Playback – A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames 9781628924893, 9781501322433, 9781628924862

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Loading . . .
2. Home and Away: The International Context of UK Videogames of the 1980s
3. Back to the Future: The UK Gaming Field of the 1980s
4. Coding, Copying and Cracking: Bedroom Cultures
5. Deeper Underground: Inside the Arcaves
6. Format(ive) Wars: Building an Industry
7. The Politics of British Videogames in the 1980s
8. Continue?
References
Index

Citation preview

Playback – A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames

Playback – A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames Alex Wade

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Alex Wade, 2016 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Catherine Wood Cover image © Jules Annan / Barcroft Media via Getty Image All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePUB:

978-1-6289-2489-3 978-1-5013-4184-7 978-1-6289-2486-2 978-1-6289-2488-6

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For DGW Without you there would be no games.

Contents Acknowledgements

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3 4 5 6 7 8

Loading . . . Home and Away: The International Context of UK Videogames of the 1980s Back to the Future: The UK Gaming Field of the 1980s Coding, Copying and Cracking: Bedroom Cultures Deeper Underground: Inside the Arcaves Format(ive) Wars: Building an Industry The Politics of British Videogames in the 1980s Continue?

References Index

13 31 51 77 103 129 151 157 167

Acknowledgements Writing can be a lonely process, but it is rarely achieved alone, and although it is my name on the cover, this book would not have been possible without the help and support of all here: Graham Allan, Martin Boddy, the BBC, Michelle Chen, Ann Cubbin, Carolyn Downs, Mark Featherstone, Mandy French, Mike Gane, Katie Gallof, Jon Hare, Andrew Hewson, and those who anonymously agreed to be interviewed as part of the project, Rew Hulley, Pascal Kao, Alex Kendall, Steve Kitson, Lucy Land, Mark Richards, Mary Al-Sayed, Phil Shelton, Dennis Smith, the staff of Retro Gamer, Anna Hanus-Wade, Mark Wade, Mary Wade, Stephen Wade, Annalise Weckesser, Chris White and Emma Winterman. Thanks to the three initial anonymous reviewers of the book proposal. Their suggestions and support were invaluable for the direction and success of the project. Thanks to the anonymous reviewer of the final manuscript for their detailed feedback on the text. Finally, special thanks to Nick Webber for his reading and comments on the manuscript, a willing brief undertaken with a historian’s eye for the past and a media scholar’s acuity of the present. Needless to say, any errors, omissions and oversights within the text are my fault alone.

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One of the most important tasks for the social history of sport could well be to establish its own foundations by constructing the historical genealogy of the emergence of its object as a specific reality. Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question

Videogames’ reliance on the linear-chronology provided by their adherence to technological progression gave rise to one of the most tempting, gratifying, and coherent explanations for their growth in the final quarter of the twentieth century. The fallout of nuclear missile programmes in the US academies of the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s paid host to widespread public acceptance of videogames and their subsequent commercial success. As arcade games and conversions onto home consoles gained traction, swathes of social groups invested in the wonder of videogames originating from Chicago, Tokyo and Kyoto. Such was the cultural craze around videogames that it became an ‘invasion of the space invaders’ par excellence. From the midways of Broadway to the piers of Venice Beach, the videogame had triumphed. The silicon of microprocessor technology was no longer used for abstract calculations, but what was now put to quotidian, practical and fun utility: to play games. Inevitably, there were moral panics and dangers associated with such a shift in financial and time expenditure. As a result, videogames and the subcultures that grew around them drew the interest of social commentators and cultural critics who dedicated themselves to the documentation of the era along with novelists, graphic artists and philosophers, such as Amis (1982), Bloom (1982) and Sudnow (1983), whose attempts were as inventive and innovative as the games themselves. Then, it was over. Well acknowledged is the crash of 1983 when the videogames industry overstretched and spectacularly imploded – the bursting

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of the bubble signalling an end to the golden age of gaming, with its remnants symbolically entombed with the burial of thousands of Atari VCS cartridges in a New Mexico landfill (Guins, 2014). The problem with this exposition of videogame history is that it is only temporally correct and, even then, only within the strict linear-chronology demanded by technological progression and development. This popular narrative, immortalized in the ruminations of the Twin Galaxies of Walter Day (1998) and replicated in many popular and academic studies since (e.g. Kent, 2001) is at once spatially out of joint and not accepting of the subtleties and niceties of the emergence of a new field. The particular bias towards an account that focuses – almost exclusively – on the US experience of videogames originating in North America and Japan means that other histories of gaming are elided from view and inquisition. The recent edited collection Before the Crash (Wolf, 2012)  is symptomatic of this. While the analysis is always insightful and provides much-needed context for a wider consideration of the industry, the fact that it is temporally located ‘before the crash’ means that it is spatially located in the United States. Yet, at the very point where the US industry was in turmoil, Europe’s videogame industry was gathering pace and providing opportunities for coders in Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Central and Eastern Europe. The United Kingdom was central to this alternative history, with its influence stretching beyond the Iron Curtain into Poland and Czechoslovakia, spanning the Pacific, and reaching as far as Australia and New Zealand. Such was the geographical and cultural position of the Antipodean islands that they were exposed to the United Kingdom’s popular software practices, such as modding and bedroom coding, but they were also availed to idiosyncratic hardware from Asia, such as the SG-3000, the only home computer to be developed by Sega. It is not true to say that these are histories that have been abridged from the literature, but rather that they are lying dormant, occasionally shaken from their slumber by investigators working at the geographical margins and cultural peripheries of games studies. Yet this does not need to be the case. As Raiford Guins notes, ignoring early writing around videogames due to their intended audience, approach, verbosity, or writing style has ‘stymied work towards critical historical studies of video games, namely by ignoring early publications’ (Guins, 2012: 24). Indeed, there is much to recommend and subject to analysis. Alongside the writing of the ‘golden age’ from Martin Amis and others, Leslie Haddon contributed a range of academic articles investigating home computers

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and games during the 1980s, while there have been significant contributions to the moral panics, arcade subcultures and politics of videogames from social scientists, cultural commentators and politicians. Writing on the formation of videogame antecedents such as pinball, amusement arcades and gambling is seen to be extremely relevant when a linear-chronological approach is replaced by genealogy. Meanwhile, contemporary authors such as Patryk Wasiak and Jaro Svelch are exploring the importance of Eastern Europe, particularly given the legal position of pirated software, cracking and counterfeit computers, while Melanie Swalwell’s work continues to concentrate on the unique position of Australia and New Zealand, and Alison Gazzard’s forthcoming book on the BBC Micro taps into the fears and opportunities of a changing British industrial society in the 1970s and 1980s. With these ideas at the fore, while being mindful of much of the excellent game history work originating in the United States, one of the central aims of this book is to subject the national and international literature both of the time and about the time to sustained critical analysis. The purpose of this is twofold. First, it provides a frame for the theoretical position of the book around the genealogy of the UK videogames industry. Second, and directly related to this, is the context provided by the literature for empirical research on bedroom cultures, the spaces of arcades, the commercial/cultural formation of the 1980s videogames industry and the political position of videogames.

Habitus The four major topics of bedroom cultures, arcades, hardware and software and the political position of games explored in this book will be familiar to many of those who grew up playing videogames during the 1980s. Yet their inclusion here is not an attempt to nostalgically pixellate the past in the present, but to draw on the spaces and times around videogames of the 1980s to provide insight into their formative years. Evidence of their emergence can be seen in media and practices as diverse as sci-fi narratives, model railroad clubs, pinball tables, wargames, and gambling. The context of videogames’ relationship to social, cultural and economic conditions, especially around the Cold War, globalization and the emergence of associated silicon technologies is of particular importance here. Ultimately, this leads to analysis of the 1980s’ ongoing influence on videogames, their subsequent academic study, and the influence on social frameworks of the twenty-first century, thereby going some way in addressing the

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gap in the literature where ‘critical historical studies of video games’ (Guins, 2014: 21) should be. This tack follows from a similar plea from authors across the spectrum of games studies that the focus on the linear-chronology of ‘bit wars’ (Therrien and Picard, 2015), or ‘format wars’, is evidence of a ‘fairly uncontested chronology’ of progression (Newman, 2012: 41). These voices call for an alignment of game histories within wider social and media contexts (see Huhtamo, 2005) that are able to integrate field work and theoretical propositions from sociology and psychology to reform the unavoidable techno-industrial account, [so that] video game history as a discipline can truly propose a synthesizing point of view living up to the complexity of its object. (Therrien, 2012: 26)

Such an approach is particularly relevant to a study of the 1980s when Western societies were held in thrall of a heft from an industrial society of manufacturing bases, underpinned by primary industries, to the decentralizing of labour to service and tertiary industries. Liberalization of financial markets by Western governments, enabled by the nexus between computing and telecommunications, meant that individuals were able to purchase goods that would previously have been too expensive, or too exotic, leading to a more general move towards a consumer society. These are themes central to social change in the 1980s and are affirmed throughout this book. For instance, for the bedroom copiers, coders, and crackers seen in Chapter  4, increased access to techno-exotica from the Far East contributed to the rise of ‘grey markets’ around the import and export of games hardware and software. Ethically and legally hazy practices abounded with the use of tape-to-tape copying, ensuring games could be sold and distributed quickly and easily, a phenomenon as common on the streets of Warsaw as in the playgrounds of Walsall. The quasi-public arcades – discussed in Chapter 5 – where much of the 1980s home coders’ inspiration for games was found, was regarded as a state of nature, the resultant moral panics arising from subcultures where illegal practice was normed behaviour. When the cultural and commercial aspects of the videogame industry are examined in Chapter 6, it is clear that the creation of a new market incumbent on silicon technologies lead to new modes of strategic management, couched in revisionist methods of publication, development, distribution and marketing. For the United Kingdom, in common with other countries, it is clear that the commercial and cultural rise of videogames was a new endeavour. With little agreed upon in the way of established practice, rules, regulations or values, it was one that struggled through by

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both expounding (and breaking) wider legal considerations and social norms to reach something approaching maturity or, in Bourdieu’s terms, a new field, One can imagine a field of production which takes off and ‘grows’ its consumers. This has been true of the field of cultural production, or some sectors of it at least, since the nineteenth century . . . supply preceded demand, the consumers were not asking for it. (Bourdieu, 1993: 113)

Using Bourdieu’s social theory, and specifically, habitus, to critique UK videogame histories has been undertaken before, particularly in the work of Graeme Kirkpatrick. Entries as recent as 2013 suggest that videogames are an immature pursuit and remain so as their content is obviated by the persistent prominence of the teen gamer of the 1980s who, sequestered in their bedroom, spent as much time reading about games in magazines as waiting for them to load. Most recently, his position has softened, but there remains a refusal to accept that habitus is as much a learning process as a situation in which learning takes place (Kirkpatrick, 2015). Following from the earlier formulation by Marcel Mauss (1973), Pierre Bourdieu views habitus as ‘principles which generate and organize practices without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 53), which, when seen in the context of the generation of the new field of production and consumption of the 1980s, shows how videogames closely followed this notion of habitus. Those most closely engaged in it, from gamers, to coders, to artists, to distributors, were involved in heuristic learning and were quite often unconsciously and even unwittingly making up the rules and social frameworks as they went along. This was not immaturity, but emergence, and many of those qualities, for better or for worse, continue to be evident in the media culture that surrounds videogames today. This is not to excuse, or even give lie to, the peculiar and sometimes noninclusive culture of contemporary videogames, but it provides an explanation for its occurrence with the cultural development of a new field found in the twin prongs of connaissance and savoir. The importance of these two elements of education, first where something is learned as connaissance, before it is embodied (both physiologically and within the corpus of learning) as the cultural knowledge of savoir, is essential to appreciating the value – and the values – incumbent in the emergence of a new field. These elements and their deeper importance to the learning, innovation, and experimentation that takes place during the emergence of a new field are explored in greater detail at the end of Chapter 3.

