame market was concerned most with recreating the existing products with newer technology. Just as PONG was cloned and followed by games such as Tank and Gunfighter, so too were games like Space Invaders seeing incremental improvements made to their interactive processes and playgrounds. This made for steady profits, but offered little in the way of innovation. Nearly ten years after the release of PONG, the experiences were still too reliant upon agonistic imperatives. The tensions between free-form ideals and agonistic ideals were at a stalemate. What the industry needed was to rethink the structure of the playground.

Midway released the Namco designed Pac-Man with little expectations. Not long after its release, it had become the biggest game of all time. More than just a financial success, Pac-Man was a cultural phenomenon that inspired everything from clothing to music. But why was this game that had been so unimpressive to industry analysts received by the public with unprecedented adoration?

The actual gameplay of Pac-Man was nothing too unique. The maze game genre had been around for some time, with the earliest example, Gotcha, dating back to 1972, the year PONG was released. While Pac-Man certainly was a very good execution of the maze game genre, it hardly pushed the technology. After all, though the player could make Pac-Man go off one side of the screen to reappear on the other, it was hardly as expansive a playground as Battlezone or even Atari Football. Coupled with the single-screen playground was the fact that the interactive playground itself was very much agonistic.

The ostensible goal of Pac-Man was to achieve a high score by advancing through the levels. This was accomplished by traversing the maze in such a way that all 240 dots on the screen are "eaten." Additional points can be won by eating the "power pellets" which would make the ghosts vulnerable to an attack as well as by eating fruits that would appear at given intervals in each level. Like Asteroids, a high score also meant your initials were recorded as well. The play was very simple, very agonistic and offered lighting fast interactivity via simple movement controls. Everything about Pac-Man's interactive playground was the logical next step in the incremental technological improvements, but it wasn't this user-friendly interactive process that is responsible for success of Pac-Man.

As we already know, Pac-Man's interactive playground is visible in its entirety, and as I have shown, that portion was dominated by agonistic imperatives. Yet that is only a portion of the entire playground. The remainder exists as non-interactive segments.

When the game is waiting for a player, it will play a demonstration. In this demonstration, something extremely unique occurred. Instead of only showing players how the game play works, the demonstration introduced the villains. Traditional playgrounds had presented antagonists, but this was usually by way of anonymous game characters. The designers of Pac-Man improved on this and gave each ghost a name as well as a character trait. The pink ghost, Pinky, was Speedy, the red ghost, Blinky, was Shadow, the Blue ghost, Inky, was Bashful, while the Orange ghost, Clyde, was Pokey. The result was not just antagonists, but vibrant beings. By establishing these characters, the player begins the game with a knowledge of not only the how of the game, but the who as well. Non-interactive scenes between certain levels also built upon this effect, but instead of simply showcasing the ghosts, they showcased the relationship between Pac-Man and the ghosts. As such, the player-character of Pac-Man was given a life in the same way the ghosts had been.

The total of these non-interactive segments is that when players enter into the interactive playground, they are not doing so just for a contest. By watching the non-interactive segments that are juxtaposed with the interactive segments, a world emerges that would not have been present with just one kind of segment or the other. The synergy of the two creates a playground that not only allows the pursuit of an agonistic goal but also facilitates the immersion of the player into a world. This world, unlike those that stood around it in the arcade, was not negligible detail; indeed, the very title of the game proves this: the player does not just control an anonymous avatar, but assumed the role of Pac-Man.

The playground of Pac-Man in its entirety is Interactive Cinematic: that is, the juxtaposition of the non-trivial interactive sequences with the cinematic forms something that is greater than either component. The cinematic segments alone would be nothing more than bland software demonstrations and the interactive segments alone had already been created numerous times throughout the seventies. This montage construct, however, took the dichotomous elements of the contest and free-form play style and combined them into a unified whole. The result was not strictly a contest, nor was it strictly free-form, but existed instead as an immersive interactive world.

The Interactive Cinematic structure of Pac-Man was just as influential on the interactive tradition to follow it as Spacewar! had been on the interactive tradition that preceded Pac-Man. While the agonistic imperative was still very much a part of the interactive tradition, the Interactive Cinematic structure made it possible to bring the playground closer to a free-form playground by deepening the relationship between the interactive sequences and the cinematic sequences.

Victory, an extremely important quality of the agonistic playground, began to ebb in the wake of Pac-Man. Playgrounds still had to have certain conditions for winning and losing because of the pay-to-play structure, but the goals began to have less to do with overt agonistic intentions. Donkey Kong, released in 1981, was intended to be "the first game videogame with a story." (Kent, Donkey Kong!, 247) While it still had agonistic elements, such as a high-score, the goal was to rescue a "damsel in distress." The characters were not explicitly introduced, but the situation was. Donkey Kong opens with the villain, Donkey Kong, carrying away the damsel, Pauline, and it is Donkey Kong himself who gives the world shape by breaking the orderly world he entered. This not only establishes the goal of the game, but it also elevates the playground above a preordained level and gives it meaning beyond being a realm in which to get points. However, the assumption that defined story elements within the cinematic sequences of playgrounds would produce a satisfying experience was the foundation of many abysmal games.

