GAMES. PLAY. LIFE. volume 01.

issue 06
From the Editor

To be honest, we thought the world would be over by now. That’s

why it took us so long to get this issue out to the press. We figured, hey, since
the world will (should?) be a smoldering heap of nothingness by the time Issue
#6 comes out, we should probably focus on more important pursuits, like lining
our bomb shelter with delicious, delicious canned beans. But then it didn’t
happen so we were caught with our pants down. Sorry about that.
But seriously, this has been a big year for Kill Screen. Our previous editor-in-
chief Chris Dahlen has moved on to bigger and better game-writing projects.
We got an office in SoHo. We brought on some interns, redesigned our website,
threw some more events, and were even cited in a Supreme Court case. Cool
stuff indeed. Also, Obama is up for reelection. We have nothing to do with that.
All this flux had us thinking about our next theme. Given the transition, there
was one word that kept floating around our heads—CHANGE.
One of the wonderful aspects of games is their constant transition from one
medium to another. From the board and parlor games of the 19th century, to the
realm of sport in the next, to digital interfaces starting in the ’60s—games are
constantly evolving. It’s a bit like a parent looking at their child’s scrapbook—
how far these little beasties have come!
This issue is dedicated to the various permutations of our favorite, snaky
little medium. We start with a look at how games are changing our world, from
the “serious” games movement budding in Latin America to enhancing our
understanding of the tragedy that was the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
From there, we turn inward—literally. Games are feedback loops that are
shifting our very being, and contorting our body chemistry, for better and for
worse.
Next, we take the long view. What happens when the children of the Atari era
turn 80? Will they be able to play the way we once did? What will those games
even look like? We turn to some talented prognosticators for their responses.
Finally, we travel to Hungary to look at a videogame that started when the
Berlin Wall fell, and has yet to be completed! Some things truly don’t change.
We’re happy with this issue, and hope you are as well! Sorry for the hiatus,
and here’s to a happy remaining 2012. We’re almost in the clear.

—Jamin
founder artists developer
Jamin Warren Dan Black Jake Elliott
George Bletsis
editor Mikey Burton interns
Ryan Kuo Dan Christofferson Adnan Agha
Mike Force Henry Crouch
art director Josh Fronk Lyndsey Edelman
Regan Johnson Gena Hayward Josiah Harrist
Jory Hemmelgarn Rachel Helps
copy editor Jesse Lenz Claire Hosking
Thomas Rousse Edward McGowan Yannick LeJacq
Michael Mesker Patrick Lindsey
contributors Daniel Purvis Drew Millard
Carrie Andersen Colin Pinegar Chris Romero
Ryan Bradley  Chaunté Vaughn Jacob Simon
Nicholas Breckon Ping Zhu Kent Szlauderbach
Dan Crabtree 
Andrew Hayward cover illustration
Kill Screen Media, Inc.
Jon Irwin Braulio Amado
Darshana Jayemanne Regan Johnson director of business
Jason Johnson development
Nicholas Keyasko  Tom Gregorio
Killscreendaily.com
James Mitchell managing editor
Bo Moore community manager
Ryan Kuo
Levi Rubeck Sarah Elmaleh
Filipe Salgado designer
Anthony Sims, Jr. provacateur
Jeremy Borthwick
Andrew Vanden Bossche John Portman
Luis Wong assistant designer
founders emeritus
Daniel Purvis
Chris Dahlen
Anthony Smyrski

Kill Screen is published by Kill Screen
Media, Inc. at Kill Screen, 195 Chrystie
St. #403b, New York City, NY 10002. Vol.
1, Issue 6.
Please give six weeks notice of change
of address. Periodicals postage paid at
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Printed in the United States
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copyright in the screenshots herein.
Copyright in all screenshots within
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Entire contents copyright 2012 Kill
Screen Media, Inc. All rights reserved;
reproduction in whole or in part
without permission is prohibited. But
please go ahead and ask, OK? Products
named in these pages are trade names,
or trademarks, of their respective
companies.

3
Contributors
Carrie Andersen is a Ph.D. student in the
American Studies department at the
University of Texas at Austin, where she
researches media, popular culture, and politics.
▶@ceanders, www.carrieandersen.com
Ryan Bradley is a senior editor at Fortune and
a contributing editor to Popular Science. He has
written for The Atlantic, National Geographic,
New York, and GOOD. ▶@theryanbradley
Nick Breckon works for Bethesda on
various projects, and once served as a game
critic for Shacknews and Idle Thumbs. Susan
Breckon lives in Michigan and was never once
critical of Nick’s videogaming.
▶@nickbreckon, @SkyrimMom
Dan Crabtree is an I.T. guy and freelance
writer with words on Paste, Ars Technica,
Kill Screen, and Gamernode. His dog is
considered handsome and well-read.
▶@DanRCrabtree
Andrew Hayward is a freelance writer who has
covered games, apps, tech, and toys for more
than 35 publications. He is based in Chicago and
is currently an editor at Mac|Life.
▶@ahaywa, andrewhayward.org
Jon Irwin is a teacher and writer in Boston.
His essays and journalism have appeared in
Alimentum, Billboard, Down East, GamePro,
Lumina, Monkeybicycle, Paracinema, and
Transitions Abroad.
▶@WinWinIrwin, www.JonIrwinIs.net
Darshana Jayemanne is an Australian
academic and writer whose work focuses
on the emerging relations between play and
technology.
▶@KickThousand, escapismvelocity@gmail.com
Jason Johnson is a freelance writer who has
appeared on Gamasutra, IndieGames, and more.
▶jasonjohnsonfreelance.tumblr.com
4
Nicholas Keyasko is a writer and a journalist
from New Jersey. His interests include
music, politics, film, videogames, eating,
and traveling the world. ▶@nkeyasko
James Mitchell is a mostly-fiction writer,
and a strategist at an advertising agency. In
reality, he lost most of his arcade allowance
to Dance Dance Revolution.
▶@jamescmitchell, saladonions.tumblr.com
Bo Moore is a freelancer and the Assistant
Games Editor at Paste. He is nursing a healthy
(read: unhealthy) obsession with LCD
Soundsystem. ▶@usebomswisely, bomoore.com
Levi Rubeck is a poet and critic from
Wyoming via New York, now working at MIT
Press in Cambridge. He would love to start a
band with you. ▶dangerhazzard.com
Filipe Salgado works at a bank, but he’s
not all bad. Sometimes he writes for Paste
and Popular Science, but sometimes he
writes stories about the deserts of the
American Southwest on his blog Big Talk,
Real Slow. ▶@philthe25th
Anthony Sims, Jr. is a freelance writer and
part-time film professor in Chattanooga, Tenn.
He owns a six-yearold Jack Russell Terrier
named Lita Ford. ▶@filmjr
Andrew Vanden Bossche is a freelance
games journalist and MFA student. His
work has appeared in Gamasutra, Paste,
Thought Catalogue, and many others.
▶@Mammonmachine,
Mammonmachine.blogpost.com
Luis Wong is the editor-in-chief of GamePro
en Español and also works at Etiqueta Negra,
a non-fiction magazine from Peru.
▶@wongcito, luiswong.com
Contents
The Change Issue
summer 2012
volume 01. issue 06

a n e w wor l d

8 — The Colossus of Code

13 — Shoot to Will

16 — Jogo Bonito

body ta l k

20 — Extreme Measures

26 — Can’t Stop, Won't Stop

grow u p

30 — Bearded, Bald, and Buttoned Up

32 — Your Mom Plays Skyrim

34 — Never Change

coi n drop

40 — I’m Your Pusher

42 — No Quarters Given

52 — Gone Baby Gone

54 — Calling Ahab

t h e gr e at m igr at ion

58 — Limited Partnership

60 — Brother’s Keeper

b ack to t h e f u t u r e

68 — Versus Mode

70 — Forever Young

82 — Reality Effects

5
A New
World

6
On Christmas itself at many locations along the front something
resembling football occurred. Private William Tapp of the Warwickshires
wrote at Christmas from just above Ploegsteert Wood, “We are trying
to arrange a football match with them”—the Saxons—“for tomorrow,
Boxing Day.” Harassing British artillery fire, he claimed later, prevented
it. There were other plans for competition, right up to New Year’s Day,
once the clearance of corpses from No Man’s Land had exposed potential
fields for play. However dotted by half-hidden turnips and cabbages, the
spaces between the lines were at least as wide as a conventional soccer
pitch. A London Rifles officer whose letter appeared in the Times on
January 1 reported that “on Christmas Day a football match was played
between them and us in front of the trench.” Perhaps because it was more
appropriate later to deny it, the brigade’s official history would claim that
no match happened, “because it would have been most unwise to allow the
Germans to know how weakly the British trenches were held.”

— Stanley Weintraub, Silent Night: The Story of the World War I

Christmas Truce
7
The Colossus
of Code
How games are finding their post-colonial
soft touch.
By Nicholas Keyasko
Illustration by Daniel Purvis
The year is 1948, and the United States emerges
from World War II as the world’s mightiest
military and economic power. The U.S. will
spend the coming years wielding this vast
power to achieve its goals through military
means: invading foreign nations; stockpiling
obscene amounts of super-destructive
weapons; threatening and coercing its enemies.
However, the U.S. will also utilize a more
subtle sort of power with the Marshall Plan,
which gives Western Europe a tremendous
amount of aid to rebuild its shattered
economy—ensuring that Western Europe
remains a capitalist counterweight to its Cold
War enemies to the East. The United States—for
better or worse—realizes a specific geopolitical
order not only through blunt force, but through
the cooperation of allies who share its values.
This was a successful use of “soft power,” a
concept defined by renowned international
relations theorist Joseph Nye.
Nye defines power as the ability to get
others to do what you want. He concludes that
there are three fundamental ways to achieve
this: “One is to threaten them with sticks; the
second is to pay them with carrots; the third
is to attract them or co-opt them, so that they
want what you want.” This third method is soft
8
power: the ability to get what you want through
attraction rather than coercion.
While traditional “hard-power” game design
is still alive and well (see Super Meat Boy), many
modern games have shifted to a soft-power
design philosophy. Instead of threatening a
player with a Game Over screen for playing
badly, they actively encourage the player to
play well—rewarding the player’s increased
understanding of the game world. They do this
by rewarding exploration and discovery over
simple survival impulses.
In Pac-Man, the impetus for forward
motion is to avoid annihilation by ghosts. Play
incorrectly too many times, and the game
ends. Arcades throughout the Reagan era were
populated with hundreds of games designed
with similarly unforgiving mechanics, where
the carrot was a high score (and a permanent
place for the player’s initials) and the stick was a
Game Over screen that could only be overcome
by inserting more quarters.
Joseph Nye might find a similar philosophy
behind the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba.
The Castro government’s seizure of private
industries was at direct odds with the economic
interests of U.S. corporations, so President
Kennedy used economic sanctions in an
 9
attempt to coerce Cuba into behaving as the U.S.
wanted. We might also think of a parent placing
a misbehaving child in “time out.” Many modern
videogames, in contrast, enrich and reward our
experience when we play “correctly,” instead of
simply ending our play when we are “wrong.” It
would be far-fetched to claim game designers
consciously mirrored globalization trends in
the aftermath of the Soviet Union, but there is
certainly a strong parallel between the end of
the Cold War era and the increasing soft-power
thinking in game design.
Perhaps one of the most prominent, early
examples of this thinking—and one of the
most recognizable influences in the modern
soft-power game—is Shigeru Miyamoto’s The
Legend of Zelda. The threat of annihilation
may still hang over the player in the Zelda
games—there are still Game Over screens—but
a large part of their innovation is the thrill of
discovery that comes from exploring the game
world. Diverging from the linear nature of
many of its Nintendo Entertainment System
contemporaries, the original Zelda allows
players to tackle its open world on their own
terms, not along a designated path.
In Pac-Man, there was no straying from the
narrow confines of avoiding enemies and eating
pellets. Even Miyamoto’s original Super Mario
Bros., an NES contemporary of Zelda, moves
in a clear line. The levels merely ramp up in
difficulty—more enemies, more difficult jumps—
as the player continues to survive. The rewards
for playing Mario well, like collecting 100 coins
and receiving an extra life, are often what Nye
would call carrots. While the old arcade anxiety
of losing quarters is gone, the original Mario
still relies on the survival incentive to keep
players going.
If you fight your way through one of Zelda’s
dungeons, you are not only allowed to continue
to play, but more of the game world becomes
accessible. Imagine you have just fought through
Ocarina of Time's fire temple and defeated the
Dodongo. The game has now rewarded you
with a new item and game mechanic—the bomb
bag—to take into the overworld. Perhaps a
difficult type of enemy blocking your progress
is easier to defeat, or you find that detonating a
bomb near a suspicious rock wall reveals a new
10
Even Miyamoto’s
original Super
Mario Bros., an NES
contemporary of Zelda,
moves in a clear line.
path to explore. Even more interesting, perhaps
the overworld itself will change in a visible way,
thanks to your progress. With the Dodongo
defeated, the water supply will return to the
Goron Village, and new non-player characters
and side-quests will appear. The game world has
been modified by your actions. Contrast this
with the original Mario, where you can’t replay
completed stages.
Instead of influencing you entirely with
coercive, basic carrots (like a high-score
counter) and sticks (like restarting you at Stage
1-1 when you die too many times), the Zelda
designers give you a reward for positive playing:
a stronger bond with the game world. You
want to continue for reasons other than being
presented with the next level or obstacle. And
your motivation for becoming better attuned to
the game’s mechanics becomes finding out what
happens next.
Modern games have followed Zelda’s
example—from the Japanese role-playing
games of the Super NES era, to the PC graphic
adventure games of the early ’90s, to the
modern “sandbox” game. Whether we are
witnessing the effects of our actions across
Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto or driving
the engrossing narrative forward after solving
a puzzle in The Secret of Monkey Island, our
progress is deeply tied to the game world. In a
sandbox game like The Elder Scrolls, we tackle
a vast amount of possible adventures at our
own speed—not prodded along by the tangible
reward of a high score, or the economic sanction
of a lost quarter.
“Uncontrollable laughter.”
- Kill Screen Daily

11
12
Shoot to Will
JFK: Reloaded lets us recreate one of
America’s greatest tragedies. It’s not as bad as
you think.
By Carrie Andersen
Illustration by Colin Pinegar

It is November 22, 1963. I sit on the sixth

floor of the Texas School Book Depository,
gazing downward at Dealey Plaza. As John F.
Kennedy’s motorcade approaches, I aim my
rifle at the president. My first shot misses. My
second hits Kennedy in the chest, ricocheting
into Governor John Connally in the front seat.
The third strikes Kennedy’s head. Fatality.
This is JFK: Reloaded, a 2004 videogame
reenactment of Kennedy’s assassination in
which you play Lee Harvey Oswald. Shoot the
president as Oswald did—win the game.
Reloaded was criticized for mutating a tragic
moment into entertainment—the late Senator
Ted Kennedy called the game “despicable”—
but games that represent actual moments
in history can reveal meaningful threads
between the trauma of the past and the politics
of the present. They are not only artifacts of
historical knowledge, but also expressions of
contemporary anxiety.
Reloaded’s developers at Traffic Games
intended for it to validate the Warren
Commission’s findings and to “disprove