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Genealogy By examining videogames as they emerged into a new field and within the context of the broader socioeconomic changes of the 1980s, a revised approach is taken in their analysis. Traditionally, significant social and cultural events around videogames are inexorably tied to their technological advancement:  best seen with the introduction of more powerful processors, increased graphical prowess, and internet connectivity. Their subsequent documentation follows these clean lines of technological advancement, which, when listed neatly and tidily in chronological order, provide a trim account of cause and effect. Yet there is a growing desire among media historians to reject the linear-chronological model in favour of relating it to ‘wider cultural framework(s), including contemporary media culture’ (Huhtamo, 2005: 4). By using a genealogical approach, this book directly addresses that aspiration. A  broader and deeper brush with history is encouraged, which encompasses, and on occasion foregrounds, the society and culture that British videogames of the 1980s belonged to and emerged from. The 1980s are infamous for being a rambunctious period in the United Kingdom and further afield, with fundamental shifts in political, military, labour and consumer arrangements. This book is acutely aware of this upheaval and ensures it is central to its discussion. It also acknowledges that the 1980s represents relatively recent history so that it is only now possible to critique the decade’s position in relation to the latter half of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twentyfirst century (Stewart, 2013). With these rejoinders in mind, this book draws on literature from both before and after the 1980s and from literature from across the world, acknowledging that a genealogical methodology, like videogames themselves, does not exist linear-chronologically and does not belong to one country, culture, or tradition, but is to be explored and analysed by all who have a passion for looking in ‘the most unpromising of places’ (Foucault, 1977: 139). The premise of genealogy then, most adroitly articulated in an essay by Michel Foucault, which became the basis for his book The Archaeology of Knowledge, ‘opposes itself to the search for “origins” ’ (Foucault, 1977: 140). This does not equate to it being anti-historical, but instead is the essence of history, characterized by a ‘concrete body of development, with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation’ (Foucault, 1977: 144). These are characteristics common to the emergence of a new field, and the learning that takes place around it. They are also tenets familiar to videogames, seen in the videogame player trying desperately to beat the clock or defeat an end-of-level

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boss, or in the burnt-out bedroom coder slumped over a keyboard while trying to balance a day-job and an exhausting pastime. It is empirically seen in the responses of those interviewed within this book, with their testaments to experimentation and experiential learning rushing through the habitus as electricity through searing silicon.

Title screen: the scope of Playback Genealogy is not haphazard in its use of writing and commentary, but its use remains ‘gray, meticulous and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled parchments, on documents that have been scratched over many times’ (Foucault, 1977:  139). Foucault’s observation resonates with those who have searched, located, bought, read, and cited writing in and around videogames from Hirschfield (1981; 1982), Huff and Collinson (1987), Mitchell (1984) and Haddon (1988; 1990; 1992):  the scribbled margins of texts belying the fourweek road and seaborne transit from a bookseller in Iowa, US, to a residence in Loughborough, UK. The chafed covers of ex-library stock seem to belong to a digital prehistory rather than form part of the commentary on Generation X’s quotidian experiences with the computer. Yet it is precisely these quotidian experiences that give rise to warnings about the emergent hazards of genealogy. Insinuations of child sexual predation in amusement arcades are recurring themes in the work of Amis, Sudnow and Bloom and were subject to public outcry from the member of Parliament for South Ayrshire, George Foulkes, with his protestations parodied ever since. Yet, in the twenty-first century, child sexual abuse is seen to have been tragically and institutionally entrenched in the practices of educators, politicians, entertainers and public servants of the 1970s and 1980s, a conspiracy of such breadth and depth that no one alive at the time could have failed to be touched by a moral outrage, the scale of which potentially reaches the office of the prime minister.1 Similarly, their surfacing corroborates the caution by game historians that all sources of the time must be interrogated as a ‘dismissive attitude towards sources such as these . . . [means] the evidential value they offer for historical work will sadly be forfeited. Those invested in game history do not have the luxury of ignoring such works’ (Guins, 2014: 25). When discussing the potential for sexual abuse, as discussed in the ‘moral panic’ section of Chapter  3, it is clear that this is not a warning that should be taken lightly.

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Surprising, uncommon, dangerous, or traditional, this book examines a range of subjects. Most importantly, it is a broad and deep contribution to the modern history of media, which, as is emergent throughout the work, is inextricably linked to the development of games and play, areas of growing sociological and psychological importance in recent history, but particularly from the early twentieth century to the present day. While this firmly places the present book as a study of games, it is also a commentary about games studies and the position of the unique culture around videogames in 1980s Britain  – and internationally – where social norms, ethical guidelines and legal frameworks to direct and channel conduct and comportment were not established. Therefore, practice was emergent and drew on approaches and ethos garnered from a range of influences, many of which were evolutionary, challenging and at times revolutionary in their scope and effect. They included, but were not limited to, the introduction of markets to traditionally state-run enterprises, such as telecommunications and utilities, the rolling back of unionization, the movement from an industrial society to postindustrialism, and from social relationships governed by production to relations affiliated to consumption. It is clear, with videogames rising to prominence during this time of change and social discord, that they could not and did not evolve in a cultural vacuum. Therefore, Playback, by drawing on the wider social, political, economic and cultural contexts of the formative years of computerized globalization responds to a lacuna in games studies, media studies and the wider social science literature, which not only overlooks these wider and hugely important influences but also actively obfuscates the degree to which videogames acted back on and, in many cases, contributed to the awful, wonderful decade of the 1980s. Justification for this elision by other scholars often rests on the glib tautology that ‘it’s only a game’ – the clouding over of the interlocutor’s eyes familiar to any games studies academic who discusses the importance of their research to social scientists from more established or widely recognized disciplines. Yet this is a keen mistake to make. As the present work sets out, the work, invention, innovation and heuristic learning that was part of a deep investment by individuals and groups into the development of videogames and the industry around them may have been playful and exciting, but in deference to another contemporary term, it meant that videogames were – and are – a serious business. Historically and contemporaneously, games are a rich, invaluable arena of study. Historians, computer scientists, educators, philosophers, sociologists, economists, philologists and psychologists will see familiar scholars represented extensively in Playback and will note that the study of games does not and

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cannot rely on one canon to grow, and that, like the subject matter itself, it draws on traditions and innovations that reach far beyond the input of a controller, mediated by silicon onto a screen. Playback places this broad and deep approach of social context and interdisciplinarity front and centre in its critique. By drawing on a comprehensive compass of literature from all of these specialists who have written of the time and about the time, there is a systematic, emergent and urgent attempt to situate the new field of videogames within the surprising and illuminating academic traditions and literature that surrounds them. In this catholic adoption of research and study and its underrepresented subject matter, it is expected that the book will act as a catalyst in ensuring greater engagement with games studies and the paradigms that encompass it. Therefore, by expanding on the twin concepts of habitus and genealogy introduced in this introductory chapter, Chapter  2 places British videogames within internationally historical contexts. Reviewing the literature written at the time and about the time, from authors all over the world, it looks in broad terms at the influences of British videogames at home and overseas. There is a reexamination of traditional schools of thought in games studies, their material and cultural contexts and how they came to be influential in different geographical spheres. Of particular importance is the storytelling/narrative tradition of the United Kingdom and how this has influenced the design and study of games around the world. Accompanying this is an appraisal of how local studies carried out by scholars overseas inform present studies into videogames in the United Kingdom, which are beginning to gain traction in print (e.g. Anderson and Levene, 2012) and documentary (Caulfield and Caulfield, 2015). This leads directly to Chapter 3, which is more specific in its analysis of the influences affecting videogames in the United Kingdom. The social and cultural sway of a society that was failing to deal with simultaneous post-imperialism on the international stage and deindustrialization in the domestic sphere casts a remarkable silhouette over the changes in production and consumption that followed. A seminal BBC Horizon documentary from 1978, ‘The Chips Are Down’, articulated the precarious position of Britain in relation to the Silicon Valley of California and the robotic heavy-industry of Tokyo, with the conclusion being that software programming was one of the areas where Britain could equal and surpass other nations. As revealed by David Firnberg in 1978 and then reiterated in 2006, it was the skills of individuals to use language well, either as a mechanism for narrative or technical communication, that provided the impetus to move beyond the moral panics wrought by semiconductor manufacture  and

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use, towards acceptance and the generation of a genuinely new field and habitus around videogames. This was enabled significantly by the BBC itself, which, responding to its own concerns in the Horizon documentary, fulfilled its Leithian educational obligation by commissioning the Computer Literacy Project for secondary schools alongside Acorn’s development of the BBC Micro. Although hardware was being manufactured in the United Kingdom by Acorn and Spectrum (among others), as Firnberg predicted, the strengths of the United Kingdom lay firmly in software development. Chapter 4 examines how the widespread and often uniquely perceived British phenomenon of ‘bedroom coding’ was viewed by individuals of the time. Closely aligned with the sociological investigation of bedroom cultures carried out by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (1976), it is seen that at the very interstice where computers and private spaces joined, the academy moved away from studying bedroom culture. Therefore, by reviving and revisiting Marcel Mauss’s (1973) essay on habitus and the techniques around sleep and technology, it is seen that the bedroom, at once separate and linked to the public sphere, is a logical host for new technologies. This thesis is interrogated through interviews with individuals closely involved in the copying and cracking culture common to home computers in the 1980s. This reveals how consumption folded into production, how legally grey and ethically hazy practices were actually viewed by proponents as a force for good, the relationship between gender and technology, the legacy for games development, and the impact on the subsequent academic study of ‘new’ bedroom cultures around digital mobile technologies and social media. If subcultures were forming in the secluded private spaces of bedrooms and dining rooms, charged by an undercurrent of ‘grey’ behaviour and experiential learning, then the amusement arcades of the 1980s were riven by illegality and criminality, to the point where they became a metonym for the common conception of the slack-jawed, bone-idle youth of the 1980s. Through an expansive critical analysis of international and domestic writing around amusement arcades, Chapter 5 finds that, almost without exception, arcades have embodied and promoted deviant behaviour, most notably engendered in their century-old traditions of gambling, the rise of leisure time, and the covert and overt links that the coin-op industry has to organized crime (Trapunski, 1979). These themes are examined with recourse to Herbert Marcuse’s (2002) One Dimensional Man, where he observes a labyrinth of Cold-War games in the RAND corporation that identify with the contemporary idea of arcades being host to deviant subcultures (Young, 2010). Their position geographically and socially underground lends

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the chapter the title of arcaves, where deviancy was normed in the habitus of work and consumption around coin-operated videogames and pinball, situations that were closely related to social class and location. Again, individuals are interviewed with regard to these practices, with floorwalkers and professional gamblers revealing tactics and experiences of both working with and playing the game(s) of the 1970s and 1980s. The contemporary decline of the amusement arcade, while easily tied to the rise of powerful home consoles, is melancholic for its wider impact on the seaside that paid host to them and the irony that a society so defined by its consumerism won’t pay-to-play in the twee and kitsch promenades and piers of the past. It is The Consumer Society by Jean Baudrillard (1998) that offers the critical inspiration for Chapter  6. Rejecting the linear-chronological notion of technology-informed ‘format wars’, this chapter accommodates the current penchant among game historians for analysing videogame culture through the lens of gaming magazines, but also argues that these should be examined only as part of a much greater whole. Subjecting the development of UK-manufactured hardware to extended critique, it is found that the work of Clive Sinclair, in his firms’ production of consumer electronics from audio equipment through home computers to battery powered vehicles, followed in many of the traits of videogames of the 1980s of being technically innovative and ethically flexible. Indeed, the strategies and tactics of star-power and media manipulation employed in the 1980s, continue to be widely used in the videogames and information and communication technology industry today. Sinclair’s hardware development and publicity apart, equally fast and loose practices are seen in the sectors of publishing and development, where synergy and overlap between different print and digital media interests informed unpredictable outcomes, including the suspicious death of Robert Maxwell, the promotion of software houses at the behest of magazine publishers and the formation of the ultimate gaming habitus, a ‘dev house’ in Ilford, Essex. This holistic approach to the analysis of publication, development, distribution, sales, promotion and journalism of videogames in the United Kingdom in the 1980s is reinforced by interviews with UK developers and publishers of the 1980s. With Britain being a divided country throughout much of the 1980s, there was considerable political and social dissensus. Inner city riots mimicked the warzones of the Falklands, and direct action was in evidence from the streets of Wapping to the South Yorkshire coalfields. Videogames, in common with other media of the time, provided social and cultural commentary to these

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reconfigurations. Chapter  7 investigates how blue- and white-collar work was transmuted by videogames, particularly as regards the use of music from older media forms, before analysing the portrayal of race in titles where the values of the inner city are used as a backdrop to the unveiling of a subculture or narrative, itself closely tied to music. As with girls’ subcultures of the bedroom, the question is posed as to where females are in videogames of the 1980s, both in terms of content and their technical/artistic contribution to key titles of the time. Finally, the position of the videogame as a site of resistance is evaluated and it is found that the videogames of the 1980s, perhaps due to their position at the margins and subcultures of society, were able to offer a greater critique than they are given credit for, with Tony Gibson, one of the pioneers of both the prevalence of race and resistance in videogames, recalling the very best satires (e.g. Spitting Image) of the 1980s. In conclusion, Chapter 8 shows how the field of videogames is so closely tied to its genealogy that it is impossible to see how it would have moved to (almost!) contemporary mainstream acceptance without experiencing the quasi-legal, ethically hazy practices inherent to those who enabled the formation of the field. The innovation that remains in the industry, the urgent need to explore offshoots and green-sticks of experimentation, is not due to its genealogy, it is its genealogy: videogames are still forming their field, still growing. By engaging with their genealogies and habitus, their dormant pasts, unfulfilled presents and possible futures can be uncovered.