The interactive process is essential to an interactive cinematic experience, but in the montage structure, so too is the cinematic aspect. The fusion of a strong interactive process with well-defined cinematic sequences that define both the story and characters equates to success, as Pac-Man showed. The industry was extremely focused on the interactive element of the game, and since the interactive sequence presented nothing new they saw the success as being attributable to the creation of the character. As such, efforts were invested in developing the characters and setting of games rather than developing a strong interactive process. It was this logic that led to perhaps the largest blunder in the history of interactive entertainment when Atari created an adaptation of the movie E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial for its home gaming console. The logic was that because E.T. had been a huge success in the theaters, it would automatically translate to a huge success as a videogame. The game was very much interested in immersing the player, as the goal of the game stuck fairly close to the source material. They did create a story-based playground, but they failed to develop the actual interactive process; the montage was not complete. The result was a game that may have featured a lovely playground, but few people ever found out because the interactive process itself was so horrendously executed that those who didn't abandon it entirely could not proceed far. While story can help to increase the level of immersion in a playground, as is the case with the more successful Tron adaptation, to focus on the story elements at the expense of interactivity creates the opposite effect.

Licensing deals presented games with ready-made characters and stories, but the viable properties were too few so the industry was still reliant on technology to create new worlds based on the structure that Pac-Man created. Just as vector graphics were used to create a more visually realistic playground, the industry began working with laserdisc technology. When coupled with computer processors, laserdiscs were capable of presenting live-action video in an interactive manner. Laserdiscs had been used once before to facilitate an interactive experience, but in 1983, Dragon's Lair was the first game to really make it to the public. Visually speaking, Dragon's Lair was unlike anything that had been seen before. With the help of professional animator Don Bluth, Dragon's Lair presented the player with a lush animated world that would seem perfectly at home in any movie theater. This gave the playground an immediate sense of immersion because the visual quality was so far ahead of any of the raster- or vector-based contemporaries of Dragon's Lair. Yet while the world itself was stunning, the interactive process existed at a very low level.

It is at this point in the interactive tradition that a sizeable number of Interactive Cinematic experiences existed. What this volume of games revealed was that just as interactivity has multiple levels, so too does Interactive Cinema. More than that, it showed that the diversity potential within the realm of Interactive Cinema is enormous. This potential is clearly evident in a brief comparison of Dragon's Lair and Pac-Man. At various decision points in Dragon's Lair, the player would have a split second in which to "speak" one of five commands (up, down, left, right, sword) to the game. If properly executed, the game would continue deeper into the playground; if done incorrectly the player would suffer one of many, many deaths. What is interesting is that even though the interactive process is at a low level, it is not so low as to make it trivial. The result is that Dragon's Lair also exists as a montage of the interactive and the cinematic. At first glance, Pac-Man and Dragon's Lair have nothing in common, but the above analysis reveals that they both comply with my definition of Interactive Cinema. However, a comparison of the two also reveals how important it is to focus on the interactive process. Twenty years later, as real-time computer graphics begin to surpass the pre-drawn, laserdisc wonder of Dragon's Lair, the game loses much of its appeal since the actual interactive process amounts to the low-level task of trial-and-error. Pac-Man, however, retains much of its appeal because the interactive process was so well designed. This enormous divergence in levels of interactivity within Interactive Cinema increased dramatically after the end of the Golden Era of Arcade gaming.

Interactive Cinema is a montage of the interactive and the cinematic, but successful Interactive Cinema is also a synergistic balance of the two. That is to say that both aspects of the experience are developed in their own right, but they are also made to harmonize with one another. It is through that harmony that the experience develops for the player. Pac-Man had a solid interactive process and meshed it with excellently produced cinematic sequences. The clones that sought to cash in on the success of Pac-Man changed the characters and either copied the interactive process verbatim or figured the interactive process wasn't so important provided there were identifiable characters in cinematic sequences. The resulting titles were uninspired and lacked innovation. However, since they were cheap to produce, the market became flooded with them, eventually undercutting the profits being made by the first-rate products. This led to a downward spiral that brought the arcade era to halt in the mid-eighties.

For many reasons, the arcade giants crashed in mid-eighties. In just a few short years, the entire drive of the industry that the interactive tradition had led to exploded, as there was no longer a central location of development for the industry. Multiple brands of personal computers were now competing with multiple home-systems and they were not compatible with one another. Furthermore, none of them shared the same capabilities. The result was an increasingly panoramic body of interactivity that offers no single thread to follow. The dichotomous playground that led interactivity to Interactive Cinema began to break down as it became possible to do away with agonistic environments with the help of the Interactive Cinematic montage.