13
the conspiracy theories surrounding JFK’s
assassination,” in the words of Marketing
Director Kirk Ewing. They argued the game
would dispel the notion that Oswald was
not the single shooter by showing that his
shots were possible, offering a prize of up
to $100,000 to the player who could most
accurately recreate the event. Strangely,
coping with the assassination’s uncertainty
compels us to recreate the grisly act that
generated the trauma in the first place—and
we are rewarded for doing so.
The problem? Reenacting Oswald’s
assassination is hard. Aside from spatial
difficulty—rather than firing an easy head-on
shot, said the Warren Commission, Oswald
waited until the car turned a corner, making
his target harder to follow—I must shoot at
the exact second and target that Oswald did. I
have to account for gravity, air resistance, and
reload time. I must admit: After failing to even
wound the president many times, it’s hard not
to admire Oswald’s skill.
After I shoot, I wait for my score out of 1,000,
which will tell me how closely I reproduced
Oswald’s work: points are deducted for
deviating from what transpired in 1963. I rarely
score above 500. No player has received a
perfect score: the winner of the competition
only scored 782 points out of 1,000. Given the
developers’ bold ambition to discredit years of
conspiracy theories, this collective failure has
weighty consequences. Instead of validating
the Warren report, Reloaded questions it. Did
Oswald actually kill Kennedy? Is there more to
the official narrative than we know?
Where Reloaded attempts to simulate the
JFK assassination, Treyarch’s widely played
Call of Duty: Black Ops offers an alternative
history. Black Ops places a Cold War-era
military operative in an interrogation room,
where officials bully him into a series of playable
flashbacks and hallucinations. The trauma
of this torture leaves the operative with a
deeply flawed memory: we do not know which
elements of this story are real, and which are
merely fabrications of a broken mind.
The final cut scene of the game reveals that
he is a sleeper agent manipulated by the Soviets
to assassinate Kennedy. He is—I am—the killer.
14
I must admit: After
failing to even wound
the president many
times, it’s hard not to
admire Oswald’s skill.
But I cannot kill him. Not with my controller,
anyway. Kennedy’s assassination is not shown
onscreen; it is only implied in an unplayable
narrative cut scene. Purported archival footage
shows Kennedy departing from an airplane in
Dallas to an enthusiastic crowd. The footage
pauses and the camera ominously zooms in on a
face in the masses: the operative stands before
the president as the images fade away.
Both videogames present Kennedy’s
assassination as a reflection of current political
concern. Whose story can we trust in moments
of crisis, when we confront war, civil unrest,
attacks on American soil? Not government
bodies like the Warren Commission. Reloaded
challenges its report by allowing players to
experience how difficult Oswald’s shots were.
In Black Ops, the operative’s hallucinations
leave him an unreliable source of history.
Neither encourages our trust.
Nor do we have power to challenge those
stories. In Reloaded, I can only shoot a gun;
I cannot move from the Depository. I merely
catch a glimpse of the inevitable assassination
in Black Ops, which unfolds offscreen.
I still sit on the sixth floor in Dallas, troubled
both by the open wound of Kennedy’s
assassination as well as the haziness of political
truth that comes from the state and leaves
us struggling for clarity. Ironically, to salve
these anxious wounds, I am compelled to keep
shooting at Kennedy, to kill the conspiracy, to
wrest truth from simulation.
 15
Jogo Bonito
Can videogames solve Latin America’s woes? A
savvy group of game lovers thinks so.
By Luis Wong
Illustration by George Bletsis

Nina Simões
(Creator of the
Francisco Tupy
game/transmedia
(G4C LA community manager) project Fragments of
Parenthood)
Mario Lapin
Gilson Schwartz (G4C LA executive producer,
(G4C LA curator) Virgo Games CEO, and
developer of the serious
game Autopolis)

16
Inside the Museum of Image and Sound in
São Paulo, three musical groups are singing
and dancing capoeira and other traditional
Brazilian tunes. It’s the end of a week full of
keynotes and talks about how games can make a
positive change in the world.
The Games for Change initiative was
founded in 2004, and has organized events
internationally. In 2011 it arrived in Latin
America with activities in Brazil that ended
with the Games for Change Latin America
Festival in December, organized by Cidade do
Conhecimento, a research group within the
University of São Paulo. The festival brought
together people involved in the videogame
industry and scholars from all parts of Brazil
and from the United States. Serious games,
gamification, and indie games were some of
the topics discussed.
The festival showcased games that
deal with poverty, education, and traffic
accidents—some of the biggest issues in
Latin America. One was the second season of
Ricardo Joseph
(Developer of the
Johan Baldeón
game Urbanias)
(Developer of 1814: La
Rebelión del Cusco, that won
one of the categories at the
G4C LA Festival)
17
EVOKE, the serious game produced by Jane
McGonigal in 2010 and supported by the World
Bank Institute, which will take Brazil as the
scenario of its new campaign. Another was
Autopolis, a game that tries to educate young
adults on how to drive properly and safely
by simulating a real city with pedestrians,
traffic lights, and drinking temptations.
Urbanias is another game that deals with civil
issues, helping citizens to address their main
problems and becoming mayor of an area on
an interactive Facebook map. 1814: La Rebelión
del Cusco was one of the award winners. It
is a real-time strategy game set during the
independence process of Peru, giving the
player the opportunity to participate in the
historical battles between the rebels and the
Spanish army.
Back at the museum, all the assistants have
joined the capoeira ensemble on the stage. It’s
a typical Brazilian party where there aren’t
couples dancing, but a whole group gathered
around the same energy and beliefs.
Inés Evaristo
(Game director of El Pez
Dorado, a runner-up)
Body Talk

18
Have you ever stared at an image too long, only to close your eyes while
the ghostly thing persists? It’s called afterimage and it happens when your
cone cells are over-stimulated and try to cope. Now close your eyes and
think about the last game you played. Do you remember it? Probably—and
if you stared at screens long enough, those moving digital particles have
probably invaded your dreams and memories at some time. We bring
them with us, from big changes in our physiology to small ones in our
subconscious. We don’t just escape to games; they take refuge in us.
19
Extreme
Measures
If making videogames turns into a
science, where does that leave the art?
By Ryan Bradley
Illustration by Mikey Burton
Last year, officials from the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) and the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
met in Arlington, Va. to discuss the future
of biological feedback. The sort of machines
they were talking about—machines that
could quantify physiological functions
(blood pressure, skin temperature, muscle
tension) and compute useful data from
it—were first introduced in the late 1960s
by the mathematician Norbert Wiener at
MIT. Soon the machines were in universities’
labs and hospitals. By 1980, the Biofeedback
Certification Institute of America oversaw
the best practices in the burgeoning field; the
book Biofeedback: Clinical Applications in
Behavioral Medicine came out the same year.
By the 1990s, nearly every hospital in America
had means for electronically measuring a
patient’s response to external stimuli, and so
did many doctors’ offices.
Biofeedback has been around for nearly 50
years, but it wasn’t until the last decade, in
particular the past few years, that the machines
used to measure physiology became mass
20
market. In 2006 Apple and Nike teamed up
to release the Nike+ platform, a combination
shoe-embedded sensor and iPod adapter that
tracks your run and delivers the report to Nike’s
website or your smartphone. When DARPA’s
scientists and engineers met with the FDA,
they were thinking beyond shoe sensors and
apps. The meeting last year was about putting
biosensors inside people.
The scientists and engineers at DARPA
are asked to think about the future, imagine
what might be possible, and work to create it.
Around the same time Wiener coined the term
biofeedback, DARPA helped create ARPANET,
a computer network that grew to become the
global internet. In the last year it helped invent
a very small robot that looks and flies just like
a hummingbird.
At the meeting with the FDA last year, Daniel
J. Wattendorf, a DARPA program manager, said
that his goal was to measure biomarkers “on-
person” in real time. A continuous monitoring
device of the sort Wattendorf went on to
describe—able to last a lifetime with little to no
effect on its wearer—is not so far out. In fact,
 21
speeding up both the development and approval
of such a device is the FDA’s role, and why the
administration was there.
When such a device is developed, the FDA
will have to gauge the efficacy of implanting
sensors with no immediate curative properties
in people. To work well, the sensors have to
function for a very long time, which raises
some interesting questions: What if someone
wants to opt out soon after a biofeedback
device is implanted or ingested or tattooed?
Can someone decide exactly what they want
monitored, à la carte? Who will host that data?
And even more basic, what if a person’s body
doesn’t react well to having a chip implanted
in it? Despite these hurdles, there is currently
a very large portion of the population willingly
participating in an ongoing experiment that
isn’t all that far removed from the kind of thing
DARPA is working toward. They do not have
chips implanted in them, but they do have a
computer or smartphone­­—some even have
wristbands and shoes that talk to one another.
All are gaming.  minimal disruption to existing form-factors …
Outside Seattle, across Lake Washington,
an experimental psychologist named Mike
Ambinder is measuring the heart rates, skin
conductance, facial ticks, and eye movements of
videogame players to deepen his understanding
of what happens when we play—using
biofeedback to inform game design. “Measuring
sentiment,” he calls it. Ambinder works for
Valve Software, the company that created the
zombie shooter Left 4 Dead. Using heart rate
What if, when I stood up
during an interrogation,
my character did too?
And what if that made
my threats all the more
threatening?
22
and sweat monitors, he traces a Left 4 Dead
player’s stress levels.
Left 4 Dead is dark and moody; and the
thing that stands out about the game is how
unsettling it is, how it’s designed to keep
players off-balance. The zombie horde comes
in waves, and these waves are diabolically
unpredictable, even after playing the same
level over and over. The unevenness makes the
calm in-between moments just as stressful as
the times dozens of undead are ripping at your
face. Ambinder is interested in measuring how
we feel—both during the face-ripping moments
and those in between. The ultimate goal is to
allow the zombie horde to respond to our stress
and, at the right moment, up it.
In-game response to player stress is pretty
basic, says Ambinder. “It’s actually fairly trivial
to create an accurate device that measures
SCL, or skin conductance level—a correlate
of physiological arousal,” he wrote to me. “In
theory, a mass-market controller incorporating
this technology could be done cheaply and with
measuring facial expressions with webcams
[is another] example.” In other words, what
Ambinder is measuring in his lab could be
repeated in a living room.
Tools for biofeedback are improving so
quickly, Ambinder explained, that in a decade
or so we’ll have come from knowing the
difference between binary emotions (happy and
sad) to real nuance—the difference between
boredom, frustration, and bliss. He described
how “particular emotions can become part of
the gameplay—imagine a lie-detection game
where a player needs to maintain a calm level
of arousal and neutral facial expression to
advance, or a competitive multiplayer game
where your score depends in part (or in whole)
on the level of arousal you’re able to incite in
your opponents.”
In one of his tests, Ambinder found that
the simple SCL biofeedback systems he had
rigged were especially popular in multiplayer
competition. This isn’t surprising. The fun
in sports often comes from knowing you are
frustrating your opponent, and what better way
to know that someone is truly frustrated than to
see data tracking their physiological reactions?
We already infer this—we read people’s
expressions on the court or the field—but soon,
we’ll be able to quantify their frustration. We’ll
be able to see our opponents, wherever they
may be, literally sweating it out. 
For game designers, the opportunity to
measure a player’s pulse or smile presents
something of a Pandora’s Box. Real-time
biofeedback is something game designers have
never had. Once the game is out in the world,
it’s being tested and tweaked, adapting to the
bodies of its players in real time. Designing
our emotional reactions to a game is no longer
simply an art, but a quantifiable science.
About 15 years ago, Rosalind Picard began to
explore what she calls affective computing,
which, she says, is a way to “teach computers
to recognize emotion.” Picard is director of
both the Affective Computing Research Group
and Autism & Communication Technology
Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. A professor
of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, she’s also
the cofounder and chief scientist at a company
called Affectiva. One sensor Affectiva makes
picks up electrodermal activity—small
changes in conductance sensed from the
surface of your skin that can tell a machine
that you are about to sweat before you do.
Affectiva also sells facial recognition
software developed by Picard that identifies
25 points on a user’s face and tracks those
movements, identifying the likelihood that
when two corners of a user’s mouth rise up
and his eyes crease, he is smiling and probably
happy. The Affectiva software works with a
standard webcam.
One of Affectiva’s clients is using its facial
recognition system to track the emotions of
online shoppers as they move through the
decision process. Another—a university—is
using the software as a noninvasive method
of testing how autistic children respond to
external stimuli. Affectiva’s literature describes
how the company’s software might be used
in videogames: to “measure gamers’ actual
emotional response to your game over the web”
and “gain a scene-by-scene understanding of
areas that are most engaging or not.”
23
There’s one gaming company that’s
taken a particular interest in Affectiva’s
research: Zynga. The pairing makes sense.
Gamers, particularly in a Zynga game like
FarmVille, are consumers, and Affectiva’s
feedback systems have proven successful for
companies like Boston Market and a market
research group called Shopper Science.
Zynga, which claims that some 60 million
people play its games every day, supposedly
employs more economists and analysts than
game designers. Theirs is a calculated art,
and their profit structure more closely aligns
with a casino than a game company. Most of
Zynga’s earnings come from a small number
of players willing to spend a lot of money (in
one instance $75,000 in a year on a single
game, Bloomberg Businessweek reported) on
its virtual items and special features. After
OMGPOP’s game Draw Something became so
popular Zynga bought the studio (for $180
million), one of OMGPOP’s engineers, Shay
Pierce, quit. Pierce went on to announce
why he was quitting on the games industry-
focused site Gamasutra: “An evil game
company isn’t really interested in making
games, it’s too busy playing a game—a
game with the stock market, usually. It
views players as weak-minded cash cows
and it views its developers as expendable,
replaceable tools to create the machines that
milk those cows.” Even so, by sheer profit
Zynga seems to be winning.
“There’s no reason to think that
entertainment consumers would be any
different than any other consumer,” says
Dmitri Williams, an associate professor at the
University of Southern California’s Annenberg
School for Communication. His research
focuses on online games and their social and
economic impact. “There are two goals,” he
says of his work. “One is to understand what’s
going on inside of these worlds. The second is
to figure out if we can use these spaces as petri
dishes for social sciences.” One of Williams’s
former students, Dr. Rabindra Ratan, is using
biofeedback to learn about our emotional
response to our avatars in games. The studies
can be as basic as watching for an uptick in skin
conductivity while one’s avatar is under attack.
More sweat means a deeper connection. After
Ratan’s participants filled out a questionnaire
about their experience, he had them watch a
video of their character being beaten up. They
still had a heart monitor on. Time after time,
and even though they weren’t playing, their
pace quickened.
This empathy toward our avatars, even
after the fact, has enormous implications for
how games are built. But it also points to how
we might use games for things we are only
beginning to imagine. Williams told me about
how videogames and virtual worlds are now
being used as a form of therapy. He gives, as
an example, groups of veterans using virtual-
reality goggles and Second Life to help treat
post-traumatic stress disorder (though this is
coupled with traditional, real-world therapy
sessions). Online, a therapist can slowly dial
up stimuli, which helps vets re-sensitize
in a safer environment. Once biofeedback
systems exist on controllers and screens, once
everyone else outside of labs is allowed to tap
this flood of extremely personal data, “You’d
begin to see it used in all sorts of creative
ways,” Williams says.  that made my threats all the more threatening?
 
Not long ago I walked across Los Angeles,
from LAX to downtown to Los Feliz, then
back west on Sunset until I again reached the
24
There is also the
ultimate question, the
double-edged sword of it
all: the data itself. Who
owns it? What might it
be used for?
Pacific. When Rockstar released Team Bondi’s
game L.A. Noire—with its sprawling and
cinematic vision of late-1940s Los Angeles—
and before I worked the Black Dahlia case and
drove and drove and drove through the city,
I walked. It’s not the best way through the
game, but moving across the landscape any
faster misses the immense amount of work
that went into rendering the city. The game’s
central action—finding clues at crime scenes
and interrogating everyone in your path—is
far less gripping. Yet it was impossible not
to consider the possibilities a biofeedback
system running through the game might allow.
The facial capture Team Bondi used on
actors to build lifelike models in the game could
be reversed, though crudely, using Picard’s
facial recognition software and a Kinect. I
imagined—during moments that were meant to
be dramatic, that were supposed to command
my close attention on the couch, sitting up
at attention, my brow slightly furrowed in a
look of concern, or at least interest. What if
SLC sensors on the controller read that my
palms remained dry, and gave me a slight
edge for remaining calm during questioning
or a car chase? What if, as I started sweating
more, steering became more difficult, or the
questions I could ask in the interview less
cool-headed? What if, when I stood up during an
interrogation, my character did too? And what if
Imagine that there was no controller, no chip
under my skin, yet the game still knew my
position on the couch, my mood, how much my
hands were sweating, and my heart rate—all
things that are, or soon will be, entirely within
the realm of possibility. I still might prefer “What do you picture that glider being used
walking through the landscape of postwar Los for?” Anderson said.
Angeles to the investigations and interrogations.
But I might not. Dugan: Our responsibility is to develop
One possible approach to seeing a heart beat the technology for this. How it’s ultimately
could be through blood, which is remarkably used will be determined by the military… The
good at absorbing light, even through skin. purpose of the technology is to reach anywhere
Our skin’s reflectivity changes slightly, in the world in less than 60 seconds.
concurrent with our heartbeat, so it’s possible
to register a pulse not with sound or feeling Anderson: What’s the payload it could carry?
but by sight. We can’t see it. But Ming-Zher
Poh, a graduate student at MIT, invented a Dugan: We don’t ultimately know. We have to
mirror that can. A fine-tuned instrument such fly it first.
as this camera, capable of measuring slight
variations in light reflectivity, is surprisingly Anderson: But not necessarily just a camera?
cheap. Poh used a simple, off-the-shelf [A pause, followed by nervous laughter from the
webcam and altered the software so that it crowd]
filters all ambient light and measures only the
ebbs and flows from the face of the person Dugan: No. Not necessarily just a camera.
staring into it. “Mirror mirror,” the user might
say, and the camera behind the reflective glass What might the datastream delivered by
captures the light bouncing off her face and biofeedback’s payload be? What is its purpose?
turns it into ones and zeros. An algorithm Poh The question is especially relevant because,
created translates the ones and zeros into a not long after appearing on the TED stage,
number of heartbeats per minute. Dugan announced she was leaving DARPA to
A camera-mirror like Poh’s is a marvelous join Google—another place, like DARPA or
tool, but for game designers it could destroy MIT, where a camera is not necessarily just
what they (and we) love about games. Williams a camera.
put it most succinctly: “The great irony of
feedback is that if you rely on it too much you
get in the way of the art.” There is also the
ultimate question, the double-edged sword of it
all: the data itself. Who owns it? What might it
be used for?
Immediately following her TED talk this
year, Regina Dugan, DARPA’s outgoing director,
had a brief Q&A with TED curator Chris
Anderson. Near the end of her talk Dugan had
a DARPA engineer fly the remote-controlled
hummingbird and the crowd gasped and
applauded. Then Anderson asked Dugan a
few questions about the “scramjet,” a Mach
20 glider that was illustrative of the sort of
audacious dreaming and repeated failure
necessary for the breakthroughs that make
DARPA famous.