Note 1 At the time of writing, Ted Heath, the ex-Conservative prime minister, was alleged to have been involved in the rape of a 12-year-old boy in 1961 (Anderson, 2015). Investigations into this are ongoing.

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Home and Away: The International Context of UK Videogames of the 1980s

I think that the Dreamcast offered a short glimpse of an alternate path, a history that never was. Had it been our history and prevailed it wouldn’t feel as romantic and tragically neglected. Will Luton, cited in Zoya Street, Dreamcast Worlds: A Design History

Press play on tape Present studies of videogames are essential to understanding a field that appears to be straying from its reliance on the historical Japanese-US closed-platform model to one of greater democracy and openness in development and play. Videogames are no longer limited to entertainment. They are as likely to be played by reception-age children in a primary school or pensioners rehabilitating in a care home as in the darkened den of the stereotypical teenage male. Similarly, developers, artists and programmers are as likely to be found working in libraries, hospitals and universities as on the latest driving game franchise in Leamington Spa. Meanwhile any given videogame website, forum or academic conference will affirm that AAA or AA games are falling away to be succeeded by independent, mobile, serious and educational games. Yet the old monoliths stand the test of time. Sony’s PlayStation 4 sold 10 million consoles in the first nine months of its release and even Microsoft’s vilified Xbox One sold three times as many consoles on its release as its predecessor (NPD, 2014). Marshall McLuhan observes that one of the key characteristics of games is that they hold a mirror up to the society in which they develop (McLuhan, 2001:  260). In a postmodern, postindustrial society, it is to be expected that games will cast away from their primary purpose of amusement and move into

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areas that are markedly different from their original purpose. There are historical precedents for this. The Fighting Fantasy series of the early 1980s, part of a genre of writing known as ‘gamebooks’, are effectively videogame text adventures in book form, provide an inkling as to the convergence of narrative and games, intersecting with the point when videogames were becoming established in the United Kingdom. The authors, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, both were pioneers in the UK gaming scene and are extensively involved in establishing games in education. Classical literature exploring games from Caillois (2001) to Greenfield (1984) and Loftus and Loftus (1983) suggests that the psychological imperatives innate to play and games makes them an essential field for transmitting ideas and knowledge, often in an experiential and tactile way. Commercial educational technologies such as the Raspberry Pi inform a generation of appusers of the hardware that powers it, reaching back through PC modding to 10in-1 electronic construction kits and homebrew hardware. A cursory examination of the technology, culture and practice, not to mention the writing around games, reveals dormant histories. These are certainly relevant to education and the social status of games, particularly in their production of social, knowledge and cultural capital, themes central to the discussion in this book. Yet, the relatively straightforward way in which the genealogy of UK videogames can be identified raises an interesting deliberation. Why has there not been a retrospective sociological examination of the field undertaken before? The first consideration is to do with time. The wider historical literature reflecting on the impact of the 1980s on contemporary Britain is only now being realized with the critical distance afforded by the passing of a generation and of Margaret Thatcher, widely seen as the 1980s most influential figure. As the studies of the era show (see, e.g., Vinen, 2010; McSmith, 2011; Stewart, 2013), the 1980s is recalled as a turbulent and often violent time. The changes wrought at the social, political and economic level are still being felt in all areas of everyday life. Widespread deregulation, particularly in the retail and investment banking sectors appears chief among these, but this was not possible without the largescale application of microprocessor technology to financial services. The privatization of British Telecom, a major player in the UK games software market in the 1980s, coincided with an explosion in information and communication technologies. Again, this was contingent on the applied use of small-scale integrated circuits, which emerged in a deregulated and globalizing market, one that is now hyperlinked, hyper-textual and sometimes, just hyped.

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If there is a justifiable absence of literature in general histories of the 1980s, then there is a general paucity in the history of videogames in the United Kingdom. Studies do exist. Anderson and Levene’s (2012) Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders provides an essential overview to the formation of the videogame industry, while the film Bedrooms to Billions interviews luminaries of the 1970s and 1980s. While important, with Anderson and Levene’s text used broadly here, they purport a sequential-chronological study of ‘the development of the industry and the creation of landmark video games’ (Therrien, 2012: 19). This focus on videogames as a site of innovation can be problematic to game studies as it is subject to constant recital and revision, with the tension between Baer and Higinbotham as the creator of the first ‘videogame’, a particular bête noir. Impasses like this are sometimes due to semantics, principally around the perception of the ludic state of a game. As this chapter shows, the status of narrative and text, as well as play and games, are essential to the generation of the gaming field and to the study of games more generally, and are also crucial to a deeper understanding of videogame histories. The second consideration is to do with space. Studies concerned with the histories of videogames are generally US-centric. Kent’s (2001) exhaustive history of the videogame industry considers other countries’ videogames, but only if they directly impact the United States. Donovan’s (2010) Replay spans a range of influences, but considers ‘Sir Clive’ (Sinclair), as the only figure worthy of extended (i.e. one chapter’s worth) discussion. Scholars writing in an important recent collection edited by Mark J.  P. Wolf (2012) have many important and subtle observations to make. Yet the title of the anthology gives the game away – Before the Crash: Early Videogame History temporally locates early videogame history firmly before 1983, but more vitally, spatially in the United States, where the crash occurred. If videogames reached critical mass in the United States in 1983, they were reaching mass critical acceptance in the United Kingdom. But ignorance of other histories even does a disservice to one of the United States’ most successful exports of the time: the Commodore 64. While Bagnall’s (2005) study is comprehensive from the perspective of North America, there are considerable oversights1 as to the machine’s legacy in Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand as well as the United Kingdom. These themes are addressed in the excellent archival research and fieldwork of Melanie Swalwell (2007; 2008; 2011) whose focus on Antipodean home micro usage in the 1980s places computers and games within an international network of knowledge transfer and sharing, where traditional distinctions between play and work were elided.

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Raiford Guins’s (2014) informed and intelligent study of the multiple identities of games, while opening the door to the unique histories of other gaming cultures, does little to fill the lacuna in a UK/European history, tacitly acknowledging that the subject is almost too broad to be tackled. James Newman’s (2012) investigation of inherent supersession in videogames hardware, is, as seen below, an important theme when considering the perception of space and time in the videogame, but does not have the sociological focus evidenced in Swalwell’s and Haddon’s writing. Nevertheless, both Guins’s and Newman’s approaches are especially welcome as they do not privilege sequential-chronological histories, but instead see the formation of games’ history as untidy and serendipitous. This is a scenario much closer to personal experiences of time, which are rarely universal and linear-cyclical, but instead are perceived in different ways, leading to the potential for contending pasts, presents and futures to be explored (see Fisher, 2014), a theme that emerges throughout this book. To provide the context for these genealogies, this chapter emphasizes the position of print, broadcast and digital media in relation to 1980s videogames. As others have noted (see especially, Guins, 2014), the books, magazine and journal articles and television programmes of this time are precious resources that are primed for evaluation and analysis. Originating in the boom of the early-1980s, many of the books discuss the impact of the ‘golden age’ and therefore have an inherent bias towards the United States. Nevertheless, some topics, such as pedagogy, the social status of games, and moral panics are universal, and this resonates across all geographies of the gaming field, particularly in relation to politics and the work of Martin Amis (1982). Other historical records, as seen in Haddon’s (1988) discussion of the nascent games’ industry, focus on the United Kingdom and have an acute awareness of its position within global networks of production and consumption. Television programmes such as Horizon are distinctly British in grain, a characteristic followed by arguably the greatest influence on videogames in the United Kingdom in the 1980s: the BBC’s computer literacy programme. Ultimately, it can be seen that across the historical records of this time, from Invasion of the Space Invaders to the Control of Space Invaders Bill the universal theme is of education through exploration. These found their inspiration in a welter of media, which contributes to the formation of different strands of videogame studies, including ludology and narratology. The intention here is not to privilege one over the other, or to score fresh wounds into old scars, but to show how a genealogy of games can explain

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how perspectives are formed from different spheres of influence. This is an unconventional approach, but offers a genuinely new mode of interrogating videogames, especially in an era as underrepresented as the 1980s. This is evident in many of the habitus of the time. For instance, many of the new technologies introduced during the formation of the field were bootstrapped to videogames (disk drives, tape-to-tape dubbing, modems) and the learning that took place was experiential, experimental and, in the case of Sudnow (1983), existential. In time, learning solidifies into practice at a bodily, cognitive and cultural level and creates a new field of expertise that is understood to be the gaming habitus, which is seen as ethically grey and morally hazy as it is broadly positive and enervating. The examination of the literature engaged with in this chapter is necessarily an overview, such is its breadth and depth. Later chapters apply the theory and analysis found here to empirical research, so that the range of this book is broad in its consideration of the topics of bedroom coding, arcade gaming, the formation of the industry and the politics of videogames and deep in situating their position within the cultural, social and media context of the time. The meticulous and comprehensive critical analysis so desired by game historians, combined with primary field research with those who worked, played and pioneered in the industry of the 1980s positions this book uniquely within the games studies sphere as a title that shifts beyond UScentrism and linear-chronologies to be part of a wider movement of local game histories, the potential and possibilities of which are only now being explored and realized from Australia to Zimbabwe. With this in mind, this chapter, and its subsequent investigation, acts as a genesis for a genealogy of the study of videogames, using reflections from the time and of the time to speak of its pasts, presents and, on occasion, its futures.

Time splitters From the early 1980s through to the present day, videogames have colonized all spaces of contemporary society (see Guins, 2004). From the Space Invaders cabinet pounding out alien heartbeats outside the newsagents where children would gather after buying a budget Codemasters game, to a suicidally defiant OutRun2 in a Soviet-era bus station in Krakow, videogames rival television and music in their capacity to become ambient (McCarthy, 2001). Today, videogames are just

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as ubiquitous, but like many media, less reliant on physical manifestations and less apparent in the public domain. Yet the changes seen by the digital distribution of videogames is less of a revolution and more of a revision, with delivery models and commercial practice familiar to anyone who played videogames in their embryonic years. Images of the past are realized on the connected devices of the present. Candy Crush (2012), a game that has perfected the pay-to-play model by targeting the psychology of gamers, positions itself neatly between the human need to progress and the human want to pay for it. Candy Crush ’s screen, blinking hypnotically for funds, is familiar to anyone schooled in the ‘Continue? Insert Coin’ pay-to-play models of the 1980s arcade games. Clones of Flappy Bird (2013), which run amok on Google Play and the App store, are the mobile update of the clones of Pac-Man (1980) and Space Invaders (1978) of the early 1980s. Meanwhile, in an Akihabara pachinko parlor and arcade, lines of system-linked Virtua Tennis (1999) cabinets invite play against an unseen opponent who, through dropped serves and errant backhands, remains just as anonymous as any Virtua Tennis opponent on Xbox Live. The cooperation of the digitized plastic bricks of Minecraft (2009) while nostalgically recalling the freeform construction of Stickle Bricks and Lego, also revises the heritage of Jon Ritman’s isometric explorer Head over Heels (1987). Videogames’ historical position at the apex of technology and entertainment encourages fruitful lines of investigation into the medium as evidenced by the series of industrial linear-chronological studies. Repetition in its genealogy is apparently self-evident and, through digital archiving, curation and restoration,3 relatively straightforward to access. Yet videogames, like the spaces they are situated in, operate in a multiplicity of contrasting, interrelated and sometimes conflicting chronologies, many of which are revealing about the field. As Juul (2005) notes, videogames use a variety of times when conveying information to the player. In a game of FIFA, a half of football lasts four minutes, while the ingame timer counts out 45 minutes. The shorter duration of matches encourages extended play. For example, a European football season, which conventionally lasts nine months and three significant changes in weather, can be completed in five hours in FIFA. If traditional games, such as snooker and test-match cricket, can immerse the player so wholly in a world that it can be difficult to move between the game and reality (see Weaver, 2004), it is telling that videogames, board games and role playing games, all of which are self-declared ‘leisure activities’, present game-time as a phenomenon to be experienced on an accelerated axis, heightening fears around addiction and ultimately making us all more

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familiar with a world that starts to resemble a bouncy-ball: smaller, faster and occasionally out of control. The development of videogames as a technological field mirrors this in-game acceleration. Their direct relationship with influential technologies of the last century including television, magnetic storage media and microcomputers, permits rapid advancement from inception, through growing pains and maturity to mainstream acceptance. As with television, videogames use the methodology of a delivery technology linked to a network – hardware – as a means of delivering independently created content – software. The screen, not always required for the operation of a computer (think of the microprocessor in the fridge, or the child counting on an abacus) is an ever-present in the canon and lends its influence to the first word in the compound noun of videogames. This was seized upon in the early years of commercial gaming by trade names, such as Intellivision and Activision, which depict a movement away from the remote ‘tele-viewing’ of TV, toward an experience that is more intense, intellectual, and interactive. This intensifying of interaction is a message borne out by the corresponding literature of the time, with Sudnow experiencing what can only be described as a series of bodily, psychological and metaphysical epiphanies while attempting to master Breakout (1976) preempting the infamous Tetris (1984) effect: Fifty hours, a good five hours a day for ten days . . . When I wasn’t at the TV I was practicing the sequence in my imagination, walking down the street, sitting in a cafe twirling a salt shaker, looking up during dinner in a Japanese restaurant at a bamboo and rice paper trellis with Breakout-like rectangles on the ceiling. (Sudnow, 1983: 109)

