Discussion Questions
Background: Section III of Hackers deals with the videogame industry of the
early 1980s. This obviously ties in with Wargames, but is also has a strong
relevance with the earlier readings on Hacker culture. Chapter 14 tells the
story of how Ken Williams moves from the structured world of business data
processing into the new market created by the microcomputer. Its discussion of
the role of the programmer in 1970s business computing is very interesting.
Williams originally thinks of selling a FORTRAN for the Apple, but makes the big
money through working with his wife Roberta on interactive adventure games. They
found Sierra On-Line.Chapters 15-16 deal with the practices of the booming
home-computer videogame industry. This is very much a chaotic, rapidly growing
area in which the hacker approach to coding is practiced on a much broader basis
than ever before. Games are written in a few months by teenagers, without
flow-charts or clear designs. They cost almost nothing to produce, but some sell
in huge numbers, making their authors (or the companies that exploit them) rich.
The model is the pop-industry. Levy contrasts these small firms and their
individualistic yet open way of working with the increasingly bureaucratic
practices of Atari and Apple. He also introduces the character of John Harris, a
young programmer who quits work as a corporate programmer to work on videogames,
and writes a classic conversion of Pac man.
- The chapters you have read are our closest look yet at what happens when
hackers organize their own companies. What is distinctive about the culture
and practices of this company? What is it about writing videogames (at least
in this period) that makes it a hard activity to manage.
- One topic that John Harris and his "female troubles" brings up is the
question of gender. Almost everyone mentioned in the course has been male --
the computer world as described here is like a monastery. Why are there so few
female hackers? How was the culture of computing shaped by this?
- The gender issue also shows up in Stone's piece. This article presents a
rich and very smoothly told story of a very strange time and place. Laurel's
position turns out to be marginal in many ways -- as a marketer who can
program, as a woman in a world of men, and as a communication researcher in an
engineering culture. What are the different cultures at the Atari Research
Lab, and why do they get on so badly? Try to summarize their different beliefs
about videogames. (Also -- are any of them hackers?)
- Douglas's chapter does not talk at all about hackers, videogames or the
internet. On the other hand, it is an eye-opening study of the early days of
radio, and the grass-roots enthusiasts who first adopted it. What are the
parallels between this and the PC or Internet -- especially in terms of who
uses the technology, how broader society and the media perceives it?
- We know what happens to radio in the end -- licenses, spectrum divisions,
the FCC, military frequencies and truly dreadful music stations. Yet in 1910
it was so different. How do we know that the Internet will not grow up the
same way? Are there fundamental technical of social differences?
Resources
 |
For Allucquere Rosanne Stone's homepage and current projects, see
www.sandystone.com. Stone is a
transsexual, theorist, media-studies type person and performance artist. This is
not your typical historian of computing or CS type. (For a much fuller list,
see here).
|
|
If there's one company with more nostalgia site on-line than Apple then it's
Atari. By far the best general site is the
Atari Historical Society. This
includes coin-ops, consoles and home computers. It has videos, transcripts of
advertisements, pictures of engineering prototypes and links to other sites.
|
|
There is a great Atari 800 series emulator called Atari800Win (the 800 and
400 were Atari's 8-bit home computers, the machine Harris was programming for in
Hackers). The homepage is
here. You'll also
need to download some ROMs to go with it. 8-bit disk images are readily
available on the Internet. Those sites tend to move around, but right now you
can get them here.
|
|
For console games, the single best site is Classic Gaming -- their
museum includes well
researched information and a bunch of links for all the early consoles. The
leading emulator for the Atari VCS, the console mentioned in a couple of the
presentations, is called Stella.
|
|
We mentioned, very briefly,. that the first successful arcade game was Pong,
designed by Nolan Bushnell and sold by Atari. Somebody out there is pretty
obsessive about this, and has produced an exhaustive Pong site, with hundreds of
pictures of every kind of arcade Pong machine and technical details of all the
home Pong consoles (the first generation of home consoles). One interesting
thing here is the connection of video games, home consoles and electronics fans
(who could build their own), but mostly the fascinating thing is that someone
could care so much. It's
www.pong-story.com. Ralph H. Baer, the guy who built the Odyssey, the first
home videogame, has a rather good page of
his own.
|
|
Finally, if you want to play the actual coin-operated games exactly as they
appeared in the arcade then you need a program called MAME. The home site is
www.mame.net -- its an open source project,
and new versions are released constantly. However, to get the ROMS you'll have
to look elsewhere, but if you scroll down on the MAME links page they have some
suggestions on sources.
|
|