25
Can’t Stop,
Won’t Stop
A 12-step process for gaming addicts.
By Dan Crabtree
Illustration by Edward McGowan
Online Gamers Anonymous (OLGA), a
grassroots self-help fellowship for thousands
of gamers suffering from a habit-forming,
treatable addiction to videogames, isn’t
playing. Since 2002, the 12 steps of Alcoholics
Anonymous have brought peace to OLGA
members longing for a permanent pause. These
are the values that have resurrected digitally
buried lives.
1. honesty and acceptance Dr. Kimberly
Young, a licensed psychologist specializing in
internet and gaming addiction, believes that
the lack of research and relative youth of this
addiction are the greatest cultural hindrances
to recognition and formal treatment.
2.  hope Enter support groups, like OLGA.
3.  trust Local chapters and online message
boards host the intimate fellowships needed to
build an active support network for recovery.
4.  action and courage Commonly known
as “taking inventory,” this step often unearths
painful interpersonal neglect. As Dr. Young puts
it, “You can’t spend all your time online and
expect your offline relationships not to suffer.”
5. integrity After Blizzard declined to bar
one OLGA member from his account upon
request, he discovered change could only come
from within.
26
6.  willingness The reallocation of time
previously spent gaming often causes
recovering addicts to adopt other hobbies like
painting, assembling puzzles, and exercising.
7.  humility After restructuring habits, addicts
admit their embarrassment to support groups
or a counselor.
8.  love Spending meaningful time with family
and close friends mends the formerly ignored
relationships and builds a support network.
9.  justice The “Costanza Step,” when
recovering gaming addicts seek forgiveness
from family and friends for neglecting, abusing,
or taking advantage of their care. This can
include online relationships like clans or guilds
who may oppose the recovery.
10.  perseverance Lasting behavioral change
cements as the former gaming addicts become
avid cyclists, painters, writers, and volunteers.
11.  beauty Support groups now encourage a
sense of pride in these new, more productive
habits and lifestyles.
12. service Recovered gaming addicts share
their success stories and active lifestyles with
current addicts who still struggle to
stop playing.
 27
Grow Up

28
We get old. It happens. In fact, it’s never not happened to anyone, ever.
There are few things that are consistent across all human experiences, but
growing old is one of them. So what happens when the playful dreams of
our adolescence become the cold, stiffening realities of later life?
29
Bearded,
Bald, and
Buttoned Up
How do you make games for Nana and Papoose?
We asked some of the best game designers to create
for the new geriatric age.
By Bo Moore
Illustration by Jory Hemmelgarn

Arthritis, mental deterioration, poor eyesight and hearing—these

ailments are common among the old, but for gamers they could
spell the kiss of death. As more gamers grow older, we wondered
how game developers could help a generation of less-than-able-
bodied players enjoy a complete gaming experience. Here’s what
they had to say.

Manveer Heir, senior designer, Mass Effect 3:

Poor eyesight is something developers should concentrate more
effort on, especially now with high-definition televisions. I’ve
heard of plenty of people, even young people with bad vision,
who have trouble reading text or seeing things clearly. Having
clear fonts that people can read, and that contrast well with the
backgrounds, is important—as is making sure all of that works on
standard-definition TVs, since people still game on those devices.
I think developers of manual-dexterity mini-games (press
the A button rapidly) need to consider that some players can’t
do those parts, and should have a way to handle them. It seems
minor, but I know people who game with only one hand, and
a sequence like that is very difficult to play through. These
sequences also affect people who start to develop arthritis,
tendinitis, or other problems with their hands. Alternate control
schemes, such as Microsoft Kinect and PlayStation Move, are a
step in a direction where manual dexterity is less needed. The
more options we build for controlling the game, the more people
we can get to play our games.

30
 Randy Smith, designer, Thief series; cofounder,
Tiger Style Games:
Games don’t need to be about intense, fast-paced action in
order to be engaging, as games from Myst to Drop7 have shown.
Designers tend to focus on challenge, mastery, and depth, but
fundamentally, the power of the interactive medium is to provide
an experience, and there are at least as many other qualities
worth pursuing. Games can be atmospheric, rambling, thought-
provoking, touching, satisfying, or mysterious, and they can
accomplish these without compromising their interactivity. As
the boundary between casual and serious gamers continues to
blur, and as the indie scene continues to deliver new experiments
in unconventional gaming, we are setting the stage to support
older gamers who will benefit from experiences that are a closer
match to their tastes and needs.

Eric Zimmerman, cofounder, Gamelab;

host of GDC Game Design Challenge:
Growing older spells the “kiss of death” only if the main
reason why someone plays a game is to compete in elite global
tournaments or leaderboard rankings. Most people play games
to have fun with their friends, and growing older isn’t going
to change this.
While it’s true that some games are less well-suited to older
players, such as boxing, football, and other contact sports, it
seems clearly evident that many older players enjoy sports and
games, from chess and Go to bocce ball and Scrabble. All of
those games have intense tournament cultures, but that’s not
necessarily why those players are playing those games.
Videogames do not need to be redesigned for older players.
Even the most intense controller-based videogame has fewer
physical demands than shuffleboard. And while videogames
don’t offer the same kind of physical exertion, they do offer
problem-solving, hand-eye coordination, and social interaction—
activities with incredibly valuable cognitive benefits.
But people don’t play videogames because they are good
for you. People play games because of pleasure and culture.
They will play games if they are enjoyable, if they are a part of
the culture in which they live. Today we scoff at “old people’s
games” like bridge and Mahjongg—when we’re all senior
citizens, the kids will laugh at our old-fashioned games like
StarCraft and Angry Birds.

31
 It took me like an hour to create my character. 8m
I couldn't decide between macho or girl.

I like the way i can walk around 14m

and pick up thistles. All i'm doing
is picking locks and thistles.
I was in a house and there
was all this stuff, and it kept
saying, "take it, steal it,
steal it." Am i supposed to
be stealing things?
Dad just came upstairs and 40h
asked, "what are you killing now?"
But i was trying to play the game so
i wasn't even looking at him.
18m
Before every quest i change my 2h
clothes and jewelry. Guys probably
don't do that, do they?

I have to level up my skills on the 3h

controller. If i can level up the
controller, then i can level up myself.
They gave me this woman to go with 18m
me. Do they at some point realize how
stupid you are and send help? I keep collecting lavender. 9h
I thought, "well, lavender
has a very calming effect,
maybe i can use the lavender
on somebody."

I can cook? Where do i cook? 13h

Your Mom
In some guy's house?

Plays Skyrim
I started @SkyrimMom to pay tribute to my mother, who
saw games not as something to condemn, but as a gateway to
bonding with her Nintendo-obsessed child. Now that I’ve left
home and she plays less frequently, her gaming has turned
refreshingly naïve. The basics have become a challenge, while
the most complex concepts somehow seem simple. In that way,
my aging mother has reminded her now-cynical, aging son of
what real play is supposed to be. Few things surprise me in
games these days; but in my conversations with her, I’m at home
again, picking up a controller for the first time.
By Nicholas Breckon I really wanted a house, but it's 18h

Illustration by Jesse Lenz

5000 gold. Who has 5000 gold?
I'll never own a house. This is just
like the real economy.
I generally wait and make everything 18m
daylight because it's safer. I don't know
32
who these guys are.
 33
Never Change
Ralph Baer, the father of modern videogames,
has a lot on his mind.
By Filipe Salgado
Illustration by Ping Zhu
Without Ralph Baer, this magazine wouldn’t be
in your hands. He is the creator of the Magnavox
Odyssey, the first home console released in 1972,
along with countless toys and electronics. He
has received the National Medal of Technology
from former President George W. Bush, and has
been admitted to the National Inventors Hall of
Fame. But things have changed drastically since
Baer first started showing off Tennis on the
Odyssey. He’s recently spoken against violent
videogames in an interview with the Salt Lake
Tribune, calling them a disgrace. I called Baer
at his New Hampshire home to discuss the seed
that birthed an industry.
Why did you end up creating the first
Magnavox Odyssey?
Very simple: I’m a television engineer by degree.
I looked at 40 million television sets that
wouldn’t do anything except play local telecasts.
If you were lucky you’d get two stations, three
stations. Seemed pretty obvious to me that
you can do more than that with a television
set. So I came up with attaching something
simple. That’s how it started. Within a year
we’re playing ping-pong, handball, volleyball,
shooting at the screen with light guns.
It seems intuitive now, because of your work,
but did people get the idea at the time?
Of course they did. The Magnavox sold close
to 100,000 units the first year, which means
100,000 families and visitors played games.
That started the industry with a bang.
34
Did you end up playing a lot of these consoles
at home?
No. The kids played with them because I was
working with things in my own lab. They were
the first to play videogames.
I don’t remember the kids playing much
of anything. They played outdoors. Not like
today: in front of a goddamn screen all day.
Videogames, as I conceived them at the time,
were thought of as a family entertainment sort
of thing, not for some kid to sit down at and
gawk at by the hour.
Do you have grandkids?
I have a set of grandkids in Boulder, Colo.,
another in Salt Lake City. I’m in Manchester,
N.H. We don’t often get together, but I talk to
one of my grandkids almost everyday. One of
them is an avid videogame player. The others,
not so much.
Recently you were quoted as saying, “Nobody
realized, even at the time, that we were on
this geometric curve ... that would go straight
up to heaven.”
Nobody had a crystal ball, but nowadays,
having a little of that curve for 40, 50 years,
everybody’s willing to predict that we’ll be on
Mars in three years. Attitudes change. How
could you predict anything as fantastic as what
you take for granted? Your iPhone, your iPod,
iPad: How could you predict that 10 years ago?
 35
No way. Well—maybe 10 years ago, but not
before that.
Even as far back as 10 years ago, I don’t think I
could have imagined half the stuff available to
me right now.
Going out with an engineer is hard. At the time,
we engineers, we used to put our arms around
everything. I built communication equipment,
test equipment, medical equipment, industrial
equipment. You name it, we built it. By
comparison to today it was really simple stuff.
Think about it: Radio had four or five tubes;
that was like four and five transistors. You look
at your watch, if you wear one; there are tens of
thousands of transistors. You look at your iPod
or your iPhone, there are many, many millions
of transistors. How could you compare that?
How could you look forward to something like
this? Nobody can read a crystal ball.
You’ve also been quoted as decrying violent
videogames. You called them a disgrace. How
does it feel to know that your invention, meant
for family entertainment, is being used for that?
Your question presumes that I came of the idea,
I built something, and that was the end of it;
but in fact it was the beginning. I spent most of
the ’70s demonstrating interactive video in one
form or another.
You’ve been creating electronics for a while. Did
you think the shift in technology from the ’60s to
the ’80s was inevitable?
Of course. Whenever technology is ready
to do something, it’s gonna happen. There
are thousands of people out there who have
the education, interest, and drive to create
something. I did it first, so, hooray.
Do you still create?
Yes. Very much so. I do electronic handhelds. As
you know, I did Simon back in ‘78. I’m still doing
it. The annual toy fair starts tomorrow in New
York. I keep cranking. What else would you want
me to do? I’m only pushing 90.
36
What do you see the future being like, from
where you’re standing right now?
Who knows what the future will hold? All we
know is, everything’s fantastic now. From the
iPod to the iPad is complete and total magic,
and we’re just going to have more and more
total magic out there. Especially in areas like
voice recognition. All of which is a little scary,
because once the machines really do a good
job, like the Siri thing on the iPhone, once the
phones can interpret and guide, how long
before they talk to each other? How long before
one phone says to another phone, “I think my
guy is a complete and total nut, and next time he
wants me to show him a restaurant that I know
is no good for him, I’m gonna tell him to knock
it off and send him to the health food store.”
How soon before they start dictating to us what
to do? There’s the astute possibility we might
have to cope with: The smarter we make the
machines, the closer we make them rivals.
If you had the chance to talk to a younger
version of yourself, how would you prepare
them for this?
The problem with this industry is, as any other
art form, you can’t generalize. Undoubtedly, as
videogames grow as an art form, everybody
will find something to suit his or her taste. I’m
sure you can do that already. It’s just another
art form; you can’t generalize it. It’s extremely
broad in what it can do—what it can portray.
For more information about the birth of the
home console industry you can read Baer’s book
Videogames: In the Beginning.
 37
Coin Drop

38
One of the new things is the “Penny Arcades.” Alongside of the wall
are great rows of picture machines. Seventy-five machines on one side,
seventy-five in the center of the room, seventy-five on the other side,
more or less at a penny a machine. You can see what it would cost to see
all. Every machine shows different pictures. Some are marked under very
sensational titles so the youth will see them all. […] The companies that
make these machines procure their photographs that their pictures are
made from by visiting all the Red Lights in different countries and getting
the fallen women to pose in some of the most wicked and horrifying
positions that the devil in the shape of men could imagine. Then they put
these suggestive pictures into picture machines to sell to saloon keepers,
swell gambling joints, and brothels.

All the men who run this kind of business drink, gamble, smoke, swear and
are sports. They, of course, generally wear an Elk’s Eagle’s, or Forester’s
badge. Our great cities are filled with these slot picture machines. Great
rooms are fixed up “swell,” fine lights, music, and decorations to attract the
youth into depravity and fit him up to be a drinker, smoker, swearer, scoffer,
libertine, professional love maker and seducer for life. These evils have all
sprung up with the saloon, and up to date sportism that the people have let
grow on them by voting for a political party that would for a price take the
license blood money of the saloon keeper and grant him a license to sell stuff
that would deprave and ruin forever their precious boys and girls.

— John E. Main, The Booze Route: A Reform Book on Some of the Up-To-Date
Evils of the Age (1907)
39
I’m Your
Pusher
A guide to liberating some change from
the claw machine’s twisted sister.
By James Mitchell
Illustration by Chaunté Vaughn