Likewise, the common synonym for videogame, ‘computer game’, locates the power of this technology firmly with the invention and advancement of the microprocessor. With only the very earliest games not relying on printed circuit boards to deliver images, sound and tactile feedback to the player, the opportunity for convergence between media, particularly since consoles and TVs connected to the Internet, has been has been pervasive. With contemporary videogame platforms presenting on-demand services such as BBC’s iPlayer, an individual can watch Match of the Day in between bouts of playing televisually slick presentations from the FIFA match-day engine. This convergence has a twin impact. First, it demonstrates how different media have taken on attributes of gaming, such as saving, sharing and playing at a time convenient to the individual, characteristics that while not unique to videogames are certainly heavily

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influenced by it. This reveals the second, more abstract and possibly more profound impact of ordering a different, possible future. Played out in immediate reference to the past, a Liverpool fan in the present can reimagine a title showdown with Manchester City, one in which they always win the 2013–2014 league title, even after they have watched their team cede on the final day of the season. Again, while this is not limited to the videogame – jumpers for goalposts football can always reimagine the defining moments of a match – no other platform offers such a high-fidelity opportunity for wish fulfilment as the videogame. Other chronologies in the brisk evolution of videogames run contrary to the advancement of a technology that has a persistent commitment to constant revision and updates. Games that are classified as ‘historic’ and even those that have reached artefact status still fall well within the living memory of the majority of people alive today. Emulation, re-releases, upgrades and fan-homages mean that the ‘classic’, ‘golden’ or ‘bedroom coding’ era are not forgotten. Continued commercial software releases for Sega’s necrotizing Saturn and Dreamcast hardware mean that the kids on the bus are aware of Sega’s existence as a hardware manufacturer, but unsure as to why the definitive version of Sega Rally runs on a console that wasn’t built for 3D. In this transition between awareness and knowledge, games studies finds its equivalent of Latin: hardware platforms become a purgatory for zombieware, products that refuse to die in spite of replacement by superior technology and game design, therefore defying ‘the logic of upgrade’ (Newman, 2012: 34). The paradox is that, if videogames are to be studied in their context, there is a requirement that videogames be kept alive in a non-place that exists between public and private, east and west, presence and absence, the past and the future, museum and arcade, production and consumption and life and death.4 For Raiford Guins, this ‘multistability’ (2014: 12) of videogames is part of a wider media archaeology where games acquire different attributes and execute alternative roles throughout their lifecycle. From the cannibalized microswitch joystick jutting out of a drawer in the Vintage Arcade Superstore in California, to the museum pieces of Van Burnham’s private ‘Supercade’ collection, the videogame is sometimes less than, sometimes equal to and sometimes more than the sum of its parts. This is particularly evident in the furore surrounding the Atari Landfill ‘legend’, where Atari’s uneasy relationship with manufacturing and marketing was typified by the burial of thousands of cartridges in New Mexico. The burial in Alamogordo had been subject to misinterpretation of public record and accordant speculation (Guins, 2014:  207–235), which when manifested

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in the white-hot, accelerated niche where specialist interests and social media meet, eventually reached a crucible of claim, myth and counterargument. While it appeared that Guins (2009; 2014), had laid much of this to rest through a series of interviews with local citizens who witnessed the event firsthand in 1983, Microsoft, commissioning a documentary for their own TV production company,5 located and dug up the cartridges. The frenzied spectacle surrounding the excavation among mainstream and specialist commentators shows the speed at which the history of videogames moves. Originally a metonym for videogames’ commercial catastrophe of 1983, in 30 years the cartridges have moved through multiple stages of neglect, ignorance, questioning and resurrection as urban and Internet legend (see Kent, 2001), before attaining matinee-archaeological status, courtesy of Xbox. Once discarded as unmarketable rubbish, the software, which coincidentally, included copies of Raiders of the Lost Ark, has attained the status of a videogame relic: unplayable, inalienable, incompatible, invaluable but testament to the multiple chronologies of videogames.

The ghost in the machine? Fisher’s revisitation of Derrida’s concept of hauntology is valuable in comprehending the multiple chronologies and genealogies that are intrinsic and extrinsic to the videogame. Ghosts of My Life (Fisher, 2014) is effused with past narratives and media echoing into our present and chiming into our potential futures. The year 1979–80 is seen as the ‘threshold moment when a whole world (social, democratic, Fordist industrial) became obsolete and the contours of a new world (neoliberal, consumerist, informatic) began to show themselves’ (Fisher, 2014: 50). Sudnow, in his writing of the time, is sensitive to this change, placing digital technologies at the nexus of this transformation, with a Polaroid photograph seen as a ‘token of a new world and way of being’ (Sudnow, 1983: 19). Likewise, Fisher sees this new way of being evident in contemporary media which is ‘less to do with a near future than the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach, haunted by what once was, what could have been’ (Fisher, 2014: 98). In the critical universe explored by Fisher, videogames provide context to the chasing away of the old to be substituted by the new: while the spaces of the past pop up in the ‘new future brutalist arcade’ (Fisher, 2014: 33) the past is chased away in ‘the videogame euphoria-anxiety of eluding ruthless predators’ (Fisher, 2014: 31). As Chapter 6 shows, the elision of history, like the ghosts in Pac-Man’s

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maze, is the model of supersession and obsolescence desired by an industry that should always appear to innovate, but only in the context of the past. Dead Rising (2006), a technically outstanding game upon its release in 2006, sees the player hacking through zombies in a shopping mall in an attempt to survive until rescue. On the very day of its release in the US market, posters on videogame forums were asking what features the sequel should contain. The irony is not lost on the observant gamer. The content of Dead Rising sees the player trapped in a non-place, attempting to escape the undead menace.6 When that same gamer looks to future titles on the day of release, Dead Rising, the product, is placed in abeyance, immediately dated, its only legacy being the source code for future titles in the series. Even in a media culture where speed is information itself (Virilio, 2008) this chasing away into the past is remarkable. There is no other media that insists on such a long future of hype from announcement to release but then almost instantaneously dates, and, in some cases, forgets the product upon release, ensuring that the next game is the best game (Newman, 2012: 59), but only if its genealogy identifies with the ghosts of videogames past. In some ways, the contemporary study of videogames, ‘games studies’, is cognisant of hauntology. Both compartmentalized and influenced by its relationship to older, more mature media forms, which inherently carry greater critical weight, the best work in film and game studies has arisen ‘precisely because both media forms haunt each other’ (McCrea, 2009: 224). The study of games in its own right is organized along historical lines of which videogames are one component. Resembling a convexing of the past and the present, the early schism in the discipline between ludology and narratology can be explained with recourse to hauntology. The Anglo-Saxon model of narratology (see Murray, 1997; Eskelinen 2001) draws on the English language’s predilection for telling stories and related textual analysis. From Stratford-upon-Avon to Baker Street, locations are transformed to deliberately place people in a specific narrative time and space, such as the Renaissance or Dickensian London. It is fitting then that the simulated spiritual home of the play, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, is located on the bank of the Thames alongside jarring new developments, brutalist skate parks and museums of modern art, resulting in the perfect place to pitch Hamlet, a space where time does indeed seem out of joint. Similarly, both narrative and games have a pull on the summary location of videogames. The English Lake District, inspiration to the nineteenth-century Romantic movement and the family home of children’s writer Beatrix Potter, whose texts, which are used to teach English to Japanese schoolchildren, has

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such an influence on the Japanese perception of the United Kingdom (Pollock, 2012)  that a level from the original Tekken (1994) is set on the shores of Lake Windermere. Mass Effect 3’s (2012) climatic ending is set in futuristic London, coinciding with the global locus of the London Olympic Games in the year of its release. In distinction to this narrative heritage, and lying a short journey across the North Sea, is Scandinavia’s design and production of the world-creating, brick-building of Lego. Lego, meaning ‘play well’ in Danish,7 emphasizes heuristic play and the non-negotiable rules of the game rather than the more flexible analysis and interpretive rules involved in storytelling. In a method comparable to the way videogame designers will always insist that their game is unique (Elverdam and Aarseth, 2007), ludology attempts to understand videogames’ uniqueness from other lines of enquiry, such as literature and cinema studies. Even here though there is confusion in convergence. Legoland Windsor is based just outside of London and it is the UK developer, Travellers Tales, who licenses Lego for distribution in videogame format across a range of narrative universes, an echo of ludology and narratology in creative and commercial practice.

Local studies The study and creation of videogames then, while catholic in its welcome to other disciplines, also follows paths that have been marked out in the histories of other fields, resulting in a diversity of study. From the Lake District to Lego, the variety of videogames makes them a fascinating and germane area of research into the interconnectedness of globalization and the medley of resulting cultural products. The United States, a commercial centre of soft power in relation to cinema, television and digital hardware exercises similar supremacy over videogames with its combined hardware and software market, which was worth US$21.53bn in 2013 (ESA, 2014). While the European figure (including Russia) touched US$20bn in 2013, the largest individual market is France at US$6.9bn, with the UK’s US$3.67bn around half this figure (Galarneau, 2014). Commercial dominance is compounded by marked ascendency in the literature. Along with the majority of monographs being published in the United States, with MIT Press hosting work from Bogost and Juul amongst others, the US-based specialist journal Games and Culture, a relatively recent addition to the suite of games studies has, in seven years, become one of the most influential cultural studies

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journals by impact rating. There appears little room for argument: games studies, like cinema and literary criticism before it, is US-centric. But in keeping with the compartmentalization of the development of videogames, which in the United Kingdom have been described as isolationist and idiosyncratic (Anderson and Levene, 2012)  the histories of videogames have diverse genealogies. As discussed in Chapter 4, the future of the industry in the United Kingdom in the 1980s was very different to that of the United States, where bedroom coding and homebrew hardware ensured that popular platforms were open for research and programming to anyone with the time and inclination. These were usually young males whose families had the requisite financial and cultural capital to invest in home computers. The United Kingdom’s penchant for bedroom coding, while apparently highly specific and localized, was also hugely influential in Antipodean countries and even touched parts of Scandinavia. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, these futures cauterized around the Japanese-US console/closed-platform model. Yet, in other Anglophone countries, particularly those with close historical ties with the United Kingdom, there are distinct similarities in the adoption of home coding as a means of producing and, ultimately, playing videogames. Melanie Swalwell finds that the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, basis of the mid-1980s so-called format wars in UK playgrounds (see chapters 4 and 6) were, along with US brands Apple and Tandy, also widely available in New Zealand and Australia (Swalwell, 2007: 5). Yet, there were a number of computers in kit-form, which requiring some assembly, that were not commercially available in the United Kingdom. One of these was the Microbee, which was as quirky in its name and advertising as anything produced by Sinclair Research (Swalwell, 2011: 8–9). Interestingly for students of ludology, alongside its success in Australia, the DIY Microbee was also distributed in Scandinavia, the Lego of home computing hinting at a future direction of games criticism. Australia’s geographical proximity to Japan appears to have been a factor in Sega’s release of another conversation piece, the SC3000, which was not widely available in the United States and United Kingdom. The SC-3000 is remarkable in that it is the only home computer to have been released by Sega and is believed to have had better commercial success in its limited release than the SC-1000 console on which it was based (Sega Retro, 2014). Closer to the United Kingdom, Aphra Kerr (2006), who has previously positioned and charted the global impact of videogames in the context of education, politics and demographics, places Ireland’s relationship with the global games industry as one of structural unevenness. In the early 2000s, Ireland, through

