A study of the relationship between platform and creative expression in the Atari VCS.
The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home video game market so completely that "Atari" became the generic term for a video game console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential video game console from both computational and cultural perspectives.
Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms--the systems underlying computing. This book (the first in a series of Platform Studies) does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of such later games as World of Warcraft), by allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction between media properties and video games. Montfort and Bogost show that the Atari VCS--often considered merely a retro fetish object--is an essential part of the history of video games.
作者简介
Nick Montfort是麻省理工学院数字媒体教授。他是《曲折的小段落:互动小说的方法》(Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities)一书的作者;《与光束赛跑:雅达利视频计算机系统》《GOTO 10》的合著者;以及《新媒体读本》的合著者(均由麻省理工学院出版社出版)。
Nick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at MIT. He is the author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities; the coauthor of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); GOTO 10; and the coeditor of The New Media Reader (all published by the MIT Press).
Ian Bogost是Ivan Allen学院媒体研究杰出主席和乔治亚理工学院交互计算教授,Persuasive Games LLC的创始合伙人,以及《Newsgames: Journalism at Play》(麻省理工学院出版社,2010)的合著者。
Ian Bogost is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, and the coauthor of Newsgames: Journalism at Play (MIT Press, 2010).
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