40
 If you ever find yourself in the Scottish town
of Fife with a fistful of coins, you could do
worse than taking them to Kenny Marshall's
house. A collector of machines known as
“coin pushers,” the archetypal arcade
gambling game, Kenny has pushed tens of
thousands of coins to learn their secrets.
James Mitchell brings some tips back from
the master.
choose a machine: Avoid those with stacks
and stacks of coins. It may look tempting, but
the more weight there is, the less chance your
coins have of moving it. Fewer is always better.
check the ledge: Modern machines have
steep inclines, meaning the coins are
traveling uphill. Something pre-2000 will
be more generous.
41
insert coin, and listen: “You’re listening
for a clonk noise. That means the coin diverter
is working, and the coins you win will go to
the paychute—and not back into the machine.
Beware the rogue machine.”
make an investment: “I’ll put a few coins in
to test the water, see how much the big prizes
are moving. Then I can estimate what I’ll need
to spend to win one, and whether it’s worth it.”
stay calm: As with pinball, tilt sensors
get more sophisticated every year. Resist all
temptation to move the machine, or you could
lose everything to the bank.
don’t be greedy: Congratulations, you’ve
won! Kenny says, “Be discreet about your
winnings. If you’re too successful you’ll cause a
hubbub, and arcade staff might ask you to leave.
Believe me, it happens.”
No Quarters
Given
Arcades are a memory of our youth and
nostalgic nod to our future. One writer takes
the long road from New Hampshire to central
Florida and beyond.
By Jon Irwin
Illustrations by Dan Black
SPACE INVADERS
On a brisk afternoon in late January, 30
Assembly Square looks the part of a forgotten
shrine. The entire lot sits empty save three
cranes and a huge drill-dozer. Dirt and rocks
have been stacked into small hills, the use
of which remains unclear. Bales of hay soak
in muddy water. Massive beams rust on the
ground. Chain-link fencing surrounds the
premises, commingling with thick tree trunks,
the wood grown around the metal.
This is the former site of Good Time
Emporium, an arcade in the guise of a sports
bar that Dan Hayes opened here in Somerville,
Mass. in 1991. The name lent a certain
mystique to the pleasures found within; peek
inside and one expected a vision of exotic
spices, of black magic charms hidden behind
velvet curtains. During my single visit, in
search of that eponymous feeling, I confess to
an implacable arousal of the senses. My first
quarter plunked into Capcom’s Gun.Smoke
and I could smell the gunpowder. It had been a
decade, at least, since playing the game. Woozy
with nostalgia, or my pint of Sam Adams, the
42
second level’s knife-throwing boss cut me to
ribbons. This was a good pain.
I had moved to Boston for graduate school.
Growing up outside Detroit, I spent a fair
ratio of evenings at a neighborhood arcade,
draped in its amniotic pulse. The East Coast
promised new goals beyond high scores and
a quarter well spent. Still, after learning of
the Emporium, I felt better knowing a nearby
arcade—this umbilical cord to my past—
existed, just in case.
Alas, that cord was cut. On June 30, 2008,
Good Time Emporium shut off the power,
ceding its real estate to the highest bidder,
a Swedish furniture retailer. I felt the loss
of unearned regret. This was no childhood
hangout. Not to me, at least. Above the lot hangs
a massive billboard: “Massachusetts! A Great
Place to Live and Work.” When I stand outside
this corralled void, only a scattered piece of
litter moves in the breeze. It’s the weekend, and
the workers are where they should be on the
weekend: playing elsewhere.
I search the rubble for clues of the Good
Times no longer being had. I find only orange
 43
peels, a cup from Louie’s Kitchen, an empty
Bud Light can. Construction scraps, nothing
else. But then I bend down and pick up a
scratch ticket—not an instant winner, but
instead a pre-paid phone card. African Dream,
it’s called. The used-up slip gave the recipient
a paltry $2 of talk time. Calling Africa from the
States is pricy; the resulting chat must have
been brief. But I understand the motivation. In
their own way, however possible, everyone’s
always trying to get home.
TIME PILOT
Across the country, memories of former
arcades vastly outnumber those still in
service. According to Steven Kent, author of
The Ultimate History of Video Games, 1982 saw
1.5 million machines playable between 20,000
full-on arcades and hundreds of thousands
of secondary locations such as pizza parlors.
Twenty-five years later, the number of arcades
hovers around a couple thousand, one-tenth
of its peak. Occasionally, older cabinets of Ms.
Pac-Man or Galaga are found strewn about for
retro chic, languishing in unwashed corners
of pool halls, a pale echo of what once was.
Exceptions do exist. Your corner pub likely
hosts Big Buck Hunter or Golden Tee—hunting
and golf games. The replacing of ghosts and
spaceships with golf balls and fauna strikes
me as somewhat depressing, a move away
from the imaginary and toward the emblems
of 24-hour sports cable. For the kids, most
states also host a smattering of Chuck E.
Cheese’s pizzerias. But the amusement chain,
once vital and necessary, has devolved, relying
on cheap plastic hammers and ticket-spitting
redemption machines to woo children with
underdeveloped coordination. It is a Sea
Monkey born from Tyrannosaurus parents.
Let us speak of it no longer.
What, if anything, survived the meteor
shower of Moore’s Law? And for how long can
these few hearty ecosystems of blaring ’80s
music and too-bright neon, of joysticks and
plungers and cathode-ray tubes, resist the
inevitable?
44
It strikes me now that
my dad always bought
console games for me,
but never took me to an
arcade. Maybe he
worried he’d lose me in
all that noise, more so
than he already had.
I’ve seen the decomposed corpse of the gone;
I now seek evidence for an optimistic future.
People tell tales of a new arcade to the west,
an anomaly in our present culture of instant
gratification and emulated experience. To the
north, the grandest of them all still thrives, a
60-year-old pleasure center lorded over by a
present-day Peter Pan. Perhaps these survivors
present clues, a lesson on moving forward.
But first, we go back.
MAJOR HAVOC
So I’m home for the holidays. I’m driving my
mom’s Nissan Xtera, a car that sounds like a bad
videogame from the 32-bit era, that emboldened
moment from 1994 to 1999 when full motion
video gave way to chunky tetrahedrons as the
gaming de rigueur. Anyway, I’m headed to my
mom’s house, who lives in Birmingham, Mich.,
after a successful lunch with my dad, who lives
in Rochester, Mich.
I mean “successful” in that during this
particular 30-minute period, my father, his
skin somehow bronzed even in winter, limited
to one his cursory referencing of a younger
woman’s breasts. His face looked older, more
crinkly. He might have said the same about my
own. When I was 12, after he moved out, I’d
visit his apartment on the weekend, the one
outfitted with a new Super Nintendo just for
my visits. The one game I ever played with
him was John Madden Football ’93. He loved
it. Then, thinking the new iteration better, I
traded my cartridge in for the next year’s
version. The new character animation, though
smoother, made passing far more difficult,
due to the extra frames causing lag between
input and action. My dad grew frustrated, lost
interest. It strikes me now that my dad always
bought console games for me, but never took
me to an arcade. Maybe he worried he’d lose
me in all that noise, more so than he already
had. Today I still feel guilty about Madden,
how I took away the single gaming experience
we’d ever shared. His guilt, like himself back
then, lay elsewhere.
The traffic light burns red. I step on the
brake and gaze to my right. Twenty years ago,
this patch of cement was home to Tel-Twelve
Mall. I spent much of my youth at an arcade
here, now a forgotten quarter-acre of real
estate dominated by the Women’s Clothing
section of Meijer, a midwestern Wal-Mart.
The place I knew was demolished in 2002. A
new open-air mall soon rose from the broken
ground: connected big-box stores lining a
parking lot painted with wider spaces. The
closest thing to an arcade now is the game of
chance Subway customers play every time they
order a Cold Cut Combo.
In the mid-’90s, if I was not playing
basketball on a seven-foot hoop at Nick Zinn’s
house, or making home movies on my dad’s
VHS camcorder, I was here, my Shangri-La: a
darkened room filled with fluorescent light and
upright monitor displays bedecked with coin
slots and multicolored buttons. This was my
first arcade. My mom and I would eat in the
adjacent food court. She’s always said it’s hard
to cook for two, but she would then, most nights.
Other nights we’d come here and each grab a
plastic tray, indulging on Arby’s or Taco Bell or
Rikshaw, a Chinese place my xenophobic palate
was not yet ready to handle. Once finished, I’d
ask to go to the arcade. My mom always said
yes, with the disclaimer: “Leave your tray.” She
didn’t want the strangers surrounding her to
think she came alone.
And so I’d test my burgeoning masculinity
on fighting games like Mortal Kombat and
Killer Instinct. (That I played as Sonya Blade in
one, or as B. Orchid [a buxom shape-shifter] in
45
the other, never struck me as a manifestation
of my anti-alpha-male tendencies until now.)
Eventually I’d run out of tokens, or confidence,
and we would leave, returning to that big
empty house.
The light turns green and my gaze swivels
away from my younger self’s favorite place.
An entire generation’s remembered
childhood is pocked with empty holes once
filled by interactive light. Suburban Detroit
exemplifies the shift. Space Arcade, once the
scene of a friend’s 7th-grade birthday party,
is now a tire store. Magic Planet became
craft store Michael’s, its unexplained yellow
submarine awning and greasy cheese pizza
giving way to plastic flowers and bolts of
cheap fabric.
As an adult, I hope for a less superficial
version of life. So why do I seek out those few
places filled with digital paths to travel, with
Continues earned through coin and a Lives
meter in the corner of a screen? Only one way to
find out. I’m off to see the Wizard.
SMASH TV
My Mazda3 hatchback scoots up I-93, T. Rex’s
Electric Warrior snarling from the speakers.
Seemed like the right thing to listen to. I hit a
patch of traffic and the flickering brake lights
resemble a blinking reward for a well-placed
skill shot. We must be close.
Destination: Pinball Wizard Arcade, located
in Pelham, N.H. Pinball Wizard is that rare
breed of arcade—new. It celebrated its one-
year anniversary in January 2012. To a lover
of coin-operated games, driving around New
Hampshire and stumbling upon Sarah St.
John's establishment must feel like pulling
the famed coelacanth out of South Africa’s
Chalumna River in 1938: here is something
long thought extinct, in pristine condition
and full of life.
Pinball Wizard is snuck into the corner of a
strip mall, next to Suppa's Pizza + Subs and an
empty space for lease that used to be Peking
Garden. Storeowners here don’t waste paint on
clever business names. I drove past one sign
for GUNS: the shop’s name, line of goods, and
security warning all in one go. Another store
(“Discount Madness”) advertised Patriots
hats and gloves on deep discount. Forty-eight
hours before, the New England football team
lost the Super Bowl. Pelham seems like a town
with short loyalty and long memories. We’re
moving on, Pelhamites say, but we’ll remember
you fondly.
Perhaps this is why a 30-year-old idea
may rise anew, as long as it stays out of sight.
Pinball Wizard Arcade isn’t visible from the
street. You enter through a side door, and walk
down a short hallway, before finally reaching
the main entrance. It’s 4:30 p.m. on a Tuesday
and no one is at the front desk. As I make my
way down the first aisle of pinball machines,
Christina, the manager, passes me and says
hello. The only other person in the arcade is a
mechanic, tinkering with half-working games
in a side room that will one day host birthday
parties and board meetings.
The space strikes an odd half-note in my
gut between giddy nostalgia and modern
perversion. I’m not used to this anymore—a
room filled with nothing but upright arcade
cabinets and pinball. The eight rows of games
form four wide aisles; walk slowly and absorb
the resultant barrage, an audiovisual cocktail
mixed and poured 20 years prior. Yet the
sensation is very contemporary. The room
feels like the physical embodiment of a Twitter
feed. Each bringer of noise is lost in time, an
anachronism: Gene Kelly seen dancing in a Dirt
Devil commercial. None of this should be here.
But there I am, pulling the plunger, shooting
this silver ball into a minefield of bumpers, each
ricochet popping with the satisfaction of a high-
decibel “ding!”
While playing at home we forget the
clever beauty of games designed for public
consumption. Like children seeking approval,
they try to get our attention. A pinball table
from 1989, Bad Cats, calls out to me in a sweet
baritone, “One more time?” The illogical request
piques my interest. Easily swayed, I put two
tokens in. And quickly lose. Arcade games
founded this incremental pay-to-play model
long ago, now exploited by super-cheap iPhone
games, free-to-play web games requiring real
money for upgrades, and even downloadable
content for more traditional console games. But
46
Each bringer of noise
is lost in time, an
anachronism: Gene
Kelly seen dancing
in a Dirt Devil
commercial. None of
this should be here.
what separates the arcade experience from any
modern incarnation is its transience.
I can only play Bad Cats standing right here.
Once I leave, the game stays. A mobile device’s
portability allows a user constant access. Your
console sits by the television, plugged in and
ready. But the nearness sours desire. If you
can always have something, you never feel that
need, that pull. The arcade traded on time’s
capacity for running out: in here, time was
precious because you never had enough. Your
parents took you away; the building closed.
Meanwhile, Capcom Arcade for my iPod Touch
sits patiently, awaiting my tapping. Knowing it
will always be there. Ignored.
This is the game maker’s anathema: mild
disinterest. In 1987, a year after Nintendo
marched onto American soil and launched
the industry-saving NES, Atari attempted to
regain the public’s mindshare with a handful
of relaunched classics. At Pinball Wizard, we
see the rotten fruits of its panic. Pac-Mania
stretches the elegant 2D silhouette of Pac-Man
into a bloated isometric mess. Blasteroids
begins with the classic shooter Asteroids
and makes an ill-conceived slant rhyme. One
is silky smooth, feeding our imaginations
with the vivid white-hot lightning of vector
graphics; the other slaps paint on our eyeballs,
the sequel a collision of ugly sprites and
chunky moon rocks. Here, then, is another
clue to What Went Wrong: the impulse
to overreach. Poisoned by desperation, a
company tries so hard to excite, to nourish
a public’s enthusiasm, that it squashes past
success. When something no longer works, it’s
better to part ways.
In 1993, when NBA Jam and Street Fighter
II were raking in quarters that would soon go
toward their maturing players’ laundry, I saw
my father three times as often as when we
lived in the same house. Something no longer
worked, so he’d left. Nearness had soured
desire—he’d found it elsewhere. Atari didn’t
learn this lesson. Only a return to the past
would salve its wounds. In 2004 it released the
Atari Flashback, a plug-and-play home system
of stored classics—the very same that were left
to wither on the vine decades prior. (Writing
this, I can’t not imagine his whispered pleas to
a younger mistress: The older the grapes, the
sweeter the juice.)
In the arcade I step up to my 13-year-old
self’s favorite game: Mortal Kombat II. After
18 years I can still pull off Baraka's fatality:
Stand a step away from your dazed opponent,
hold Block, pull the joystick Away four times,
and hit High Punch. My mutant avatar severs
the head of my opponent, a tanned alpha
male, decapitating him to the sound of a
faraway gong. Even with no one watching,
the grotesque achievement satisfies. But
the feeling fades. My last quarter goes into
Battlezone. Unbeknownst to me, the Out-of-
Order sign has been ripped off; my tank sits
motionless, its cannon firing nonstop toward
the outline of a volcano, before too many
enemy shots pierce my armor and the screen
cracks and I die. Time to leave. My own private
arcade has finally been infiltrated by others. A
dad and son stroll the aisles, separately, each
looking for something the other can’t find.
Before leaving, I speak briefly with Christina
Wagaman, Pinball Wizard’s floor manager. She
tells me its arcade is the second-biggest on the
East Coast. I asked if she knew of others nearby.
She mentions only one.
HARD DRIVIN’
Funspot is a renowned family amusement
center in Laconia, N.H. Its mascot, Topsnuf,
resembles a crocodile, a close relative to those
dwelling here millions of years ago. Like its
symbolic icon, Funspot has thrived amidst the
47
harsh winds of change, certified by Guinness in
2008 as the largest arcade in the world.
Towns have a way of latching onto
superlatives like a trophy wife: Look! This
is mine. But Laconia is not known as the
bedrock of classic arcades. In 1916, a band
of 150 calling themselves the Gypsies
gathered for a motorcycle ride through
the area's winding lakeside pavement. The
following year, the Federation of American
Motorcyclists sanctioned Laconia's as the first
official road rally, a tradition that continues
every second weekend in June. The first time
I went to Funspot, on my 29th birthday, I
stopped at a nearby bar for a sandwich and a
beer. This was the Broken Spoke Saloon, the
self-proclaimed World's Biggest Bike Bar (with
locations in Daytona Beach and Sturgis) and
center of all things leather and chrome. That
three miles separate gaming heaven from the
Hell's Angels is surely a sign of a humorous
creator. But the propinquity makes this writer
pause. What's in the water off Meredith Bay
that fuels in some the urge to hang their
Heritage Softail around a mountainous curve,
in others the desire to play a game of Sega's
Super Hang-On?
The dichotomy feels like a reflection of
my own upbringing: a father who bought
three motorcycles in quick succession after
turning 50; a childhood often spent indoors,
playing NES when siblings were behind a boat
waterskiing. The tug of assumed machismo
made me pull back with passive resistance.
Decades later, in Laconia, I finally see my own
fractured past made whole.
Opened by Bob Lawton in 1952 with a $750
loan from his grandmother, Funspot (then
called “Weirs Sport Center”) retains a sense
of its humble beginnings. A decade of Dave
& Busters and Sega’s ill-fated GameWorks
prepares the 21st-century arcade visitor for an
onslaught of pseudo-futuristic style: the kind of
shiny aesthetic meant to invoke awe but instead
dates your efforts immediately. Funspot's
main building is all off-white paneling and
exposed wood. Starting a mile away on the
2nd floor of Tarlson’s Arcade, it moved into the
present location in 1964, with a ribbon-cutting
ceremony held by the mayor. Lawton, now 80
years old, still works seven days a week. The
arcade’s success is a testament to his ability to
see what kids (and their parents) like doing, and
to provide them a place to do so, unafraid to
leave history behind.
In 1964, Funspot’s primary attraction was
miniature golf. A billiards hall was built one
year later. In the ’70s, mechanical shooting
galleries, room-filling slot-car racing tracks,
and other electro-mechanical wonders were
installed. When Japanese electronics company
Taito released Space Invaders in 1978, Lawton
was paying attention. Soon he had a line-up
of the machines in a prominent location; soon
the pool tables were removed, then the slot-
cars, to make room for more upright cabinets.
Lawton opened several remote Funspot
locations, from South Portland, Maine to
Port Richey, Fla., each filled with the popular
machines. Videogames were taking over.
Eventually, they would cede their dominance
to a healthy mix for young and old—a bowling
alley and a Bingo Hall are now both popular—
but Funspot still boasts more arcade games
per square foot than anywhere west of the
Grand Meridian.
In 1981, Gary Vincent was one of the
hundreds of kids lining up to play the latest
titles. Lawton noticed him hanging around.
In the heat of summer, during the apex of
Pac-Man Fever and after their college-aged
employees started heading back to school, he
asked Vincent if he’d like to help out and make
a little money. Thirty years later, he’s now
Funspot’s operations manager and president
of the American Classic Arcade Museum,
housed within Funspot’s main building.
I sat down with Vincent to learn how the
ACAM came to be. His all-beige uniform
gives him the look of a safari guide. “It was
September of 1998,” he begins, diction
tingeing the date with a slight glow of legend.
An easy grin presses into a soft, spectacled
face. He speaks with a youthful enthusiasm,
all wide eyes and gesturing hands, thoughts
and memories tumbling out one after the
other. “We were having one of our weekly
meetings. At the end of the meetings, Bob
Lawton would always say, ‘Does anybody have
anything else?’ I said, ‘You know, there’s quite
48
a few old games upstairs.’” After searching
online, Vincent noticed that fewer and fewer
places existed where people could find arcade
games, classics like Sinistar or Robotron
2084. So he floated the idea to organize their
collection, “kind of like a museum.” Lawton,
founder of the Lake Winnipesaukee Historical
Society over a decade earlier, didn’t want the
past to be forgotten. “Give it a shot,” he said.
“See if anybody has any interest.”
In May 1999, they held their first classic
games tournament. And the people, bereft of
nourishment, subsisting on stale ports and
shoddy emulations, came in droves.
We’re in Vincent’s office, away from the
din of almost 300 coin-op machines originally
made from 1972 to 1988. And yet it feels like
we’ve been stuffed inside one of their coin slots.
Innards of uprights surround us, game placards
spilling out onto the floor. Half-finished
cabinets line the ground with circuitry exposed.
This is where Vincent fixes and tests new games.
On one wall, cathode ray tube monitors are
stacked like an unlucky string of Tetris squares.
But to Vincent, the dusty screens gleam like
unearthed gems. Though LCD flatscreens,
cheaper and more accessible than CRT
monitors, could be used to repair old games, he
admits, “they just aren’t the same.”
Generous fans will often send donations of
games or monitors, knowing Funspot needs
them for their collection. The contribution is
not cheap. Vincent tells me the average price
to ship a full arcade game is $450. Birdie King 2
recently came in, along with Space Encounters
and a giant exposed cabinet for 18-Wheeler, a
mix of physical engineering and electronics.
We step over to the monstrosity. A slight
lumbering in Vincent’s gait reveals his true age.
But then he plugs the machine in and stands
behind a huge steering wheel jutting from the
front. He now looks excited and anxious, as
if minutes from passing his driver’s test. He
clutches the hard plastic, calling early games
such as this “a marvel of imagination.”
From the 1920s through the early 1970s,
before computer chips made Pong possible,
arcades were filled with such mechanical toys.
The curious could plug a quarter into a wooden
box and see a marionette dance the tango.
The arcade traded
on time’s capacity
for running out: In
here, time was precious
because you never had
enough. Your parents
took you away; the
building closed.
Squeeze a handle to gauge your strength. Test
your passion with the Love Tester, where two
people each held a chrome handlebar; a bulb
then lit up—Smoking! Lukewarm!—decoding
the pair’s matching pulses into a romantic
future. But dime-store mysticism wasn’t
enough for some. Others wanted to actively
play. Vincent considers the pre-video arcade
game developer’s plight. “All right… I have a
projector bulb, I have an electric motor, I have
a chain, and I have this cellophane. How am I
going to make a game?”
We're standing in front of one such answer.
Instead of a glowing monitor, the display of
18-Wheeler is a physical space resembling a
diorama. Instead of sprites or vectors, the
player looks at the back of a model truck.
Vincent starts the game up and the cabinet
comes alive with the whir of running machinery.
On the surface below the truck now appears a
hazy road. He steps on the gas pedal near the
floor and the truck “moves”—below and out of
sight a motor runs, spinning a crudely painted
cellophane disc. The moving image is projected
via mirrors to the playing surface above. Press
the pedal down harder and the disc spins
faster, providing the illusion of speed. Turn the
steering wheel and the projector tilts back and
forth, the stationary model truck appearing to
take corners with ease.
The effect is hallucinatory. Without a
computer chip or graphics card, savvy game
makers still crafted a representation of the real
49
built for play, a primitive and dream-like escape.
Vincent unplugs the machine.
“People appreciate that we’re not taking
games and hiding them away,” he explains
back at his desk. Four ghost sprites from
Namco’s Pac-Man rotate on his computer’s
screen saver. “Some have never played a real
arcade game cabinet.” Vincent’s voice wavers,
the idea nonsensical. But he understands the
disappearance of rooms filled with quarter-
munching amusements, even if he doesn't like
the results.
“You can’t make [money] with old games.
People are like, ‘Oh you must!’ If old games
made a lot of money, everyone would have old
games. I say, ‘If you think it’s great, copy down
a list of everything that’s out here, go rent
10,000 square feet of floor space and tell me
how profitable it is.’ Because it’s just not. This is
more a preservation of history.”
Success, however, can be weighed in
currency other than coins. “A thrill [for me] is
the first-time visitor, who hasn’t been in the
arcade since the ’80s. And they walk in here for
the first time and just get that look like…” He
giggles like a dumbstruck child. “They look
around, they don’t know what to say, but they
just have this big grin on their face. Perfect.”
Vincent started as a customer; he knows
the lure of the arcade better than most. His
profession, then, yields bittersweet results. His
work means he doesn’t play games nearly as
much as he once did. He spends most of his time
here—his wife visits Funspot often, since if she
didn’t, “she’d never see me,” he says—and yet
he’s needed elsewhere, fixing a broken game or
unjamming a token machine, instead of in front
of a cabinet, where his love first grew.
We take to the floor to absorb the closest
simulation of “the real days” left on this
planet. Classic cabinets, famous and unknown,
stand side-by-side in row upon row. Some
names are pure, boiled-down. Tapper: the
controversial resource-management game
that had players filling on-screen mugs
with Budweiser beer. Timber: where you
cut down trees. Some were obtuse, an ode
to mesmerizing abstraction: Quantum,
Stratovox. Many were straightforward: Hit the
Bear, Food Fight. I walked through the maze,
Vincent showing me rare finds and sharing old
secrets. Then I asked him if he had a favorite
from when he was younger.
He walks over to a game called Alpine Ski.
The playfield shows a stick-figure skier from an
overhead perspective racing down a mountain.
You avoid blocky shrubs and pick up points
slaloming between trees. A single joystick
controls your skier’s direction, and a button
makes you move faster.
“Show me how it’s done?” I ask. His eyes
widen. The thought of playing the game hadn’t
occurred to him.
“Wow,” he breathes, taking a ring of keys
from his pocket and opening the front panel
to register a credit. “I haven’t played this in at
least 10 years.” His muscle memory somewhat
intact, he clears the first few sections, skirting
between trees with practiced finesse. But the
rust shows—he anticipates an icy patch but
slides too far, hitting rocks. Vincent’s glasses
shine with the fake-snow glare; his back is
bent slightly for optimal elbow angle. He falls
again. The joystick clacks in its casing, the
plastic older than his only audience member.
He jams the button in a staccato rhythm
attuned to some old song in his head from long
ago. His skier clips another tree and time runs
out before he reaches the bottom. He exhales
an audible grunt of displeasure. But on his
grimacing face, a smile.
BREAKOUT
Funspot attempts to preserve the past, or
evoke one that never was. Playing classic
games is another way to relive the moment
we played them first: a stagnant form of
time travel. Sarah St. John, owner of Pinball
Wizard, took over a building that housed
Accent Bath & Spa, another business reliant
on a customer’s need to feel young. Playing
Galaga in 2012, you remember the way things
were. The way they might be, if only you
could go back. Perhaps arcades died out not
due to the advancing capabilities of home
consoles or a reluctance to set our children
in unsupervised darkness, but because
the surrounding culture devised more
50
That infectious
stimulation, found
previously only in dark
rooms pulsing with
light, is now everywhere.
But can distraction be
meaningful if it’s all
that you feel?
efficient ways—Botox, TV Land, wheatgrass
smoothies—to feel ageless.
In his essay from Playing the Past, Sean
Fenty writes, “we cannot help but think of
these virtual playgrounds as perfect and
immutable constants that we can return to
for comfort as our world changes around us.”
He’s referring to emulations of old games—an
exact representation of the mechanics and
audiovisual content, but played instead through
modern computers or consoles. He argues such
mimicry loses much in the transition. But what
if those playgrounds still stood? What if arcades
never faded away, crumbling into lots more
profitable when empty?
Perhaps what is needed is a different type
of soil altogether. On February 3, 2012, a new
game development team called Innovative
Leisure was announced, bringing together
the creators of Atari arcade games such as
Battlezone, Missile Command, and Centipede,
headed by Xbox visionary Seamus Blackley.
Their mission: Create original, industry-
shaping games, just like they did decades ago.
“We are looking at the new arcade,” Blackley
wrote, describing the growth of mobile games,
“and 99 cents on the iPhone is the new quarter.”
Upon hearing the news, Gary Vincent,
purveyor of the old, feels optimistic.
“Gaming is all about innovation and keeping
up with the times,” he responded in an email.
“It is nice to see a melding of classic game
designers and new technology… This should be
exciting to follow.”
 Such news is heartening. Instead of and I will drive to Portland, Maine, seeking
coercing old games onto new platforms—the out venues for our wedding. I can’t change
virtual joystick, a bit of touchscreen fakery the past. While wandering up Congress St.
meant to replace the real deal, is surely a we pop into a comic-book store. There, in the
creation of Beelzebub himself—our industry’s back, are five working pinball tables. On the
ur-designers can use today’s methods to wall is a whiteboard, filled with makeshift
create tomorrow’s games. The playfield has leaderboards. I pump my 75 cents into Monster
expanded to each and every hand with an Bash. A column of strangers’ inked initials
opposable thumb. That infectious stimulation, taunt my failed skill shot. The lady in my life,
found previously only in dark rooms pulsing not a parent but a soon-to-be spouse, watches
with light, is now everywhere. But can over my shoulder. A jackpot and two multi-
distraction be meaningful if it’s all that you balls later, I register a seven-digit score that
feel? What was once soothing vapor is now cracks the top 10. I add my name to the list. In
ever-present miasma. Arcades no longer exist one month, she will add my name to hers. This
because everything is an arcade. is how we survive.
Down the street from Good Time Emporium's
old home, smack in the middle of America's
densest city, other businesses still thrive. On
a Saturday in January, cars filled the parking
lot in front of a place called Christmas Tree
Shop. Anxious customers streamed through
the automatic doors. The store's slogan posed a
question: Don’t You Just Love a Bargain?
Across the way sits a decrepit building. This
is the District Court of Somerville, est. 1967.
Paint peels off the back façade. A four-sided
clock tower rises over the front entrance;
on three faces the time is 5 o’clock, on the
other, 20 after three. I check my phone: It’s
1:00 pm. The courthouse, sad and maligned
and inaccurate as it may be, still appears to
be functional. Peering through darkened
windows allows a view into a dank but
running operation.
One block over sits a church named Christian
Assembly. Its slogan exerts a more pressing
need than seasonal foliage—“Need a Family.
Need Deliverance. Need Hope.”—though the
lack of question marks opens its simple message
of reliance into something closer to urgency.
People require these things, apparently: Faith,
Justice. Christmas Trees. Good times? They’re
further down the list.
As for me, I’m trying to move on. Arcades,
like childhood, exist as forgotten kingdom
and haunted memory. Too few seek out its
treasures, so it sinks, crushed by time’s
merciless pressure. Too many desire what
once they had, and go on chasing ghosts. The
week after my visit to Funspot, my fiancée