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tax-breaks and highly educated labour, was able to provide the technical support required by giant tech firms like Microsoft. Later, following the credit crunch, Ireland’s hi-tech sector suffered with companies withdrawing and retrenching. Kerr, with unerring attention to detail, contends that the influence of home computers from the United Kingdom in the 1980s are a significant factor in this inherent instability (Kerr, 2012b: 133; see also Kerr, 2012a), one that Ireland, in common with much of the Euro-zone, is only now recovering from. Localized studies of the histories of games hint at futures that were not realized, formed around pasts that were not unified. Fisher argues that the process of social homogenization, where space and time were smoothed out by the Americana of ‘80s style culture gloss’ (Fisher, 2014: 135) affects all cultural products from this era. A cursory glance at the texts from this time bears witness to this. Predominantly written by US authors entranced by the neon night of the early 1980s arcade craze, the books resemble the coin-ops they describe: a repository for other people’s money. There is even the earliest hint of corporate convergence and control over digital and analogue media. Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld, published by Warner Books, has extensive access to the programmers of Breakout, a game developed and distributed by Atari, whose parent company was media giant Warner. It is easy to be skeptical of the documentation of the time, neatly coinciding with the bloom of a billion-dollar industry, writers-for-hire desperately penning crude ethnographies before the craze crashes, but it is a mistake to be so dismissive; after all, these are ‘invaluable (primary) sources for historical research’ (Guins, 2014: 25).8 A popular tips book from November 1981 is a case in point. Before even recommending the best approach to Gorf and Galaxian, Hirschfield opens with the prescient declaration that ‘[v]ideogames are not a fad’, before warning the reader of the social penitence that must be paid when the coin drops in the slot. Some social theorists don’t like the trend, they say that the games can become a compulsion, almost an addiction, that they provide easy escapes from reality; and that they dehumanize players, decreasing vital interpersonal contact. (Hirschfield, 1981: ix)

Naturally, contemporary gamers will ask: so what’s changed? The widespread – and not always misplaced, as anyone who has frequented a match of any given first-person shooter on Xbox Live  – assertion that games have elements that are deemed to have negative social effects are a rail-gun to the conservative and

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red-top tabloids’ attack on videogames. What has changed is the articulacy of the response. Hirschfield, in a book teaching us how to master the videogames, is not afraid to argue the wider social and educational case, placing them in a context where genuine learning about the self, community and socio-technological change takes place: Arcades, far from isolating players from the rest of the human race, are becoming major neighbourhood social centers. They’re like clubs, with members drawn together by common interests and friendly competition. Furthermore, video games improve players reflexes and mental powers far more than many other activities; for instance watching today’s television shows. The games offer a chance to participate, to enjoy oneself non-passively, and to release tension and aggression. In a society moving towards complete computerization, the games teach self-reliance and computer confidence (Hirschfield, 1981: ix–x).

Hirschfield is not only competent in his subject matter of high scores, but confident that the change that computers bring is irreversible and inevitable with videogames merely one strand of a wider movement. While Hirschfield alludes to it here, the ‘social centers’ that are proponents of the appeal of the arcade, where different classes would mix in their common game aim, is a theme shared by all writing of the golden age. On closer inspection then, the US obsession with videogames of the early 1980s, generated a parallel fervour in writing the coin-op and gaming experience. Therefore, it is true to say that the writing of this time reflected the coin-ops, but this is closer to the diversity, creativity and inventiveness of Missile Command (1980), Pac-Man and Breakout than the capitalist realism surmised by Fisher. To those who analyse the epoch, this is, quite literally, not new. For Swalwell, videogames ‘were a prime harbinger of digital technologies’ (Swalwell, 2007: 257).9 Therefore any writing that describes, documents, analyses or critiques these changes are indispensable to its genealogical past, present and future. Tracing the genealogy of games through historic literature is recognized as a vital approach to games studies, with ‘rigorous scholarship to something that we could confidently call “historical analysis” “game histiography”, or, better yet, “critical historical studies of video games”, recognised as being “long overdue” ’ (Guins, 2014:  21, see also Huhtamo, 2005:  4; Wolf, 2008; 2012). As observed above, while much of the early writing around videogames was embossed by the richness of the ‘golden age’ (Day, 1998) of videogames in the United States

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between 1979 and 1983, this is a seam of writing that has considerable leverage on the history of gaming in the United Kingdom. This is important to the current study, as videogames, although divided by their histories, did not evolve in a vacuum. The United States clearly has more writing to offer in the epoch of the golden age, but this is not embroiled in isolationism. After all, arcade games can be seen as one of the earliest manifestations of computerized globalization, where it was possible to play an identical game in Tokyo, London and New  York, providing further affirmation of play and games being a universal language. Meanwhile, the studies themselves, like the genres of games they feature, are marked by their variety. Graphic art, psychology, descriptive philosophy, urban studies, how-to compendiums, lifestyle advice and phenomenology are all sampled, sometimes within the same text. This is not writing limited by the past, but set free by the emergent possibilities of a new gaming field, a kind of auto-writing by the ghost in the machine. In fact, possibly the most fascinating text of the era was written by a British author immersing himself in the midways of Broadway. Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982), was written by Martin Amis, London acolyte and sometime enfant terrible of twentieth-century English literature. There are a number of reasons for its position as a games and literary curio. First, although its topic is expressly games, it has little in common with the wordplay of Amis’s more sober fictional examinations of postindustrial London and postmodern America, and even less with his non-fiction essays (Amis, 1986; 2002). Second, the book, effectively disavowed by its author, has become something of a lost ark for literary critics, revealing a line of enquiry long overlooked in the study of late-twentiethcentury English literature (O’Connell, 2012), haunting the author’s own oeuvre in its simultaneous presence and absence. Third, the author’s renouncement makes it a collector’s piece in its own right and its subsequent rarity has led to book traders selling the book on Amazon for £3000. Amis’s book, circulated by a London publisher, was not the only UK-based documentation of this time, but it remains the most infamous. The US golden age of games, along with inspiring nascent games’ development (Anderson and Levene, 2012: 62) had a significant influence on the scrutiny of homebrew and classroom coding, including analysis of how games are organized historically, by gender and as a container for cultural capital, especially evident in the work of Leslie Haddon (1988; 1990; 1992). Richard Bartle (1996) meanwhile, piqued by the popularity of MultiUser Dungeons in the late 1970s and early 1980s, explores the psychology of

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videogames, following the earlier experimental educational psychology of American researchers such as Loftus and Loftus (1983) and Greenfield (1984). Consequently, there are a wealth of ambitious projects by proponents of the UK gaming field that capture the spirit of the time:  Bedrooms to Billions is a documentary that, like the early-1980s public service computer, the BBC Micro, has a stated aim of being distributed to every school throughout the United Kingdom, positioning it as a Lydian stone for the next generation of games developers. The pixelated iconography of Imagine Publishing’s Retro Gamer offers detailed commentary on the history of videogames, which, while acknowledging its global framework within the three major centres of gaming (the United States, Europe and Japan), is bold in its contention that the United Kingdom’s history is vital to the global milieu. The Raspberry Pi is a computer that, like the Microbee and early Sinclair computers, encourages the user, usually a teacher or schoolchild, to have practical experience of using hardware and programming. These legacies of 1980s videogames, present endorsements of what were once the future of videogames, indicate that a UK-focused sociological study of videogames’ impact is long overdue. Beginning with textual analysis of the literature around 1980s gaming, this study offers an entrance into the possibilities of those pasts in the context of the social, economic and cultural conventions that are familiar – and different – to those experienced in and around contemporary videogames.

Time extend This chapter has demonstrated how the dearth in studies that move beyond the linear-chronological and often US-centric approach to game studies is not confined to studies of the United Kingdom, but is of concern to the context of game histories around the world. The United Kingdom, with its idiosyncratic approach to games development reveals genealogies that stretch across space and time reaching importance in the Pacific Rim and showing how different approaches to criticism and analysis (e.g. ludology and narratology) are historically contingent on wider influences than merely hardware and software and are enshrined in the social and cultural traditions of a country or a region. The subsequent importance of the United Kingdom’s contribution to global videogames is not in dispute. Yet there is a considerable lack of contemporary

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engagement with the topic, which is partly rectified by recent documentaries and popular history books. These are useful as a statement of record, but offer little examination of the catalysts, or indeed the habitus that gave rise to this unique field, which was constituted by hobbyism, the merging of production and consumption and the extensive – and at times existential – impact it had on the United Kingdom’s social and political fabric. The actions, interactions and reactions that ripple this fabric at the local level of the United Kingdom is the topic of the next chapter, which charts the emergence of videogames in the UK through reference to moral panics and outrage, education and policy changes. Ultimately, this is realized in the intercession of the BBC’s Reithian public broadcasting values of ‘inform, educate, entertain’ to microcomputing with the advent of the BBC computer and the parallel inauguration of a new field of videogames, which arose from this peculiar, unconventional habitus that was the genealogy of British videogames of the 1980s.

Notes 1 Omissions include evaluation of its legendary SID sound chip, which launched the careers of musicians such as Rob Hubbard and Chris Hulsbeck; the fabled ‘format wars’ of the mid-1980s, which were fought in classrooms, playgrounds and bedrooms instead of Internet forums; and its impact on the Finnish and Swedish mod scene, where it is still used to this day. 2 Sega’s System 16 board, which powers OutRun, is infamous for containing a ‘suicide chip’, which, through a security processor, powers down the game after approximately 10 years, ensuring that the game can no longer be played, becoming quite literally, dead code. 3 In the UK, the ‘format wars’ of the mid-1980s have been authoratively archived on websites such as World of Spectrum and Lemon64. Much more than a vanity exercise recalling and recording the heyday of these machines, their documentation extends to books, advertising, magazine reviews and boxart. For further critique, see Chapter 6. 4 James Newman explores this in Best Before (2012), which shows how retro enthusiasm can have a retrograde effect on the preservation of videogames. Coupled with a ‘systematic discarding of gaming’s past’ (Newman, 2012: 9) by software and hardware manufacturers, any attempt to collate and curate videogaming’s past is a maze of dead-ends and non-sequiturs, of which museums, private collections and exhibitions are only part of a solution.

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5 Microsoft’s realignment with their core market of games and gamers on the Xbox One console has meant that their TV production arm was disbanded in 2014, again showing how quickly fads and fashion change where the influence of the videogame medium is concerned. 6 See McCrea (2009: 228–231) for extended analysis of the content of Dead Rising and its relationship to the concept of hauntology. 7 Like the toy itself, the etymology of ‘Lego’ has hidden depths: it derives from the Latin root meaning ‘to read’. See Wade (2009) for further discussion. 8 Guins is a particular proponent of this approach, but archived materials have been identified as key to historical research by Wolf (2012) and Huhtamo (2005) among others. 9 This is evidenced throughout the history of videogames and through to contemporary platforms. For instance, recent videogames consoles were a key proponent in the adoption of high definition visual displays and accordant storage media (Blu-ray and HD-DVD), with the inclusion of DVD capability central to the PS2’s global success. There are historical and local precedents for videogames’ influence on other industries too. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the rise of amateur pirating in the mid-1980s was also a driver in Amstrad’s (among others) production and development of ‘dubbing’ tape-to-tape decks. In terms of social media, Farmville on Facebook has consistently been one of the most popular apps since its release in 2009. The increasing value placed on the synergy between games and networking and social media, which finds its roots in the Multi-User Dungeons of the 1980s, is stressed by Facebook’s US$2bn acquisition of Oculus VR, a virtual reality development company, responsible for the Oculus Rift headset technology.

3

Back to the Future: The UK Gaming Field of the 1980s

Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not nature. Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Historical positions of videogames The jostling for position among the multiple histories of videogames is symptomatic of the emergence of any new art form, technology or media. Videogames, like the critical strands of ludology and narratology which followed them, did not develop in a vacuum or appear overnight. As shown in the previous chapter, while there is multistablity in the afterlife of videogames, there is accordant multistability in their formative years. Marshall McLuhan, in a rarely cited chapter of his book Understanding Media, identifies the means by which games take shape and develop in response to their environment and the dominant social, political and economic models of the time. This is a significant, if often overlooked appraisal of games as the chapter on games is subtitled ‘Extensions of Man’, sharing its subtitle with the book itself. Throughout the chapter, McLuhan places games directly in relation to society’s position within the political economy. They haunt the habitus of the everyday, at once a reminder of the stressors of the quotidian, as games ‘could have neither existence nor meaning except as extensions of our immediate inner lives’ (McLuhan, 2001: 258), and a way of exhorting pressure, ‘games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of specialized actions that occur in any social group’ (McLuhan, 2001: 255). What then to make of the videogames that arose during the 1980s? What of the wider social and cultural influences that gave rise to the Space Invaders of promenades