One could examine every platform and every game to see how Interactive Cinema has been taken up by the industry, but that would be impractical, as the number of games released since 1983 is spectacularly large. Instead, it is more beneficial to look at how the genres of games have changed from the last days of the Golden Age of Arcades to the categories that define modern games. This examination reveals a continuation of what I have discussed so far. What is clearly evident is a migration from interactive elements being the defining characteristics to a hybrid definition based on both the interactive as well as the cinematic.

In 1982, Chris Crawford composed a taxonomy of computer games (Crawford 1984). Since his perspective on the industry was from a personal computing perspective as well as an arcade perspective, the taxonomy is quite complete. He divides games into two categories: Skill-and-Action Games and Strategy Games.

The Skill-and-Action games are those that "demanded of the player are hand-eye coordination and fast reaction time." (Crawford 1984). In the terms of his later definition of Interactivity, these games focus their efforts on the "listening" and "speaking" of both actors rather than "thought." Sure, it would take some thinking ahead to keep Pac-Man out of danger, but planning ahead is useless if you aren't able to "hear" the current state of the game and "speak" your response quickly. While this would seem to be indicative of the agonistic worlds, it places Pac-Man in the same general category as Asteroids, which removes the distinction I have shown exists between the Interactive Cinematic structure of Pac-Man and the agonistic world of Asteroids.

According to Crawford, the other category of strategy games "emphasize cogitation rather than manipulation." (Crawford 1984) That is to say, they usually forego the speed of interactivity and focus instead on careful selection of speech. This places it more in line with a free-form playground in which immersion is the goal. However, in each category, the deciding factor is how one interacts. Strategic games incorporate both wargames (which are quite agonistic) and exploration games (such as one of the later iterations of Colossal Cave Adventure by Warren Robinett.)

Crawford's taxonomy reveals interactivity itself to be the factor that determines his categorical divisions. His subcategories for Skill-and-Action games confirm this claim, as the only real differentiation is how the agonistic goals are embodied. Even in delineating the types of strategy games, the emphasis is still placed on acting within the playground rather than on the playground itself.

In 1989, the long running Computer Gaming World magazine revised their genre system. In this new re-categorization of playgrounds, what is evident is that interface isn't the main factor anymore. The genres changed from strategy, adventure and action (all reminiscent of Crawford's taxonomy) to strategy, simulation, adventure, role-playing adventure, wargames, action/arcade (Myers, 286-301).

The adventure category is defined as "games that allow you to take your alter ego through a storyline or series of events." While Crawford's taxonomy focused on the means by which this happened, this new genre is satisfied to ignore the interactive methods and recognize that a narrative structure is essential to the playground. However, the Computer Gaming World categories do not make the necessary conceptual leap to differentiate between types of story. For example, a game that would have the character go on a hilarious romp through space (Space Quest) would still be regarded as the same type of game as one that has the character assume the gritty role of an officer of the law, trying to catch a serial killer (Police Quest). Both games send the user on "adventures," but the settings and moods of the games are extremely different. In the years since the establishment of Computer Gaming World's categories (Myers, 293), the categories themselves have remained fairly stable, but there is a trend towards hybridization.

A look at one of the more popular gaming websites reveals action games, but also first-person action, action adventure, action racing, action strategy, action simulation, action RPG and more. While these specialized genres do not yet include narrative structure genres such as comedy or drama, they do show a very clear trend towards definition by playground rather than method of interactivity. For example, Metroid Prime is a considered a First-Person Adventure.

As I will cover in Chapter 3, "First-person" does not describe the mode of interactivity, but how the player is viewing the world. In this case, it means that what the player-character sees is what the player sees. This may seem just as general a term as Crawford's taxonomy in 1982, but the important quality to observe is that it describes the mode of entry rather than type of interactivity the player experiences. This is a serious distinction from the 1982 taxonomy. Additionally, "adventure", though still existing as a general story signifier, is also non-descriptive of the specific means of interaction. Compared to the original definition (Crawford, 1984), which was concerned with puzzle elements and the number of disks the game was stored on, it is clear games have changed into immersive playgrounds rather than an agonistic worlds determined by the interactive process alone. The old genres would have you know exactly how you interface with the program and what control you will have, but now all you can tell is that the playground of Metroid Prime will immerse the viewer in a story by way of a first-person perspective. How it does that can only be discovered by entering the world.

Though entry into these playgrounds was possible when they were simple interactive contests, things are no longer so simple. With the formation of the Interactive Cinematic montage, the playgrounds have become increasingly more complex. While theories of play were sufficient when looking at the formation of the Interactive Cinematic playground, they do not reveal much about the direction Interactive Cinema is now headed.