51
Gone Baby
Gone
Recycled for parts and left to sit, one
arcade distributor’s old cabinets recall the
shining past of coin-op gaming.
By Andrew Hayward
Photography by Gena Hayward
Located on a stretch of Western Avenue in the
North Center neighborhood of Chicago, Western
Automatic Music’s beige brick façade might not
catch the eye of the average passerby. But I can’t
creep past on the No. 49 bus without spotting
the same sun-faded NBA Jam Tournament
Edition cabinet, one of several such machines
visible through the large picture window. From
the outside, it looks like an arcade was picked
up on one end and shaken until the contents
crammed against the east wall.
In actuality, Western Automatic Music
remains a thriving business, as the company
distributes and maintains games, jukeboxes,
pinball machines and more to bars and other
spots in the Chicagoland area. The family-
52
owned enterprise began in the 1930s, and
witnessed both the rapid rise and middling
descent of coin-operated videogames. Vice
President Jim Thom says such games once led
the company’s business, but demand has fallen;
plus a city ordinance limited establishments
without a special license to just three arcade
devices, sending many units back home.
It’s part of the reason why the building seems
like a mass grave for picked-apart cabinets—
many lacking trackballs, joysticks, or monitors.
Videogames remain a “top three” income
generator for the company, notes Thom, but
inside its halls, the unlit marquees and pillaged
inputs speak to a hallowed era that is fading
from public view.
 53
Calling Ahab
Social games call their power users
“white whales.” Maybe we should call them
chronic gamblers instead.
By Andrew Vanden Bossche
Illustration by Regan Johnson

54
 55
The Great
Migration

56
All journeys have secret
destinations of which the traveler is
unaware.
—Martin Buber
57
Limited
Partnership
A 20-year director of film and television finds
frustration and possibility in the game industry.
By John Dower, as told to Anthony Sims, Jr.
Illustration by Mike Force
It started for me with the news. When I
understood that the news was a story and a
story always had bias and a point of view, that’s
when I started trying to tell my own stories.
I wanted to be a cinema director because I
believed—I still believe—that stories have the
power to change things.
When Lionhead UK approached me about
Project Milo, I was focused on directing
television and film. My lack of game experience
was an asset to them because they were looking
for new perspectives on story and character.
My job was to create a relationship between
the player and a three-dimensional, third-
person character named Milo. Instead of a
controller, the player would interact with the
character through a new motion-capture device
called Natal.
Lionhead said they wanted to make the
player cry. I thought, if it’s really possible to
do that in a game, then we were approaching
the kind of power I saw in cinema, being able to
create something that could not only tug on our
heartstrings but also affect our consciousness
at a deep level.
I worked with some extremely talented
developers. They would create these amazing
58
bits of gameplay, and then I’d come along and
ask why our character would choose to do that
particular thing at that particular time. The
answer was always, “Because it will be fun for
the player,” and I would say, “But why would the
character want to do it?”
That’s the biggest difference between making
films and making games. Films and television
most always develop around great characters,
while games focus on rewarding players for
their efforts, and character development often
falls by the wayside.
So those conversations were extremely
difficult. But still, there were moments on Milo
where the character and gameplay clicked,
where these worlds of cinema and gaming
meshed, and I remember thinking, Holy shit,
this is something really new.
I believe in the next five or 10 years, games
can have a monumental effect on storytelling.
That’s what excites me. That’s why I want to be
part of it.
John Dower has served as motion capture
director and drama consultant on game projects
from SCEE, Wondermind, Camoflaj, and
Eurocom.
 59
Brother’s
Keeper
As the 31-year-old president of Parker Brothers,
Rich Stearns was sitting on top of the world
with the hit Frogger. The boardgame and toy
maker was poised to become king of the new
world of videogames with licenses to make
games for Star Wars, Marvel Comics, James
Bond, and others. Just three years later, he was
selling china. What happened?
By Rich Stearns, as told to Jamin Warren
Illustration by Josh Fronk