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in Rhyl, the Pac-Men chomping in chip-shops in Southend-on-Sea, the OutRun machine blinking across the Atlantic in Newquay? What of the strange symbiotic relationship between school, traditionally seen as a place for rebellion and revolt among young males (see Willis, 1981), and home, where the same boys brought what they had learnt through their own graft at home to bear as games on the computers of the after-school club? McLuhan quickly identifies with these themes: ‘[T]here is a desperate need for games in a highly specialized industrial culture, since they are the only form of art accessible to many minds’ (McLuhan, 2001: 262). This chimes with the wider technological change in the 1980s as the microchip came to dominate military geopolitical considerations in terms of the proliferation of strategic nuclear missiles in finance with the computerization of stock exchanges and in culture with the digitalisation of recorded music. As noted by Hirschfield (1981) videogames offer a method by which individuals, usually within wider social groups, can mature into a comprehension of the changes wrought by semiconductors, a technology whose impact is still rendered incalculable by its potential and possibilities. Nevertheless, it is possible to situate some historical precedents which gave rise to the videogame from the literature of the time. It is interesting to see, as demonstrated in chapters 4 and 5, that even with the pang of Cold War panic pervading the development of technology and games (see Sudnow, 1983: 89; also Marcuse, 2002), many videogames developed in the 1980s find their genealogy in more innocuous notions of play. Haddon, writing in 1988, was one of the first authors to provide an academic history of videogames. He writes of the US space programme, led by NASA and locked in a bitter technological and propaganda battle with its Soviet opponent, as being instrumental in the development of computer science as an academic discipline at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1959. Historically, the development of computing had been funded by a military agency, but when this was transferred to the civilian space agency, there was a parallel increase in support. This was co-opted by the provision of a minicomputer by DEC, a private contractor that traded technology for research and, eventually, personnel, which had attained graduate status on their own machine (Haddon, 1988: 55). This would seem to be a fairly typical germination of computers in the world’s foremost military industrial complex: the research followed the money. Yet even before the inception of the academic discipline, humans were experimenting with play and games; ‘a male community had evolved in the university’s model railway club where members used their technical expertise to construct and

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investigate systems’ (Haddon: 1988: 55), leading to the ‘hack’, a method of solving a design problem with graceful aplomb. These individuals, inculcated with systems-design-as-play ‘played with machines [computers] as if they were toys’ (Haddon, 1988: 56). Even at this early point, schisms in videogames can be seen. Similar to the home construction kits seen in Australia, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, as mentioned in Chapter  2, the development of videogame hardware takes place within a ludic context, whereby parts are placed together to construct a greater whole. At the same time, hacker Steve Russell looked to other areas for inspiration: ‘I had just finished reading “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series. He was some sort of scientist but wrote this dashing sort of science fiction’ resulting in the ultimate videogame hack the ‘sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar’ (Russell, cited in Haddon, 1988: 56). This suggests that the software used on the machines takes place within the context of narrative, following the Anglo-Saxon model of textual interpretation, placing one story within another context results in subsequent revision and reimagining: the same is true of Shakespeare as Spacewar. It is quite literally, too early to definitively say that this was the point at which the two divisions were born, but there is a suggestion that the study of videogames commenced from this point, and Haddon continues to cite videogames as the first commercial software (Haddon, 1988: 58) giving lie to the later fears by Commodore and Sinclair that the software of videogames, which as an open platform they would have little control over, would cheapen the hardware of their computers (Haddon 1988: 72), when in fact, videogames were the driver behind the success of those computers during the 1980s and beyond with the Atari ST, Amiga and the seemingly endless technological and commercial durability of the PC (see Chapter 6). The bootstrapping of videogames onto the rise of information technologies, is indicative of wider social change. In contemporary capitalist societies, change is articulated both as a constant, a way of life that results in short-term contracts, high rates of home rental and detachment from local communities, and as a positive force, one which should be embraced as part of a wider societal restructuring into being reactive to events, rather than anticipating and planning for them. With the role of information and communication technologies in creating this shiny, bouncy-ball world – the thrust of contemporary critical theory from Auge to Zizek – it is perhaps the lack of change which is significant in contemporary societies. Moral panics abound, but these are centred on grotesque and abhorrent pasts – paedophilia involving 1970s TV personalities and members

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of Parliament in the 1980s,1 state cover-ups of disasters at major sporting events and the Crown’s obsession with terrorism in Northern Ireland – while the intelligence harvesting of indigenous populations and phone-hacking trials tend to be seen as a by-product of a media-saturated society where personal information is not used as a means of control, but as a means of linking in and maximizing the reach of social media, of which all users are complicit.

Moral outrage The changes fashioned by the introduction of semiconductor manufacture, however, were significant. Just as the writers of the time struggled to come to grips with the potential and cultures surrounding the new technology, so did instruments of control: parents, politicians, presidents queued to quell interest and obsession in videogames. In spite of psychological research to the contrary (see Loftus and Loftus, 1983; Greenfield, 1984), in 1982 the US surgeon-general issued a warning that ‘video games could be addictive to children’ following in the tracks of a 1981 presidential decree by President Marcos who demanded the dismantling/destruction of 300 arcade games in the Philippines. In the United Kingdom, the then member of Parliament George Foulkes led a campaign to limit ‘the menace of video games’ (Haddon, 1988: 60), even specifying the name of the game deemed to be harmful in the Control of Space Invaders (and other electronic games) Bill (Foulkes, 1981: cc287). The overlap between the writing of Martin Amis and the submission of the Labour MP goes beyond the titles of the respective works, to the point where Amis’s text appears as a homage to Foulkes. For instance, Foulkes argues that the bill seeks to control ‘space invaders – of the terrestrial kind’, implying that there may be extraterrestrial invaders that aren’t covered by this bill (and are perhaps more welcome in the local community) as young people ‘play truant, miss meals and give up other normal activity to play “space invaders”. They become crazed, with eyes glazed, oblivious to everything around them’ (Foulkes, 1981: cc287). Amis, in comparison, appears reticent in his description of youngsters playing games and truant at the same time: ‘[W]e’re told that children don’t bother going to school much any more. How can they? They’re too busy playing Space Invaders’ (Amis, 1982: 30). Of greater concern is Foulkes’ assertion that a 17-year-old boy was so desperate to feed his addiction that he resorted to blackmail and extortion ‘demanding

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£900 from a clergyman with whom he had previously had sexual relations’ (Foulkes, 1981: cc288).2 Deplorably, the spectre of child abuse haunts other writing, suggesting a hidden side to the twentieth-century pursuit of pleasure, the legacy of which is perhaps only now becoming apparent in retrospective moral outrages. Flippantly or not, Amis observes ‘classic, textbook child molesters’ (Amis, 1982: 20) lurking with intent in the shadows of an unnamed New York arcade. Meanwhile, in Times Square, the boy-child Bloom has no idea what to expect with an ‘elderly man peering over my shoulder. Is he enamoured of young boys, or honestly enjoying my uncanny skee-ball skills?’ (Bloom:  1982:  xiii). While Sudnow, supervising his son in the Superball Arcade, sees ‘strangers of all kinds pack[ed] in tight along the walls, intensely engrossed in private behaviour while browsers come close up from behind to watch. Rear ends are dark and faces flicker’ (Sudnow, 1983: 4). As expanded upon in Chapter 5, it is implicit and explicit in the writing of this time, that arcades, a ‘gathering point for youth’ (Haddon, 1988: 61) or ‘an easy way to rebel’ – to distinguish themselves from their parents (Loftus and Loftus, 1983: 85) – are constructed from complex and subtle social interactions which were not fully recognized or investigated at the time, even if these spaces were seemingly exploited by those with ulterior motives. The moral panic that impelled Foulkes to contest arcades as a location for deviant behaviour may have derived from this fear that it wasn’t the games per se that were corrupting, but the clandestine, menacing ambience of the spaces where they were located, a view shared by the City of Mesquite’s attorney during a statement to the Court: ‘I’d say 100 parents protested to the Council . . . Then we started hearing of dope traffic, vice, runaways – you name it – all going on inside these places [arcades]’ (Archer, cited in Bloom, 1982: 121). While reporting on the panics, the literature, as was its wont at the time, offers to educate on potential solutions to these problems. While Bloom offers an exhaustive list to surviving the ‘video jungle’, with the primary entry being don’t give your money to beggars as they’ll only ‘put it in the game you most want to play’ (Bloom: 1982: 199), Michael Rubin is ebullient in his zeal for the etiquette and manners required in the social environment of the arcade. First, he offers a mathematical equation as to the number and type of people likely to be attracted to arcades and games (Rubin, 1982: 74–76) before transferring the ‘unwritten rules of video play’ to paper, which purportedly cuts down on the potential for negative interactions resulting in ‘behavior and manners that are better than at

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home’, with parents disbelieving that ‘their child is so polite when he won’t take out the garbage without a threat’ (Rubin, 1982: 100). Equally, it may have been that those affected by games lay outside of the traditional notions of working-class moral panics seen in the educational sociology of Cohen (2011) and Willis (1981). Foulkes is strident that it is the effect on ‘bright children who have never been in trouble before, who become hooked on the [sic] “space invaders” ’, with a boy of ‘above average academic ability’ impelled to steal between £60–£100 to ‘play the machines in the Arcade’ (Foulkes, 1981: cc287). Malapropisms à la George W. Bush apart, this is a moral panic which chimes with the fears of the middle class. Computers, ostensibly bought ‘ “for the family” or “for the children” ’ (Haddon, 1992: 85) to assist with homework, or as a way of coming to terms with new technology, were seen as a folk devil, simultaneously necessary for progression of the community, while feared for its potential impact on pre-existing social relations. As Foulkes notes, it was generally boys of above-average academic ability who engaged with gaming, and there was significant cultural and social capital invested in learning, understanding and mastering videogames, as evidenced by the publishing of hints and tips books for games in the early 1980s (e.g. Hirschfield, 1981; 1982), type-in programs onto home microcomputers from magazines, through to the tips sections in the publications of Newsfield and EMAP such as Zzap, Crash, Commodore User and Sinclair User, where inputting ‘POKE’ codes, which changed the memory address of a program, required an elemental understanding of BASIC programming and machine architecture to enable or disable certain aspects of a game’s mechanics. The folk devil evinced by the ‘technological habitus’ (Freund, 2004) of engagement with computers and found in executing hints, tips and cheats around home and arcade games, developed its own specific, but significant subculture. This was seen in the development of modifications to games by a global scene of enthusiastic amateurs, reaching back through the type-in code of the 1980s to the computer science of hacking and systems-design-as-play of MIT in the 1950s and 1960s. The development of this culture took on its own form in the United Kingdom. In 1991, the Warwickshire developer Codemasters, in developing its aftermarket game modifier the ‘Game Genie’, offered gamers the opportunity to access all areas of a game or attain infinite lives. As non-proprietary hardware attached to closed platforms such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, it drew the ire and reprisal of the Kyoto manufacturer. An inevitably protracted legal battle ensued, until a US court ruled in favour of the UK firm (Anderson

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and Levene, 2012:  190), awarding damages to Codemasters and permitting its sale in the United States. Meanwhile, over the border in Staffordshire, the electronics firm Datel, produced the ‘Action Replay’ cartridge, which from its beginnings in the Atari ST and Amiga mod scene, has appeared as a third-party peripheral on Sega, Nintendo and Microsoft platforms, where it continues to the present-day as a successful modifier of the Pokemon titles on handheld consoles. Datel, in constantly updating its Codejunkies website with new cheat codes, tacitly accepts the contemporary desire for perennial updates and patches, while acknowledging the past histories of Newsfield and EMAP magazines enamoured with PEEKS and POKEs, methods by which the home micro became a ‘self referential-machine’ (Haddon, 1990: 99) where experiential learning would take place across a range of different spaces. These could be areas of relative safety, such as the family home and computer classes at school; liminal safety, such as the school playground and computer shops where games were pirated, traded and sold; and places of unknown safety, in arcades and shopping centres where the public space was physically and metaphorically invaded by games (see Guins, 2004).