60
 61
It was back in 1975 and I was working at
Gillette. I’d gotten an MBA from Wharton
and had spent a year and a half at Gillette,
when I saw this ad for an assistant marketing
manager in Salem for Parker Brothers (PB). I
was interviewed and hired in 1977. They gave
me card games and action games and what
we call “tortured” cardboard games. But they
were interesting, especially this codenamed
sector with the 1K Texas Instrument (TI)
chip. You can Google it. Basically, it was a very
primitive electronic game where you find the
location of a submarine. We crammed a graph
on a little LED readout. At the 1977 Toy Fair, it
was introduced and it was underwhelming—it
wasn’t much fun to play, but it whetted Parker
Brothers’ appetite to get into electronic
games. The next year we introduced Merlin.
That ended up on the cover of Newsweek. The
other game was Simon.
Simon was a huge success—this little
handheld game with a red receiver and a
keyboard with lights and six different games.
Merlin, on the other hand, was your best
friend. You could challenge Merlin.
I was walking through the product
development labs, and talked to one of the
tinkerers who had a piece of plywood with
nine LEDs. He said, “Oh, it’s a tic-tac-toe game
powered by a microprocessor, but the cool
thing is the noises.” These bleeps and whoops
were novel. We'd never heard things like that
before. Nothing. I started working with this
guy to develop this into a product concept. We
tried to figure out how many games we could
stuff on a 3x3 grid. One was music and one
was a memory game. The real charm, though,
was the sounds and noises, which gave it
a personality. The machine gave you the
raspberry and had a musical trill. That’s what
led to positioning it as a person.
At that time, videogames were still quite
young. You had Pong, but I’m not sure that
Atari had been out more than a year or two.
The next few years they started to focus more
on the electronics, and I turned over from the
card games so I could focus on developing
more handheld games. In 1979, we introduced
Wildfire, an electronic pinball game, and
Bankshot, an electronic pool game. Merlin
62
was still a huge hit, and by 1980, we were doing
over $50m in sales from all of the electronics
games. Mattel was doing football, baseball,
and handheld sports games. Milton Bradley
(MB) was in the mix, too—everyone was
introducing handhelds. MB had this game
called Microvision that was the first one with
an LCD display that had a lot of pixels.
You could only look at tech, and the first was
1K, then Merlin at 2K. By 1979, 4K chips were
available. But displays were very primitive.
You could have LED displays, and LCD was just
starting, but it was just grey and black. Full
color was still a long ways off. The videogame
market was starting to explode with the Atari
2600, and it was obvious to me that the future
of gaming was going to be videogames. You
could almost say that the handheld games were
a transitional or portable form of electronic
gaming. They didn’t have to be connected to
your TV. You had to have cartridges.
You have to remember the context for
Parker Brothers, which was a subsidiary
of General Mills (GM). There was a lot of
consolidation between older post-war brands
and “sexier” verticals. GM acquired Bisquick
and Betty Crocker and then acquired Parker
Brothers, which was vogue.
Around 1981, the Parker Brothers senior
management came to me and said, these
electronic games have been so successful;
we want you to do new ventures. I was a
marketing manager or something, but I had
the biggest chunk of Parker Brothers business
at the time. It felt like a demotion, because
they took my other responsibilities away but
said I was in charge of new ventures—so find
the next big thing.
I did some analysis and felt like it was
videogames. We’ve got to be in the game
market. At that time, everyone who entered
the market had their own incompatible
system. Coleco, Atari, Texas Instruments,
Mattel had Intellivision. Parker Brothers
said, that’s a hardware business and we
don’t know that, but I said, let’s not make
the razors—make the blade. In the future,
the people making hardware will be people
like Sony. It was prophetic. I said, Sony and
Magnavox will make the hardware, and the
thing that’ll be the money maker will be the
software. We know games, we know kids, we
know entertainment, and Sony doesn’t and
TI doesn’t. My strategy was that we only do
cartridges for multiple formats in case the
other systems fade away. The only other
company doing that was Activision, but at the
time no one had heard of them.
It’s hard to describe this, but there was a
gold rush. Dozens and dozens of companies
saw this opportunity. The question was when
it would shake out—there were just too many
people. It was like the Internet bubble of the
2000s, when everyone started drugstores or
whatever online.
There was a big meeting about my work,
because GM owned Kenner, who did all Star
Wars toys, and Lionel [the train companies]
wanted a piece of that market. Bernie Loomis,
who was head of the marketing and design
(MAD) group for GM, called a summit meeting
about who should do videogames. Lionel
wanted to do it, and so did Kenner, and MAD
wanted to do it with his group. The day
before the meeting, my boss fell sick. They
said, “Stearns, you gotta go in his place.” I
was 30. The VP of marketing was an IBM guy
with a white shirt and I was the young turk.
Everyone else was a CEO of their company and
I had been there about four years. Our CEO
didn’t know about videogames, so I led the
conversation.
At the meeting, everyone gave
presentations. Bernie had this 3D system and
he had a hardware system. Kenner was going
to develop a videogame system for Star Wars.
Then it was my turn. I said, every one of these
63
strategies is going to fail, because we shouldn’t
be making hardware. Every three years, there
will be new hardware, and we don’t want to
be in that rat race. My strategy was software-
only driven by licensing. We don’t want to
be the fourth video baseball game. We want
proprietary licensed properties that’ll come
from arcades in Japan. I had talked to some
of the presidents of Japanese companies, and
they’d grant us a license. Moreover, GM had
an amazing roster already with Star Wars,
Marvel, Universal for James Bond, and others.
Then, the meeting ended.
The General Mills executive VP Jim Fifield
said, “That’s the one I want to bet on,” and I
should report to Parker Brothers president
Randolph Parker Barton. Parker Brothers
would take the lead.
I had an unlimited budget, but I had to call
Fifield for anything over $250k. I was told that
we had to be at Toy Fair with our first games.
This was July and Toy Fair was in February.
Over the next 18 months, I hired 180 people. I
created a whole videogames division.
Now, I just needed games! Frogger was
owned by SEGA. I went out with a roll of
quarters in the Northshore Mall in Boston. I
literally had an expense advance in quarters.
I’d be standing there in a coat and tie with a
10-year-old kid.
I knew Frogger would be a winner. There
was a fellow named David Rosen who was head
of SEGA USA who was our contact, but I had to
convince people that Parker Brothers was even
a real player. Why give us the license and not
Atari? Well, we’ve been around 100 years and
Atari won’t publish your game on ColecoVision
or Intellivision. But we will.
Rosen took our proposal to his board. I
figured we’d need to put at least $250,000 on
the table. Our comptroller almost passed out.
We paid a lot less for Star Wars and he thought
I was crazy. It was the most expensive license
we’d ever attempted. So I had to call General
Mills and run this by them. Fortunately, they
approved. The day of SEGA’s board meeting, I
was waiting but calling them every 15 minutes.
Finally, I got David Rosen and his assistant.
“I’ve got bad news,” he said. “We gave it
to Coleco. They had a better offer and they
offered more.” I asked, if I could outbid, could
I get the license? “The board meeting is over.
If you can, do it in 30 minutes.” I hung up and
I called Barton. It was the longest 45 minutes
of my life.
I thought $500k would do it—we got approval.
So we secured the license for Frogger and
we showed up at ’82 Toy Fair with the first
Frogger and Star Wars videogames. The
prototypes were just lights and mirrors, so
we ran a video loop and promised we’d deliver
before Christmas. Frogger put us on the map.
We sold $40m of videogame cartridges for
those two titles in the first year.
We had doubled sales of Parker Brothers in
such a short time. My career skyrocketed and
at 31, I was VP of consumer electronics. So we
were off to the races.
Then E.T.: The Videogame came out.
Atari paid $1m for the license and
made something like 20 million games, but it
was a dog. It stopped selling, but by 1982, the
market was glutted by everyone throwing
videogames at the wall. We did a study on
how many Atari units were on the market
compared to the country’s boys between eight
and 15 years old. We calculated that the
market was approximately 90-percent
saturated by the beginning of 1983. All the
Wall Street projections of sales were going to
be bogus, because we demonstrated that the
market couldn’t absorb that much product.
We were starting to cry wolf. We were headed
for a crash.
I was asked to speak at some Wall Street
investor conferences in Manhattan with these
stock brokers and the senior-level person of
Atari. They said the market is going to double.
I stood up and said that I beg to differ. The
market would be flat in 1983.
In 1983, everything we said came true.
People like Toys ‘R’ Us were selling cartridges
that were $35 for two for $5, because they
were desperate and games were sitting on the
shelves. Atari went bankrupt and nearly lost
everything in nine months that they had built
in the prior eight years. Mattel literally went
to a position of having negative net worth
[of more than $150m]. The write-offs were
enormous with obsolete inventory. There
64
were landfills in New Mexico where they were
burying millions of E.T. cartridges.
In the spring of 1984, Randolph Parker
Barton announced his retirement at 52 and
called me to New York to be CEO of Parker
Brothers at 33. Even though it was my division
that was causing problems, I was told that
this wasn’t my fault, and we want you to get
out of the whole company. It was a sad and
sorry ending, though. Over that next year,
just about every meeting I had was about the
financial meltdown. By then, we’d started
getting into home computer software. I said
that if you have patience, this market will
come back. Videogames are here to stay! But
it’ll take two to three years for inventory to
move through, and for buyers to come back.
PCs will be a growing segment for education,
and we think there’s going to be a pop in
educational software.
Let me put this in perspective. We had
kids licensing for Care Bears, Strawberry
Shortcake, James Bond, Marvel, and Star
Wars. We were well positioned if they’d ride
it out, but basically in the end, the company
didn’t have a stomach for this. I was told by
the summer of ’84 that GM wanted out of
the market. We cut our losses, got out of our
licensing contracts, and had a big write-down
on excess inventory to focus on toys. But if
PB had stayed in that market, they would be
one of the powerhouses in game software
today. Activision weathered the storm and so
could’ve we.
In 1985, General Mills had an emergency
board meeting and suddenly announced that
they were divesting toy and fashion companies. a call and Arakawa wants to have lunch to talk
They owned IZOD and Monet Jewelry, but the about a new game project.
fashion things were so volatile. He begged, even though I thought it was
See, in the ’60s, a lot of consumer products a waste of time. We ate at the King’s Grant
companies like GM and Gillette were Inn. [This is now a Quality Inn.] He pulled
diversifying by acquiring companies in drawings of this new system they’d developed
other industries. General Mills bought toy for the home. We want you to head up the
companies. Fisher-Price was bought by Quaker marketing division, he said, because we’ve
Oats. GM bought Parker Brothers in 1963, and looked and no one knows more than you do
I came in 1977. For GM, it was swallowing a hot about videogames. We respect your integrity.
chili pepper, and for so many years, PB was We want you to come to Redmond and run this
sleepy—but then big toy licensing hit. Kenner new division. With all due respect, I told him,
sold $500m a year in the 1970s of Star Wars the last thing I want to do is a videogame.
toys. Then the videogame market came on its Nintendo went to $4b and then they
heels—but when the music stops, it’s not fun. bought the Mariners. The lawyer who set up
So in ’85, they announced they were the meeting was a quiet guy named Howard
divesting, and at the ’85 toy show, I was talking Lincoln. He ended up as president of Nintendo
to potential buyers for the company. In the of America, and he made tens of millions
summer of ’85, I got a call at dinner and was personally off the success of Nintendo. My kids
told my job was no longer there. They were joked that I was such a loser for turning down
spinning off PB, Kenner, and Lionel, and they that job. Oh, well. I guess God had a different
were bringing in Wall Street to take the new plan for me.
company public. The whole thing vanished
underneath me.
But in 1985, we were brought by an inventor
to his new product—a stuffed animal called
Pound Puppies. We called it “Cabbage Patch
Dogs.” They wanted PB to make them, and so
I got on an airplane and met with Fifield who
pulled out this dog. “Parker Brothers wants
to do this line of dogs in 1985, and we need an
approval right now,” I said. It was already late
and we needed something. “We aren’t doing
any stuffed dogs and Kenner’s already doing
Fluppy Dogs with Disney,” he said.
The inventor took the Puppies to Tonka.
It was a runaway hit. Fluppy Dogs was a
disastrous failure. Tonka made so much
money in two to three years that they bought
Parker Brothers and Kenner with all the
money. They made and rewrote toy history. I
was suddenly fired in July or August.
I’m unemployed, and it’s the summer of ’85.
I get a call from Minoru Arakawa, the son-
in-law of Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of
Nintendo. I’d gone to Japan several times and
had a developed a good relationship with them
through licensing. Arakawa went to Redmond
to start Nintendo of America with the Sky
Skipper and Popeye properties. Anyway, I get

65
Back to the
Future

66
Where does humanity come from?
Where is it going to?
How does humanity proceed?

— Paul Gauguin
67
Versus Mode
A poet’s toolkit points to a deeper understanding
of play.
By Levi Rubeck
Illustration by Michael Mesker

68
“Because you cannot fight the way the
older boys can... you watch from afar,
hand in your pocket fingering coins. If you
never find this place you can tell yourself
you’ve known it in other forms.”
— R.A. Villanueva,
“Between Worth & the Church
of the Transfiguration”
Games and literature have always been tight,
but the creative bloom of videogames (and
argument over their status as “Art”) has
rekindled this relationship. Consider Ian
Bogost’s A Slow Year, described by the author
as a chapbook of “game poems.” Bogost, a
game designer and Georgia Tech professor,
released a work that is a direct confrontation
between videogames and poetry, embracing the
limitations of a single kilobyte to try and convey
the same subliminal lyricism of the seasons
through code that poets like John Keats and
William Carlos Williams wrought with verse.
Bogost’s binary poetry is an example of
ekphrasis, an ancient Greek rhetorical device
that millennia-dead philosophers and writers
used to dramatize visual art. Since then the
form has evolved into the use of one medium
to confront and engage with another. This is
a level above fan fiction, the movie version of
a book, or simply using language to layer on a
wordy description of a sculpture. Ekphrastic
art investigates the emotional resonances
between two aesthetic forms, often through
a specific piece.
While Bogost explored poetry through
videogames, a growing mass of poets is
using the lyricism of poetry to investigate
the stories within games and the narratives
constructed by and through the player playing
them. Among these primarily American (for
now) gamer-poets sits professor and editor
R.A. Villanueva, who seeks to meld the high
lyricism of Edna St. Vincent Millay with the
Chinatown Fair in NYC; graphic artist and poet
Bianca Stone, who endeavors to understand her
partner’s fascination with online role-playing
games; and Brian Oliu, a writer currently
teaching in Alabama and author of So You Know
It’s Me and Level End. His manuscript Leave
69
Luck to Heaven collects prose poems titled after
Nintendo Entertainment System games that are
knee-deep in the muck of growing up.
Many of these poems are long, winding,
personal pieces deeper than mere love letters
to Shigeru Miyamoto. At their most successful,
Oliu’s ekphrastic 8-bit poems encapsulate the
twining of games and life. Games grow beyond
games as they form the narrative around a
young artist’s development, and Oliu conveys
this by translating a seasoned platformer-
player’s grace into language:
“When you disappear you leave half a
heart which doesn’t go very far these
days. These days I don’t notice when
it starts getting dark; the drapes on
windows prevent the sunlight from
purely entering my room.”
— “Simon’s Quest”
Simon Belmont, legendary vampire hunter,
ill-equipped and lost in half-statements (aka
poor translations from the Japanese) and
dying light, plays as much the boy floundering
through puberty as the hero. The first heart lost
stings the hardest and can leave one in despair,
surroundings disregarded, sunlight the enemy.
Simon’s Quest and teenage life were confusing,
aimless, bleak games that if played without
assistance could leave you quite frustrated and
lonely. Oliu finds the poetry between puberty
and cartridges.
Ekphrasis is knowing “in other forms,”
and verse translates through language the
most inexplicable, baffling, and beautiful
aspects of life. Poetry is an ideal form for
interpreting the cavalcade of emotions gaming
fosters, as it has done with the nuances of
humanity for generations, whether through
kilobytes or syllables.
Forever Young
Ultimate Newcomer started development in
Hungary just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's
still not finished. We go inside one of videogame's
greatest, untold tragedies.
By Jason Johnson