Postindustrial Policy The friction in these sites of consumption and learning, production and politics, play and policy has been well documented as a reflection of broader tensions in the UK society of the 1980s (see especially, Vinen, 2010; McSmith, 2011; Stewart, 2013). A brief review of these tensions helps to place the gaming field within its context. Almost universally, accounts of the years 1979–1991, record a violent decade in the public and private sphere. In 1982, the triumph over Argentina at Port Stanley in the Falklands War prompted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to proclaim ‘a new-found confidence – born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true eight thousand miles away’ (Thatcher, cited in Stewart, 2013: 168). Her confidence was not always reflected in the psychology of the UK populace, which strained to accept social and economic change. Many of these ‘battles’ were contingent on the geography and demographics of what would, in the sociology of the time, be understood as inner-city, working-class areas. In 1981, riots in Brixton and Toxteth, triggered by an increase in stop-and-search tactics by the police force, itself a reaction to rising crime, forged class and ethnic differences between young, unemployed males and a financially enervated

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police force. The mineworkers strike of 1984, effectively a legacy of the 1970s public-sector strikes for higher pay, became a picketed ground war between police and other miners, with the effects still felt in communities and families in Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire to this day. England’s club football teams, themselves strikingly successful in European competition, were more feared for a tribal element which gallivanted across the cities of Europe until the death of 39 Juventus fans in 1985 at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels resulted in a fiveyear ban from European club competition. Four years later, 96 Liverpool fans, trapped in a standing area at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield Wednesday’s stadium, were crushed to death as police failed to manage the volume of attendees. Although rejected in many quarters of the popular media, hooliganism was blamed by some redtop newspapers. As of the writing of this book, an enquiry into the role of the police in the tragedy is ongoing. The changes wrought by a movement towards a post-industrial society based around electronic technology and networks were forged in the 1980s. Newspaper workers transferred from the heat of the print presses of Fleet Street to the cool desktop publishing of Wapping held strikes at the threat the Atex mainframes posed to their trade (Stewart, 2013: 365), where editors and journalists would be responsible for typesetting via bespoke publishing software. This has since devolved to the personal level where individuals can produce their own publications, both in print and online. The ‘Big-Bang’ of 1986 meant that London’s Stock Exchange was at once computerized and also permitted retail banks to harness investment portfolios. With the 2008 credit crunch centred on bad debt by over-leveraged banks which did not ring-fence investment from retail arms, the Anglo-American model of deregulation was found to be flawed, and for the UK at least, floored at that precise time in October 1986. Meanwhile, in a consumer counterculture, illegal dance events, known as ‘raves’, utilized sampled electronic music presented as a live event (see Chapter 7 for further discussion of music and videogames) to deliver, according to the acronym from which it was derived, ‘Radical Audio Visual Experiences’ enhanced by a suite of synthetic drugs such as ecstasy, LSD and amphetamines, engendering a moral panic among parents, politicians and the police that resulted in the introduction of a special subsection to the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. In comparison with the dark and sometimes desperate acts of the arcade and the adjustments required by a combination of privatization, monetarism and computerization, the habitus of home micros and videogames appears sanguine by comparison. Haddon notes only a ‘minor moral panic’ in the case of

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computers, which may inculcate isolated, antisocial users (Haddon, 1990: 92), an observation that chimes true with the hikikomori of contemporary Japan who exhibit acute and extended social withdrawal, or indeed anybody who has witnessed at first-, or second-hand, the compulsion involved in playing World of Warcraft. Yet, as evidenced in the empirical sections of this book, this minor moral panic is perhaps underplayed. Fast practices, grey economics and hazy ethics combined at all levels of production, consumption and play within the UK videogames industry of the 1980s. Often this was triggered by sheer surprise, the hobbyist appearance of micros in the home unanticipated by many, where ‘some visionaries looked forward to a time when homes might hire computerprocessing time over the phone’ (Haddon, 1990:  94). Although a source of humour for Haddon, this is a prediction which has resonance with viewdata systems, such as Prestel in the UK and Minitel in France, which enjoyed niche popularity in the 1980s and, in Minitel’s case, throughout the 1990s. Accessed via dial-up modems, the systems were highly centralized and offered mail services and information to users via subscription. The purchasing of processing time via telecommunications networks looks less incongruous in the present day. Data processing and storage are recentralizing as the use of cloud data, thin clients and shopbots become ubiquitous. While supply-side data gathering can offer advantages to the consumer by remembering all previous purchases, or being able to access all data everywhere, it also poses risks to personal data integrity and develops its own cultural logic of power and control (Coley and Lockwood, 2012).

Clouds on the horizon As noted by Haddon, the arrival of computers into the domestic environment was not the future which was predicted or preordained, a scenario particularly true of the United Kingdom, where one of the most pervasive moral panics of the time was centred on the lack of engagement with silicon technologies. Responding to this in 1978, the BBC’s bellwether science programme, Horizon, examined the opportunities and costs associated with the adoption of the microchip into British industrial society in the episode ‘The Chips are Down’. Analysts and experts generally agreed that the United Kingdom was five years behind other advanced nations in appropriating the technology and even further behind in terms of awareness of the impact of the new technology. More problematically,

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with Japan’s heavy manufacturing companies (e.g. Toshiba) and the United States’ ‘Fairchildren’ of Silicon Valley3 dominating semiconductor manufacture, it was unlikely that the United Kingdom would make any meaningful contribution to the production of hardware. The grainy pessimism of the programme would not seem out of place on a television programme discussing the replacement of human jobs by robots in 2016. The narrator, highlighting the miniscule brilliance of the chip states, ‘[T]his is the reason why our children will not have jobs to go to’ (BBC: 1978), and asks whether an elite cluster of 60000 billionaire technocrats would produce enough GDP to subsidize a wider population rendered economically inactive by automation. In spite of the ‘apocalyptic’ overtones (Anderson and Levene, 2012: 18), the end of the programme is defiantly optimistic as to the future, ‘[P]rogramming is a particularly British skill, in fact, we invented it  . . . some believe we should move from hardware to software and use these skills to develop high technology industries around them’ (Horizon, 1978). This is affirmed by David Firnberg, then director for the National Computing Centre: We’re going to be finding all sorts of new ideas and we do want to be able to tap them off . . . giving someone the opportunity to apply the microprocessor in an entirely new way . . . building on it, exploiting it and producing a world-beating product from it. (Firnberg, 1978)

Although the UK had an interest in the development of magnetic resonance imaging scanners, there was no clear strategy for the development of silicon technology in 1978, but the end of the programme reiterates that it is software, not hardware, that holds the greatest possibility for future advancement. This is borne out by a 2006 presentation to the Computer Conservation Society, where Firnberg, who was responsible for training thousands of individuals in the use of computers observed: It’s interesting that there was no correlation at all between ability in mathematics and achievement on the course, but there was a high correlation between ability in English language and achievement. This was because applying the technology is all about constructing a sentence, constructing a complete thing, rather than getting sums right. (Firnberg, 2006)

A similar pattern is observed among children in the United States of the time, where ‘literacy is a necessary factor in the development of Piaget’s highest stage of cognitive development, the stage of formal operations’ (Greenfield, 1984: 132), which informs abstract thinking, a key aspect of computer usage from gaming

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and word processing to programming in low-level languages. In retrospect, this bias is clear to see: the United Kingdom is – and was – pre-eminent in the area of coding, art and programming. Yet this did not prevent UK-based industries from developing their own hardware, some of which was a response to the fear communicated by Horizon in the 1970s and 1980s and some of which was commissioned by institutions, particularly the BBC. The BBC, who enjoy an enviable history of innovation in commercial broadcasting, including being the first to broadcast an Olympic Games (London, 1948), producing Europe’s first full colour TV channel (BBC2, 1967), delivering distance learning with the Open University (1971) and providing the world’s first teletext service (CEEFAX, 1974), continued to demonstrate the Corporation’s commitment to its founding values to inform, educate and entertain.

The owl from auntie4 Having informed the late 1970s populace that the Winter of Discontent was the least of their worries given the penumbra of automation cast by the microchip, the BBC, moving from panic to ambition (Anderson and Levene, 2012:  33), transferred to the second Rethain principle of education. As seen from books, magazines and programmes of the time, educating the reader, viewer and gamer is central to the discourse around 1980s videogames, a theme shared by the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project. In spite of having 10 television programmes supporting the project, ‘people didn’t learn very much from [them]’, which lead BBC Engineering and Research to ‘radical and unusual thinking’, where a public service broadcaster felt it incumbent to move away from a traditional didactic teacher-student model, to something closer to experiential learning – ‘[T]here’s nothing like getting your hands on a machine to find out what it can and can’t do, what it consists of ’ (Radcliffe, 2008).5 Placing computers into the hands of the UK population lead to some novel uses, including a prank where a BBC programme was hacked while broadcasting live (Anderson and Levene, 2012: 47), the development of the world’s first ‘open world’ game in Elite (1984) and the installation of the BBC microcomputer into schools throughout the United Kingdom. As seen in this and the previous chapter, the development of videogames and home computers in the 1980s was dependent on a range of stimuli, all of which colour a spectrum of pasts and a kaleidoscope of futures. Geographical location,

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histories of science and technology and culture all influence different tracks of development. In the case of the BBC Micro, however, this was the first – and only – time a public service broadcaster in the world funded the development of the hardware, the language – BBC Basic – and the software, for example, Doctor Who and the Warlord (1985), to play on it (Elliot, 2014). The ‘radical’ nature of the BBC Micro, then, appears as separate to the technology itself: the Sinclair ZX Spectrum6 was more powerful than the BBC Micro, but was not selected as the public sector standard bearer (Hauser, 2008). Similarly, even though the origin of the Micro from the public sector was noteworthy, it had – arguably – less global influence than the iPlayer or BBC Worldwide, both of which are ‘unmissable’ brands. Instead, the significance of the Micro appears to be not in its popular appeal, but the niche that it opened between the public and the private sphere. The antisocial behaviour which drove Foulkes to bring videogames to public attention was due to a very middle-class moral panic. Parents, justifying the purchase of microcomputers, with the educational adage ‘we bought it to help with your homework’, were terrified when this was subverted into entertainment, as playing and programming videogames appeared to be the only reason academically able schoolboys would use computers. This pedagogical imperative was not limited to the United Kingdom. In the United States, psychologists observe that ‘when children do complex programming, video games are their favourite subject’ (Greenfield, 1984: 136), while in New Zealand an interviewee observed that ‘in the 80s, when I was a kid, a computer was a luxury item for having fun . . . far more of a toy than it is now’ (Swalwell: 2008: 196). Therefore, the view of the home computer as a toy and therefore superfluous – if not a folk devil – was, to some extent countered by the BBC, whose soft paternalism acted as a salve as microcomputers infiltrated the private domain, thereby conferring ‘an educational function on toys which . . . rises with the transmission of cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 2010: 221).7 However, placed within the wider context of fundamental shifts to the political, social and economic milieu of the UK where traditional divisions of the public and the private, individualism and statehood, right and left, slowly disintegrated, there was clearly a ferment of foment; ‘some Britons rioted and went on protest marches while others hung patriotic bunting and bought shares in British Telecom’ (Stewart, 2013: 1). The BBC Micro can be seen as a symbol of this change within the United Kingdom. This was a machine, prompted into existence by a moral panic, funded by the government, contracted for manufacture to a technology firm, branded and provided PR support by the BBC and sold to a closed market (secondary education), before being

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purchased by middle-class families and used by individuals to play and program games, then, following the generation of another moral panic, being acclaimed as an historical pillar of the contemporary UK games and software industry. The complexities of its motivations and interactions, its position of relations within industrial society, make the self-referential machine a postmodern product, one which reaches into a past of play and politics, a current dissolving of private and public spheres and a future of code and consumption.

A new field As seen throughout this chapter and in related technology studies (see e.g. Arthur, 2009), the development of a new technology, medium or culture cannot be isolated to one specific point in time or space. It is not linear-chronological. Instead they are contingent on a welter of stimuli, some of which are intended and some of which are serendipitous. The outcome of the actions, reactions and interactions by the individuals, groups, institutions and objects involved are equally hard to predict and are reliant on a range of variables. Therefore, witnessing videogame play and programming from the supermarket to the bedroom is at once surprising when considering the aims of hardware manufacturers of the time, but more prosaic when considering Caillois’ (1959) maxim that play is pretechnological and pre-discursive so, as ‘cultures change, so do games’ (McLuhan, 2001: 260). It would be more of a surprise then if new technologies were not used to play games, as opposed to the reverse being true. The utility of the microchip, so extensively used in everyday life, is still being explored and it is practically impossible without the critical distance associated with retrospection to say with any certainty if we are currently living in an era defined by its relationship to information. However, it is possible to affirm that the use of computers for playing games represents, in sociological terms, the generation of a distinctive new field of production, one enabled by consumption. One can imagine a field of production which takes off and ‘grows’ its consumers. This has been true of the field of cultural production, or some sectors of it at least, since the nineteenth century . . . supply preceded demand, the consumers were not asking for it. (Bourdieu, 1993: 113)

One of the reasons for the popularity of videogames pre-1983 in the United States and throughout the 1980s in the United Kingdom and Europe, was of it

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being an unexpected phenomenon, of technological exotica inhabiting quotidian spaces previously reserved for mundane consumption: fish-and-chip shops, corner shops, classrooms. All had games tucked away or proudly on display. The popularity of the new field of games meant that in the 1980s, when going into a newsagent, it was possible to play the arcade game Space Invaders, buy a £1.99 clone over the counter, pick up a magazine to read a review and POKE to the end of the game, duplicate the game on a Matsui tape-to-tape recorder and then sell a copy at school the next day. It is of course arguable that music possessed much the same elements in providing ambient soundtracks and mixtapes, and the VCR acted in much the same way for television, thereby reinforcing the influence of pre-existing technologies on this field. Yet it is videogames’ predilection to extend into these fields which makes it important. For instance, the Commodore 64’s SID chip, which produced so many memorable tunes from 1980s games, is still used by major and independent music producers today, such is its unique sound. Centresoft, a Birmingham software distributor in the early 1980s, distributed games to newsagents, chemists and corner shops, achieved full vertical integration by creating a spin-off, US Gold, who licensed games developed in the United States for distribution throughout the United Kingdom and Europe (Chaney, 1985: 47) before becoming a successful software house and publisher in its own right. The networks set up in the tangle of Spaghetti Junction exist to this day as Centresoft continues to distribute games electronically and physically around the globe. Perhaps one of the most instructive legacies is that there are still games programmed on Apples and Acorns, Spectrums and Commodores. While wringing out the final bit from antique silicon, their ultimate use as contemporary games machines is as unintended as their original use as ‘toys’, or platforms for play. As the following chapters show, the rise of videogames in the United Kingdom in the 1980s inexorably changed the habitus, for those involved in videogames at first- and second-hand. Bourdieu, redefines habitus from its origins in Mauss (1973) as ‘principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 53). This definition speaks to the widespread and commercial introduction of videogames as a site of production and consumption where inputs, processes and outcomes were unknown from the outset. While clearly not occurring by accident, the use of microprocessor technology was, as this chapter has shown, more directly attributed to exploring, playing