70
 71
 Hungary in the late ’80s was one of the most
volatile places on Earth. The Soviet Union
was on the verge of crumbling, and with it, the
Eastern Bloc. The Iron Curtain did not fall
without a fight. There were scenes of revolt. In
1989, more than 75,000 protesters flooded the
streets of Budapest. A year later, the Hungarian
republic was formed. With it came democracy
and, as they say, freedom.
What does someone do with newfound
freedom? Perhaps, swept up in the spirit of
change, they go into politics. Welled over with
nationalistic pride, they enlist in the armed
services. They see the world. The way to the
West, which had been cut off by 150 miles
of barbed-wire fence along the Hungarian-
Austrian border, was opened. The last thing you
would expect someone to do is lock themselves
indoors and develop a videogame. Yet that is
exactly what a group of young Hungarian men
did. They started working on a computer game
called Newcomer, an adventure about a man in
search of—what else—freedom.
While their choice was not the obvious one, it
might have been the greatest pursuit of liberty
of all. It was the pursuit of free enterprise.
Under goulash communism, Hungarians
were required by civil law to work—usually in
a field other than videogames. It was nearly
impossible to form a game development studio.
That would require the blessing of the state,
which, for common people, was very hard to get.
Their only option would be to go underground;
but distributing samizdat—self-published,
uncensored media—was a criminal offense.
The story of Newcomer could likewise be
described as a tragedy. The amount of man-
hours spent on it will surely dwarf what little
recognition it will receive when it is released
later this year. During my interviews with
István Belánszky, the project’s current lead, he
told me several times how he was going into
“crunch time,” the prolonged periods when he’d
spend upwards of 90 hours a week readying
the final build. He usually seemed exhausted,
having had only a few hours of sleep from
working on the game. Since 2008, Newcomer
has been his full-time job. Before that, he
averaged around 20-30 hours a week. And that
is just the work of one team member. A game
72
While their choice was
not the obvious one,
it might have been the
greatest pursuit of liberty
of all. It was the pursuit
of free enterprise.
tester I spoke with told me that he had been
playing the game for 14 years. Since then, he
said, “there was barely a day I did not spend at
least one or two hours playing.”
Since the decline of communism, Hungary
has made a full transition to commercial
capitalism. Yet Newcomer remains a relic
of bygone days. It still runs on bulky, khaki-
colored, plastic computers reminiscent of the
Space Age. It looks like it was made in the Soviet
era. Though the original creators set out in
search of prosperity on the free market, the
game has looped back to a socialist ideal. After
decades of hard work, the game will be given
away for free on the internet. While the times
have changed, Newcomer never did.
Newcomer was born in 1990, the same year as
the Persian Gulf War. It goes without saying,
but the development cycle didn’t go exactly as
planned. As proof, here I am, playing a pre-
release version in 2012. The game’s history has
been a perpetual series of setbacks, reboots,
and delays. Newcomer was first released in 1994
for the Commodore 64 to miserable sales. The
team, unhappy with the end results, reopened
the game. Instead of making a sequel, they
continued development until 2001, when they
quietly released an expanded edition called
Enhanced Newcomer.
By now, the original team members are
pushing 50 years of age. All but one has
abandoned the game. Belánszky, the youngest
member of the old guard—the newcomer, so to
speak—has taken the reigns in the past 10 years.
Though he started out as a beta tester for the
 1994 edition, he has since become Newcomer’s
driving force. Unsatisfied with the game they
made, he forged ahead, muscling through the
forthcoming final edition without help from the
original creators. Belánszky assures me that
Ultimate Newcomer will be completed soon, but
the first question that comes to mind is: “Why
would anyone remain devoted to this?”
Although 22 years have passed in the
interim, Newcomer is still very much a late-
'80s-era computer game. Set in a penal colony
gone rogue, it is a role-playing game with an
emphasis on player choice. You could think of it
as an 8-bit version of Mass Effect. The graphics
are utilitarian, and the game takes place in
what looks like a giant maze. Here’s my stab
at describing it: It’s like walking through an
elaborate series of office cubicles after quitting
time. Newcomer’s world is one of gray walls,
perfectly square rooms, and boxy architecture
built of ragged shapes.
Besides that, you don’t see things. To
be precise, you don’t see the objects you
interact with onscreen because of hardware
limitations. In order to look at a picture
hanging on the wall, you face the empty wall
where the picture should be, press the Return
key, and a description appears in purple text: take over 100 hours.
“Very nice landscape drawing.” The game’s
cast of characters—made up of militants,
sleaze-balls, and jail-yard priests—are
invisible also. When you move onto a square
where someone is standing, their black-
and-white mugshot—drawn in large pixels—
appears in a window below.
The places you explore are perfectly
motionless. Moving around feels like clicking
through slides on an overhead projector, as
opposed to the fluid motion of film or watching
television. There is no sound, except for the
plod of my own footsteps as I move forward, one
frame at a time, by pressing the “I” key. Turn left
or right, with “J” or “L,” and the screen jumps 90
degrees. Turn left four times and you pivot in a
complete circle. The “K” key, the Enter key, and
the Spacebar, given the specific situation, can all
mean “Yes.” Though the interface is outdated,
the creators aren’t twiddling their thumbs. It’s
just that instead of smoothing out the rough
edges, they are piling on lore.
73
Cases such as Newcomer’s are uncommon
in the game industry, but not unheard of.
Publishers generally have the business
sense to cancel projects before they slip into
obsolescence. Embarrassments are mostly
avoided, but sometimes, shit happens. The
most widely publicized trainwreck was the
long, strange evolution of Duke Nukem Forever.
After Duke’s development team squandered 15
years playing catch-up with the latest tech, the
publisher was forced to take legal action to get
the game out the door. When it finally arrived
in 2011, Duke was deemed a massive flop by
critics and players alike. One publication
called it “barely playable, not funny, [and]
rampantly offensive.”
Newcomer is a different beast altogether.
The first distinction is size. Newcomer is a
big game. How big? Even Belánszky admits
that he doesn’t know the game’s full extent.
According to his lead tester, it “is almost
beyond computability.” The game’s website
says it takes 60 to 280 hours to play the first
time through. To put this in perspective, Duke
Nukem Forever takes approximately 10 hours
to complete. The longest solo games, like
Persona 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, can
Second is scope. The difference between
Newcomer and a game like Duke Nukem Forever
is that Newcomer has expanded laterally, not
vertically. Whereas Duke’s tragic flaw was
a severe case of technological penis envy,
Newcomer’s fault was that, for four console
generations, it ignored the changing times
and focused strictly on content. The team kept
adding more stuff: 150 additional characters
weren’t enough. They wanted 180. A word count
that matched that of Crime and Punishment
seemed inadequate. They threw in another
novella’s worth of reading. A good portion of
the development time was spent adding what
is appropriately called the “Long and Complex”
mode. Whereas a branching game like Mass
Effect has multiple endings, each of Newcomer’s
three modes has multiple endings.
The problem is that the game industry
doesn’t wait around for designers to pen a
work equivalent in length to In Search of Lost
Time. If videogames are art, then they are
the most fickle kind of art. In other media, a
lengthy delay isn’t necessarily detrimental.
After 44 years, Brian Wilson was able to
piece together the Beach Boys’ lost album
Smile. Spend too long making a game and the
hardware won’t be around to play it. Case in
point: Newcomer is a Commodore 64 game. But
since the actual Commodore 64 has been out
of production since the mid-’90s, it must be
played on a C64 emulator that runs on modern
computers. (Belánszky’s Ultimate edition
will be getting a very limited release on 5 1/4’’
floppy disk, however.)
This means you are playing an authentic
Commodore 64 game, complete with all the
hangups. Belánszky counts it as a blessing that
the pixel-art style of retro games has made a
comeback. The writing is a disaster, dealing
with characters with names like Dogcatcher
and Axel and Jackal, second-in-command of
a gang called the Marauders. It avoids direct
comparison to Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, the
B-movie to end all B-movies, only because few
games are regarded for their script. Worse, it
is necessary to keep notes, jotting down hints
that you are given during the game. This way,
when you talk to someone like Ruth, a victim
of sex trafficking you can sleep with for 500
bucks, you can choose “Tell me about...!” in
the menu, then fill in the blank. Such aspects
make playing Newcomer feel like running into
a brick wall. In fact, I did run into the wall
several times, fumbling with the controls, as
the word “Ouch” scrolled repeatedly in the
dialog box.
The game begins inside a compound that
looks like a Syrian prison. I’m trapped in a
Even Belánszky admits
that he doesn’t know
the game’s full extent.
According to his lead
tester, it “is almost
beyond computability.”
74
maze of dilapidated sandstone patroled by
guards with uzis, punk rockers, and wild dogs.
I get into a fight with the dogs, and it goes like
this: I push “F” to fight, “A” to attack, and “Y”
to confirm that I want to attack. Then, I shoot
the dog for 1,200 damage points. I do this
seven times in a row and the dog dies. As usual,
there are no graphics to illustrate this violent
conflict. It all occurs in a menu. I feel like a
quality-control inspector on an assembly line,
pressing the pass button each time a can of
soup is slid in front of me.
Because of episodes like this, there is a
disconnect between the game I see and the
game described to me. Newcomer’s original
designer Zoltan Gonda told me that he is
prouder of the game than anything he has ever
done. Belánszky, his protégé, said what drives
him is “the opportunity to take something that
was promising, beyond what [he saw] in other
games, and make it even better.” Once, he told
me the inspirational story of a man who had
played a previous edition of Newcomer in 2002.
The man had lost his job and his wife, and was
living alone in a flat. In his despondency, he
started playing. After six months of not doing
much else, he reached the end. The man then
wrote the team a letter of gratitude. He said
that Newcomer had helped him regain his self-
confidence, and by playing it, he managed to
pull his life together.
István Belánszky is tall and has a fairly
slender physique. His head is shaved bald,
and his features are pointy. He wears a bushy
goatee, with no mustache. Shaven, his chin
would be as prominent as Jay Leno’s. His
goatee extends far in front of his face, as if
you were viewing in profile the Man in the
Moon. When I first contacted him over email,
it took him a few days to respond. When he
did, he explained that he had been checking
me out—making sure that I was a writer,
and not some Newcomer fan trying to glean
unannounced information.
To put it bluntly, and it may be an
understatement, Belánszky is obsessed with
his game. When he sent me a copy to play, he
encrypted the file and gave me the password
over a secure chat client. This, he told me, would
prevent the game from falling into the wrong
hands, in case his network had been hacked. It
felt like we were turning keys at the same time in
order to arm a torpedo on a submarine.
Belánszky lives in old communist public
housing in Budapest. His apartment is nestled
in a wide, gray, boring building that was
erected, along with many exactly like it, in the
1960s and ’70s to house the working class. He
says its stairs are good for workouts. Belying
his image as a programmer, Belánszky is
also a bit of a health nut. Our conversations
frequently began with small talk about hemp
shakes, Omega fatty acids, cardiovascular
training and stretching, and the benefits for
lacto-vegetarians of building muscle mass with
goat-milk whey protein.
He has not always been this health-
conscious. However, as he spent the past
decade primarily sitting in front of a computer,
he developed a serious heart condition and
Type 2 diabetes. To finance Newcomer, he
began working for hire, doing odd jobs in
the games industry: quality assurance,
voiceovers, and localizations. He worked on
Newcomer during his downtime. The result
was a constant cycle of programming that
eventually took a toll on his body. In 2008, he
had to give up the side jobs because of his
75
declining health. He weighed over 250 pounds.
He was literally working himself to death.
Now Belánszky is healthy again. While
Newcomer didn’t take his life, it did rob him of
his youth. He turned 40 this May. Most of his
adulthood has been spent living and breathing
Newcomer. This fact is outlandish even before
you consider that, strictly speaking, it isn’t his
game. Belánszky joined up with the original
team members in 1994, when the first edition of
Newcomer had nearly been completed.
Taking over development on Newcomer may
have been his destiny. Belánszky dropped out
of high school in his senior year. He wanted to
work in information technology, and the school
he attended was ill-equipped to teach it. The
best the Hungarian educational system had to
offer were “horrible DOS PCs.” So he landed
a job writing a monthly column on tabletop
role-playing games for Guru Magazin, one of
the first gaming magazines in Hungary. It was
there that he discovered the game that would
consume him.
In the spring of 1994, he had a long
conversation in the editorial room with Zoltan
Gonda, the creator and original designer of
Newcomer, who occasionally wrote reviews for
the magazine. Newcomer was in its final stage
of development—or so they thought. Gonda
was in need of another playtester who could
 give him feedback. According to Belánszky,
“he pitched it to me as a computer role-playing
game that was more like a tabletop role-
playing game than anything else. Given my
other main interest was computer geekery, I
was sold on the idea.” He eagerly accepted the
invitation, and with Belánszky’s assistance,
the team wrapped up production on the first
edition of Newcomer.
Gonda had assembled a team of three that
included a coder, an artist, and himself as the
game designer. Together, they envisioned
a game in the same vein as Interplay’s
popular titles, such as Wasteland, a post-
apocalyptic fantasy that inspired Fallout;
and Neuromancer, which was based on
William Gibson’s famous cyberpunk novel.
The plot, at least at the outset, is similar to
the TV series Lost. A group of strangers with
questionable pasts find themselves stranded
on a mysterious island. Only these strangers
are convicts, and the island is a prison. At the
start of the game, your character wakes up on
the island, confused from amnesia. His only
memory is that he shot and killed his wife and
the man she was sleeping with.
Like its main character, Newcomer’s
development started off on the wrong foot
76
in 1990. Gonda had planned to complete the
game in two years, but the team quickly ran
into snags. No one had worked on a videogame
before. Gonda likened the process to “walking
in a 10-miles-long, pitch-dark tunnel with
a tiny lighter in your hand.” The problem
was that they didn’t have the hardware they
needed to produce a game of the caliber
of others on the market. They went from
developing on MS-DOS, to two Commodore
64s linked together, to an Amiga 500, but
Newcomer proved too much. It took too long
for their underpowered computers to process
information, so they purchased a compiling
tool from the U.S. in order to speed things up.
However, the code it produced didn’t work.
They tried writing their own compiler, but it
was too slow.
Eventually, they found a powerful-enough
computer. By then, the initial two years had
passed, and they were just getting started.
Regardless, they were determined to make
Newcomer a reality. They believed it could
become a commercial success. In fact, some
of them still do. As recently as a few years ago,
Gonda shopped Newcomer around for a high-
definition update. But, even in 1994, success
was not to be. Half a year before Newcomer
was finished, Commodore went bankrupt,
the Commodore 64 went out of production,
and the market for its games collapsed. The
original Newcomer sold an underwhelming
1,500 copies. It was considered a local success
in Hungary.
Belánszky tells me his Ultimate Newcomer is
the far superior edition, though you wouldn’t
know it by looking at it. When you ask him
why he does it—why he continues to dedicate
his life to a game that was dated the first
time it was released 18 years ago—he will say
something like, “For the hell of it!” or, “Ask
those guys who first made it up to Mount
Everest.” But the truth is, he does it because
he has faith in its system. By the system, I
mean the massive body of code that connects
the game in the same way that twisting,
disorienting streets connect Istanbul.
Newcomer is designed so that it can be
explored for a lifetime. Most of the active
testers have completed it more than 50 times
apiece, and they still have not seen every
encounter with rabid dogs, nor discovered
every plot twist within its crumbling walls.
Their job is partly an archeological excavation.
Recently, the lead tester discovered unknown
content that had existed for over 15 years,
and was buried deep within the game.
This is all the more impressive considering
that Newcomer is story-driven. Unlike a
sandbox game, where the designers create
a host of variables and let them run wild
within a system, every choice in Newcomer
was handwritten.
The great paradox of Newcomer is that,
despite its severe technical limitations, it
Newcomer was
designed to give the
player an extraordinary
amount of freedom—
something Belánszky
has not always had.
77
allows you to do so many different things. If
you can think of something to do, there is a
decent chance you can do it. Sure, it has all
the normal conventions of role-playing games.
There are turn-based battles to fight and
experience points to gain and spend. There
are bartenders to drink with and merchants
who sell shotgun shells. You may form a team
of the unlikeliest of heroes. But you can also
cheat at gambling, pickpocket, blow things
up with dynamite, rip off jukeboxes, have sex,
learn the gift of guile, wash dishes, specialize
in cryptology, wear makeup, work in a field, and
look at a porno magazine.
According to Belánszky, Newcomer’s
distinguishing trait is “the way the narrative
is triggered by the actions the player chooses.”
Newcomer was designed to give the player an
extraordinary amount of freedom—something
Belánszky has not always had. As a child, he
watched the “commie regime” use the threat
of physical violence to suppress differences of
opinion. As an adult working in a Second World
republic, he has felt the sting of being on the
wrong side of outsourcing. He was overworked
and underpaid. He complains of unfair labor
practices in his country. “We had to play by the
Soviet rules back then. Now we are expected to
play by neoliberal rules,” he said, referring to the
limited opportunities he sees within Hungary.
As if to compensate, Newcomer is full
of choices. “This level of flexibility and
nonlinearity is still very, very rare in computer
games,” Belánszky told me. The player’s actions
make ripples through the game. If you get into
an argument with a merchant, you can freely
take his life—that is, if your stats are high
enough—but the consequences are greater than
missing out on the double-barreled shotgun
for sale. You will also lose the chance to make
friends with a creep named Sancho. And should
you kill the Snake Charmer, you won’t be able
to convince Anna Verkaik to seduce Wilder, in
order to infect him with an STD. Yet this could
allow you to seduce him yourself.
What you see of the prison camps and
wilderness and space stations and virtual
reality caves is largely determined by an
incredibly long chain of events. To keep up
with the massive amount of choices the player
makes, there are more than 2,050 script
packages that run in the background. These
scripts evaluate situations. They calculate
who is alive and who is dead, which characters
have joined your party, and what skills they
have gained. The scripts know how much
time has passed, and what game-changing
events have occurred. There is even one that
keeps tabs on when the walls are sprayed
with graffiti. These systems come together
to create a world that not only evolves, but
revolves around your every whim.
In addition to an unprecedented amount of
agency, Belánszky and his teammates dreamt
up a ludicrous amount of backstory for the
game’s 180 key characters. Because many of the
characters are inmates, he saw fit to give them
psychological profiles. For instance, the android
Percival (serial number: 143) is a male spy built
in the year 2058. His cybernetic body is made of
Steel-Titanium-Molybdenum. He has a sense of
duty, he acts thoughtfully, he’s non-autodidact,
and he has a built-in AI link.
Belánszky spent a solid three months at the
library in Budapest, cooking up a reasonable
pseudoscience. “I wanted the tech journals
and descriptions to be solid,” he told me. He
researched subjects such as criminology,
behaviorism, and psychiatry, and then merged
them with cyberpunk tropes and conspiracy
theories. The result was details—lots and
lots of them. Sometimes, during our many
long conversations, Belánszky would give
me lists of seemingly random prison records
he had written:
William Blake—Emotion retarder v0.736.
Paul Van Kryg—Loyalty v0.9 (failed).
Fabricio Cerioni—Loyalty v0.9 (failed).
Peter Waarden—Emotion retarder v1.0b.
Seamus O’Connor—Emotion retarder v1.0z.
Louis Arbey—GEAS v0.8.
The team also hid daunting secrets deep
within the game. For instance, David Peabody,
a young British thug, is a secret character that
you probably won’t run into. But let’s say you
do. Whether he lives or dies; joins your crew, or
gets a rival gang to kick your ass; knocks you
out and steals your money, or helps you rob a
78
vending machine; commits murder, or deals
in kidnapped hostages; all depends on the way
you treat him. Other secret characters include
a former porn star, an alien, and a guy who,
according to Belánszky, “likes to kill himself.”
However, the domino effect isn’t limited to new
recruits. It goes all the way down to the smallest
detail, such as how long a used condom will
remain on the ground.
According to Ben Samuel, a software
engineer at UC Santa Cruz, this type of design
is called scripted narrative, where “the
player interacts with the story at points that
are specifically authored by the designers.
You have a space of play that is cleanly and
clearly denoted.” Newcomer may be the most
ambitious scripted narrative ever designed.
Belánszky told me it was “an experiment to
see how far the complexity could go.” When
I asked him how many of these scenarios
were in the game, he didn’t know. “Hundreds?
Thousands?” he said.
The lion’s share of these extravagant scripts
were added between 1997 and 2001, during the
second phase of development, when the game
was known as Enhanced Newcomer. It was
during this time that Newcomer went from
Most of the active testers
have completed it more
than 50 times apiece,
and they still have not
seen every encounter
with rabid dogs, nor
discovered every plot
twist within its crumbling
walls. Their job is
partly an archeological
excavation.
being a fairly straightforward role-playing game
to a godlike attempt at granting free will. In
1996—two years after the original edition of
Newcomer was released—Belánszky, Gonda,
and the rest of the original team had reunited.
Their hopes of breaking into the game industry
renewed, they formed a small software
company. Before long, however, they had
revived Newcomer.
The plan had been to create new software and
sell it to publishers, but that never happened.
The only thing they sold was a game that was
an advertisement for Electrolux, a company
that makes designer household appliances, and
400 boxed copies of Enhanced Newcomer. Most
of the team was still living with their parents,
so they didn’t have to worry when a project
fell through. As Belánszky put it, “when you
don't have to pay the bills, you can cut being
pragmatic some slack.”
Belánszky’s generation was the first in
Hungary to step outside the order of Living
Socialism, where employment for everyone was
a strict policy. It seems like the Newcomer team
were relishing in the fact that they didn’t have
to go to work. They were developers without
a cause. And they weren’t alone. Thousands
of other young Hungarian über-geeks, a term
79
Belánszky uses to refer to himself during this
time, had grown up using Commodore 64s, and
they took a keen interest in creating computer
graphics, pixel art, MIDI music, and even
games for the defunct computer. They were
part of the demoscene, a grassroots movement
among hobbyist developers that centralized
throughout Europe.
According to Poison, a well-known graphic
artist within the Hungarian scene, people were
drawn in for two reasons: One, because it is
art. “You don't explain why you do it. Doing it
is the explanation,” he said. And two, because
it is competitive. The reason demosceners
restrict themselves to using outdated hardware
is because it levels the playing field. Another
reason is the wow factor. “If someone breaks
the known limits, it makes for a really nice
surprise,” he added.
With these tenets in mind, Belánszky and
company started kicking around new ideas
for Newcomer. This was followed by a period
of unbridled ambition, in which they threw
in everything but the kitchen sink. They
added a plethora of letters and diaries, a
pair of loaded dice, walkie-talkies, a high-
tech cigarette lighter, monk robes, a useful
tube of super glue, gang memorabilia, neural
implants, intelligence modules from outer
space, a mysterious super-weapon, and items
that are too confidential to be revealed here.
(Belánszky is a stickler about spoilers.)
If making Enhanced Newcomer was the
afterparty, then what came next was the
hangover. In 2001, at the end of the expansion,
the team made around 1,200 euros in royalties
and donations from the Enhanced edition.
Newcomer inspires a cultish following among
a very few. An anonymous post made on the
game’s website in 2001 read as follows: “To
this day, Newcomer is one of my favorite
games. I bought it in late 1994 or early 1995. I
was forced to discard my old C64 a few years
ago, but the game still rests inside my desk
drawer, and has been waiting for some time to
appear on my monitor.”
By that point, the team members weren’t
in it for the money. Yet a small loyal fan base
wasn’t enough to keep them together. Reality
was beginning to sink in. After four years of
reckless abandon, Newcomer was still in a
shoddy state, and so was the team’s so-called
software business. It had been a hell of a ride,
but the party was over. They couldn’t go on
making a passion project forever. One by one,
the members went their separate ways. Gonda
left to work on other projects in the game
industry. The original coder quit making games
altogether. The original artist now works on
high-budget first-person shooters.
Belánszky was the only man left standing.
He considered it his civic duty to finish
Newcomer the right way. He felt betrayed
that the original members had abandoned
the game. He wasn’t ready to give up. In 2003,
he assembled a new team to undertake the
Ultimate edition to be released this year. At
first, they didn’t plan on expanding the game.
Newcomer was already mammoth. They were
just going to make it friendlier to play. (Up
until then, it had to be booted from floppy
disks.) They thought they would knock it out in
no time. They were very, very wrong.
When the newly formed team began to
update the game, they were horrified by what
they found. It was infested with bugs. Nothing
80
worked right. Characters that were crucial to
the plot would suddenly forget what they were
supposed to do. Characters that were dead
would return to life. Belánszky found himself
in the peculiar situation where a work of fiction
will sometimes parallel its author’s life in
ways that cannot easily be accounted for. It is
fitting that Newcomer is set in a penal colony.
For Belánszky, repairing Newcomer’s many
problems has been a 10-year sentence of manual
labor. As he put it, “Sartre said, ‘Hell is other
people,’ but to me, ‘Hell is other people's code.’”
Belánszky, who had been a game designer on
the Enhanced edition, found himself playing a
new role: exterminator. What followed was the
debug session to end all debug sessions. The
more bugs Belánszky fixed, the more he found.
By 2008, he had fixed 350 bugs. By 2010, the
number had risen to 550. At last count, it had
surpassed 700. The project nearly collapsed
several times: once because of Belánszky’s
failing health, and another from exhaustion.
But he persevered. Giving up is not something
that Belánszky does easily.
For Newcomer’s fans, Belánszky’s tenacity
has been the cause of what seems like an
eternity of waiting. Guzslován Gábor, who
first played Newcomer in 1995, told me that
Belánszky is “lost in the details,” and that
he should “forget the hunting of the bugs.”
When I asked him whether Belánszky was
a perfectionist, crazy, or simply obsessed,
he agreed to all three. Near the end of the
robust clean-up, Ultimate Newcomer received
one last gasp of new material, delaying it by
For Belánszky, repairing
Newcomer’s many
problems has been a
10-year sentence of
manual labor.
 another 15 months. At one point, the release cataclysm on the market—one that changes
date was set for February of this year. It’s everything—for that potential to return.”
now May, and Belánszky tells me the weapon Belánszky might say the same of his country.
upgrade system needs to be revamped. (As of In the 22 years since Hungary became a republic,
publication the game is still unreleased.) his ideology has shifted. Cynicism has replaced
Those who question whether it will ever be his youthful optimism, and his doubt has
finished have a legitimate concern. However, spread to his view of freedom in general. He
Belánszky is confident it will be released soon. questions if Western society is really free, or
(Once, he told me that there were only four bugs if freedom is undermined by capitalism. “The
left.) The reason is that after 18 years, he is consumerist culture and condition that is
tired of working on it. Newcomer has changed supposedly about personal freedom in fact just
him. He finds himself drifting away from his turns people into zombies,” he said.
preconceptions about games, gradually losing He wonders whether Hungary was better
the naïve outlook that they are intrinsically off before democracy. “It implies something
good. “I have lost both my faith and interest in very bad when I sound as if I preferred then to
games,” he told me. now. I totally hated it back then—but also now,”
After Newcomer is done, Belánszky says he he said. “What has befallen this region is just
will take a few months off to recuperate. His suppression of a different kind, and is more
health has begun to decline again during the subtle and harmful.” Though he has spent his
final surge to complete the game. Then, he life in pursuit of freedom, he finds it a troubling
says he won’t continue with Newcomer, or any proposition. It is easy to visualize, but elusive,
other project. The colossal amount of effort it and hard to enact.
took to build the game of his dreams, together
with his frustrating experiences working
in the game industry, has left him weary
and fatalistic. He thinks that the majority of
games make players worse human beings. He
believes that the industry has been ruined
by commercialization. He is convinced that
games have psychologically conditioned their
audiences into not thinking—into mindlessly
craving more of the same thing. He says,
“Gamers may be beyond saving.”
The people who play Newcomer will
doubtlessly be few. Belánszky takes pride in
that. He has taken the road less traveled. He
went in the opposite direction of the draconic
industry. He finds sanctity in Newcomer’s lack
of commercial appeal. “It would tear my heart
out to gut Newcomer by lowering it to the lowest
common denominator—just to add eye candy
and turn it into a cash vehicle,” he said.
In his mind, Newcomer has remained
pure, while the rest of the industry has fallen.
Although he still believes in the potential for the
good in games, and in the spirit that swept him
up in software development almost 20 years
ago, he admits that it might require too much
effort to achieve it. “Pure potential is nothing,”
he told me. “There would have to be some huge

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Reality
Effects
A lesson on the myth of virtual reality
from ancient Rome.
By Darshana Jayemanne
Illustration by Dan Christofferson
Zeuxis and Parrhasius were two of the
greatest Greek painters of the 5th century
B.C.—at a time when Greece’s primary
export was greatness. They decided
to have a paint-off. Zeuxis unveiled a
painting of grapes so luscious that birds
flew down and tried to eat them.
Parrhasius then brought forward his
work. But when Zeuxis sought to pull aside
the curtain, he found that Parrhasius’
picture was exactly that—a picture of a
curtain. Zeuxis exclaimed, “Zeuxis has
deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has
deceived Zeuxis.”
Zeuxis died from laughter while
trying to paint an old, funny-looking
patron who had asked him to depict her
as Aphrodite.
“Virtual reality”—the phrase sounds retro,
glib, and uncomfortable, as if Al Gore were to
bust out “Information Superhighway” in a
television interview tomorrow. But not so long
ago, VR was always just around the corner, and
82
it was going to be great: a completely plausible,
artificially generated version of reality. This
was supposed to be the absolute apogee of what
artistic technique could achieve.
Hell, Star Trek: The Next Generation had
a version of VR called the “Holodeck”: we
imagined that even people in the far future
would be impressed by it. But the big leap never
really occurred. Our consoles and personal
computers are faster and better, but not so
different from those a decade ago. So why did
we stop wanting VR? Why did Nintendo’s Game
Boy far outsell its Virtual Boy? And what can we
call realism after the death of VR, but before the
invention of the Holodeck?
Videogames, deep down, have never
quite given up on the VR idea. Realism is
the cresting wave on which new graphics
technologies are deposited for our
consumerist beachcombing. “It’s so believable,
you won’t believe it!”: the oxymoronic
pitch for every blockbuster military first-
person shooter. But this resembles Zeuxis’
experience of what we may call the reality
effect—in the first story, an image real enough
 83
that he tried to grasp it; in the second, a gap
between painting and model so beyond his
grasp that he just couldn’t keep it together.
What has certainly changed since Zeuxis’
time is the way the reality effect has been
interpreted and valued. Plato distrusted poets
for making ersatz copies of real things and
threatening the clarity of reason. Consider
Arachne’s fate—transformed into a spider
by Athena for weaving a tapestry better than
the goddess. The message is clear: No hubris,
please. The gods created reality just fine. No
need for a sequel.
Pliny the Elder, the Roman busybody from
whom we have the first Zeuxis story, admits
puzzlement about artistic striving towards
visual verisimilitude. For Pliny, images
ultimately derived their value from the great
scenes of religion and tradition, gods and
heroes. This is a recurrent theme: only the hoi
polloi enjoy realism.
Art critic Oliver Grau has argued that the
earliest example of “virtual art” we still have is
the Villa dei Mysteri. The villa is near Pompeii,
not far from where Pliny got himself and
most of his crew turned into realist statuary
while trying to get a closer look at an erupting
Vesuvius. The house contains a room painted
with exquisite frescoes that form a continuous
and immersive depiction of a woman’s initiation
into a Dionysian mystery cult. In the Villa dei
Mysteri, the reality effect is religious: it exists
not for its own sake, but to surround the viewer
with a deeper, truer reality.
It was early in the modern era of Occidental art
that images—and with them the reality effect,
the desire to perfect illusionist techniques—
really begin to shake loose from devotional
contexts. In painting, technical developments
such as linear perspective opened up new
possibilities for illusionist realism, as early as
Lorenzetti’s 1344 Annunciation and codified
by Brunelleschi’s famed studies. But the break
with religion was not clean. Art cost a fortune to
make, and meddlesome patrons generally took
a dim view of expensive pigments being used to
84
render the unique visual qualities of an apple or
fish on a whim.
As a result, artists often stashed their realist
experiments in windows, doors, embrasures,
and other partitions of a sacred scene, creating
frames within the frame. It was here, in the
margins and recesses of traditional pictures,
that artists such as Giotto and Jan van Eyck
sought the freedom to pursue the reality
effect—to create works that could “trick the
eye” (trompe l’oeil). You might swat at a fly on
the frame of such a painting, only to end up
feeling like Zeuxis.
This pursuit of realism became increasingly
pronounced, so that by the time of Pieter
Aertsen’s Christ with Mary and Martha (1552) we
can register the change through what Norman
Bryson calls “an extraordinary reversal of
scale.” The Scriptural scene is visible from
the house’s kitchen, but the religious figures
are about as dynamic as the Caryatids around
the fireplace. Instead, the brushes dote on the
culinary supplies—finally, we have Martha’s
view of things.
Realist art finds true freedom in the famous
17th-century pronk still life canvases, such
as those of Claesz, van Oosterwijck, and Jan
Brueghel the Elder. The play of light on surfaces,
how things look when organized by everyday
habit as much as dramatic composition, the
temporal rather than the eternal; that’s what
these pictures are about. Art finally achieves a
completely quotidian wonder: the reality effect
comes into its own atop the intimate space of a
kitchen table.
However, are these pictures as still as
they claim? These “still lifes” represent a
tremendous, centuries-long movement.
Our consoles and
personal computers are
faster and better, but not
so different from those
a decade ago. So why did
we stop wanting VR?
This is an art with a heightened awareness quotidian reality effects of Shenmue; all take
of art history, a process of “folding over” their place next to the military authenticity
in which what was once consigned to the and photorealism we’re always told we want.
marginal space of the frame actually becomes And the reality effects of the past are always
constitutive of the image. This is similar present, as shown by 8-bit culture and so many
to how we speak of “generations” of game independent games.
hardware and software: the still life presents a The representational agility of computer
view onto both a realist object and a historical technology allows these effects to be brought
series of art objects. together in ever more complex ways: in
Paradoxically, the still life can be considered fact, the process of gameplay can be seen as
a genre of change: a change toward an emerging giving us new modes of participating in the
historical awareness that underwrites our convergence of reality effects. The multiple
current media literacy. The still life draws tricks of the hand that make up the trompe
attention to the power of the painterly gestures l’oeil were once the sole preserve of artists;
that have trained our optical faculties. The now, the responsibility is shared differently.
trick of the eye is only possible because of many And in this perhaps there is something still to
tricks of the hand. Even in claiming to “be” learn from old Zeuxis.
an object, realist art draws attention to the
limitations and advantages of its own medium. Commissioned to create a statue of Helen
Reality is not merely looked at, it is achieved. of Troy, Zeuxis began by summoning
Just as it was finally achieved, then, the several models. Failing to find the
reality effect fragmented. For every immersive features he needed in any one model,
Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of the artist took the best features of five
art”), a Courbet serving up slices of politicized models, giving reality to a form that
reality. For every Walker Evans document, a exceeded it.
cubist Picasso. For every “the camera doesn’t
lie,” a Photoshop Disaster.
Were Zeuxis and Parrhasius to have a
rematch today, no doubt as gamers we’d root
for the former, because he wanted what we
want—the multiple realisms of both movement
and visual appeal. So perhaps it isn’t so strange
that VR went stale so precipitously: it was far
too coarse an aspiration. Realism in gaming
has been evergreen by comparison because
of its dynamism. It is part of a whole history—
from sprites to polygon models to subsurface
scattering, mega-textures, and motion-
recognition controls—of many reality effects.
Much like the still life, the idea of gaming’s
linear progress toward ever-greater realism
conceals a stormy history. Looking back at
multiple reality effects—visual, aural, tactile,
conceptual—makes the history of games seem
prismatic. Games have made use of techniques
from fields as diverse as industrial design,
computer graphics, and cinema to create
their reality effects while influencing them
in return. The civic reality effects of SimCity,
the mythic reality effects of Okami, the

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