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and toying around in the field, than any mastery of the technology or the cultures surrounding it. The material recordings of the time, alongside the games, machines and computers written about, point to this implicitly and explicitly and can be seen in terms of their own experimentation of genres, position and styles. Nevertheless, almost without exception, their inherent purpose was to educate. From the computer literacy project and Amis’s literary ethnography, to level maps in magazines, the key proponent is of learning and learning to learn. Even Foulkes’ obtuse address to the House of Commons can be seen as an attempt to comprehend the political and social impact of videogames. Interestingly, the framing of contentious and controversial opinions in the political sphere is described by Bourdieu as being part of ‘political axiomatics’, which is subject to the same binary logic as an algorithm or program (Bourdieu, 2010: 419) as if the new field is reprogramming, or at least revising the code of pre-established fields, while re-educating those within it. Useful as a term describing the make up and structure of a field, habitus is also a significant conceptual framework able to analyse an individual’s habits and interactions with other individuals, fields and institutions at both the bodily and cognitive level, a theoretical exposition especially relevant to the process of learning. The ability to achieve such tasks as touch-typing, dialling a telephone or soldering wires to chips – elements essential to home computer usage in the 1980s – is formed firstly through connaissance, where one learns how to do something, before repetition embeds it in the body. At this point the newly acquired knowledge takes a fascinating double turn. As it becomes technically learnt performance, (habitus), it is also cultural behaviour: savoir – as being a programmer or hacker permits access to fields and languages that are closed to non-savants. This suggests that the learning process of cultural knowledge, that is savoir, is not only ‘second nature’ as would be used to describe someone who is an expert in their field, but also a social abstraction which happens to be physiologically embedded.

The gaming habitus The new field of videogames has been explored by Graeme Kirkpatrick (2012; 2013). He presents videogame publications from the 1980s such as Zzap! and Crash! as using new language to prepare the possibility space for a new field. Primarily this is concerned with ‘gameplay’, a compound noun specific to

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describing the experience of videogames, which, as it becomes familiar to the savants within the gaming habitus (Kirkpatrick, 2013: 78), attaches significance and independence to the new cultural field. For instance, as graphics improve, their importance declines and how a game plays, in terms of its accessibility, interface, ease-of-use and enjoyment, becomes more important. The result is that the true savants, those inculcated into the gaming habitus have the savoir to be able to dismiss the technical and objective status of a game, such as graphics and sound, and focus expressly on more subjective areas such as ‘gameplay’. Magazines, using the noun extensively and providing forums for its discussion on letters pages ferments a culture where game developers are pressured to ‘create authentic products – games for gamers’ (Kirkpatrick, 2013: 80), a situation which remains true to this day as ‘hardcore’ gamers are able to leave behind AAA products, express their dissatisfaction with the current state of the industry on NeoGaf and then crowdfund a new game which fits with their profile of what a game should be and how it should play. Kirkpatrick’s exploration of the emergence of this new field is generally convincing. Running gaming in parallel with the changes wrought by neoliberalism, he ranges against the contemporary US-centrism in games studies and identifies the latent and overt sexism and elitism in the magazines when gaming eventually goes mainstream and ‘casual’ in the mid-1990s. In terms of the education of a new field, it is noted that as the gaming habitus developed, the mode of address changes from didactic, paternalistic learning to something closer to a symposium or a conversation, thereby moving ‘from a mode of address in which parents are supervising and gamers are their children, to one in which young people are their sole intended audience’ (Kirkpatrick, 2013: 87). The placing of the audience into a position of savoir speaks to a maturing medium which has generated its own habitus and has developed an identity separate to trainspotters and board-game players (Kirkpatrick, 2013: 87). From the soft paternalism of the BBC Micro to the rebellion of its teenage years with the Sega Mega Drive, the coming-of-age story told by videogames is enshrined in the discourse which surrounds it. Somewhere following its mirror stage and in its growing pains, Kirkpatrick argues, the habitus and culture of this new field becomes transfixed, so that gaming becomes defined by ‘a failure, an internal limitation that prevents it . . . from becoming a fully autonomous cultural practice (Kirkpatrick, 2013: 94). The moral panics, sexism, elitism and childish behaviour which infect the contemporary gaming habitus suggest that this is a stymied cultural practice whose technical proficiency is not matched by the immaturity of its savants.

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Yet Kirkpatrick overlooks the influence of education in the formation of the field, particularly around heuristic learning, which provides – primarily young people  – with the building blocks of new concepts to enable ludic invention. Historically, studies of children and videogames have shown the learning that takes place to be emergent, so that invention and innovation are key ways of adapting to the changing dynamics of gameplay. This occurs at the abstract level as seen in the inputting of POKE codes and mapping of levels for distribution in magazines and, at the applied level, in developing techniques such as lurking in Asteroids (1979) or hunting warp zones in The New Zealand Story (1988). The emergence and use of building blocks is also a key characteristic in the study of videogames. The fact that videogames have developed their own discourse, language and culture of study around them clearly indicates a maturing medium, particularly as the ludological school maintains that videogames be treated separately from other art forms and media. Meanwhile, in the contemporary gaming field, a significant proportion of games’ development is taking place in the service of education. Serious games, educational games and simulations are seen as viable experiential alternatives to traditional didactic models, transplanting the experimentation with the code and hardware so popular in the 1980s to the modern classroom and lecture hall. The immaturity that Kirkpatrick sees as a failure is what marks videogames as different from other fields, while its accent on toying and experimentation means that while its primary appeal lies with children and young people, it can, with the investment of time, as McLuhan observes, be accessible to all. In concluding his analysis of the gaming habitus Kirkpatrick’s appraisal resembles a paternal lament. An ‘erosion of childhood innocence’ gives way to a ‘new order which fosters cynicism’ marked by the ‘affective nonchalance of teenage culture’ (Kirkpatrick, 2013: 95–96), marked by excessive consumption. It is important to consider the impact of unrelenting and indiscriminate consumerism, particularly in the case of children, but this is not a subtle critique. In obviating the importance of traditional childhood fields such as board games, sci-fi narratives and model train clubs to the formation of the gaming field, significant influences are overlooked. In their own eras, these pastimes generated their own moral panics before eventually being accepted as bona fide, if specialized, cultural practice. In addition, videogames which originated from this immature past are highly valued by contemporary audiences – and not only retro enthusiasts – with younger players ‘discovering the gameplay value of the older games, which are well suited to the tiny screens on cell phones and other

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pocket devices’ (Wolf, 2012: 5). Wolf ’s observation suggests that the term ‘gameplay’ is important to the genealogical formation of videogames, both within the historical context of 1980s videogames and in how the past continues to chime with modern digital technologies and the savants who use them.

Playing fields Kirkpatrick’s use of habitus highlights the potential pitfalls inherent in repudiating the position of other fields which overlap and segue into gaming, some of which are influences from the past, such as model railroading, and some of which, like digital technologies themselves, stretch into unknown futures. Some, like the continuing obsolescence of new technology or old games, appear to be genealogical threads which have run their course, but, continue to influence the present, as seen with the penchant for homebrew coding, while still others, such as the latent threat of child abuse, haunt the past, present and future and are not immediately apparent even with a nuanced investigation of the literature both of the time and about the time. The immediate differences expected in geographical disconnections from Australia to Scandinavia reveal unexpected commonalities which transcend national boundaries and cultures, and so provide insight into potential futures which never came to pass. The problem for the field of videogames is that for one which is so fixated on the future, there is a real danger that the histories of which it is a part will be forgotten. From the vantage point of games research, this is an unwanted outcome and also one which is unnecessary, as many of the people who programmed and played videogames in the formation of its field remain alive today. For this reason, the next three chapters of this book engage in empirical research with the savants of the UK videogames field from those who coded, cracked and copied in bedrooms, worked and played in the amusement arcades and the technical savants who scribed the code to the industry of the 1980s.

Notes 1 See Chapter 7 for further discussion of the politics surrounding videogames and associated media. 2 Amis reports that Michael Brown, the Conservative MP who argued against the bill, told reporters that ‘he had stopped at a pub on his way to the House [of

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4

5

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Commons]—for a pint and a quick game of Space Invaders’ (Amis, 1982: 30). The bill was voted down 114–94. The reference to ‘Fairchildren’ relates to the spin-off companies that were set-up by senior management leaving Fairchild Semiconductor to pursue their own products. This area forms the basis of what is termed ‘Silicon Valley’ in the San Francisco Bay area. The title of this section refers to the owl that was used as a logo for the BBC Microcomputer, presumably to connate wisdom, and ‘Auntie’, which is a traditional term of endearment for the BBC, originating in the days of John Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, it is seen as reflecting the compassionate leadership of the public service broadcaster. At this point, it is important to note that the development of the BBC family of machines is discussed extensively in retrospective accounts (see especially, Furber, 2014; Anderson and Levene, 2012; BBC, 2009), but it is its significance to the wider social context that is important to this study. The Spectrum and its impact is covered in detail in Chapter 6. The use of a trusted brand to enter the domestic sphere was also used by Sony and Microsoft years later in their early 2000s ‘battle for the living room’ via the PlayStation and Xbox consoles.

4

Coding, Copying and Cracking:  Bedroom Cultures

A basic social arrangement in modern society is that the individual tends to sleep, play, and work in different places. Erving Goffman, Asylums

Game plan There is a widely held axiom that the UK videogames industry ‘has a history which accelerates from small firms, maybe even individuals programming software in their bedrooms’ (Johns, 2005:  157)  which has come to be exalted in recent retrospectives, such as Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders (Anderson and Levene, 2012). The coding scene of the 1980s is perceived as the bedrock for an industry which moved from the sequestered realms of dining rooms, attics and cellars to become the locus of developers with skill sets which forged entire generations of software and hardware. From Argonaut to Psygnosis, Japanese platform manufacturers Nintendo and Sony turned to the United Kingdom to provide the connaissance for 3D technology on the N64 with Starfox (1993) and the savoir for the synthesis of clubland cool and digital technology with the PlayStation’s WipEout (1995). The impact of bedroom coding on the UK’s position as a twenty-first century leader in the sphere was fortified with the film release of Bedrooms to Billions (2014), a narrative documenting the inception and nurturing of an industry which now contributes an annual GBP1.7bn to the UK economy (Prospect, 2015: 8). One of the most instructive elements of the release of Bedrooms to Billions was the directors’ intention to distribute a copy to every high school throughout the United Kingdom. This pledge, undertaken partly in response to the ‘Next

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Gen’ report (Livingstone and Hope, 2011), impels schools and students to pique their interest in videogames as a pathway to work rather than a short-cut to the pleasure principle. Initiatives such as the Raspberry Pi encourage open-source hardware development and museum exhibitions from ‘Game Masters’ at the Museum of Scotland and ‘Game On’ at the Barbican, which attempt to recapture the spirit of the time with dedicated academic curricula and educational spaces to inspire the next generation of coders, artists and developers to practise the art and mechanics of videogame creation, design and programming. While the films and books which lionize bedroom coding are a justified celebration of a specific, perhaps even special, time and space in the development of videogames, their increasing curation through exhibitions and reports suggests that there is a desire to see this past revitalized in future educational endeavours. It seems then, that even if the habitus cannot be replicated, the spirit of the 1980s can be revived. This chapter examines the habitus that was peculiar to this time. As a genealogical study, it begins by picking at one of the final strands of contemporary bedroom coding found in Introversion Software’s moniker as the ‘last of the bedroom coders’. One of their titles, DEFCON (2006), replete with its Cold-War identity crisis, has a special affinity with the 1980s and provides a fascinating discourse around the role of toil and play in the modern workplace and the subsequent tendency to stratify skill sets and homogenize work cycles in modern videogame development. By examining how videogames can create from copying, the discussion extends into the cracking and copying culture which was prevalent throughout the United Kingdom and Europe in the 1980s. While there is growing emphasis on the importance of bedroom coding, the focus of current studies is more on elements of ‘coding’ and less on the disposition of the ‘bedroom’. This chapter turns to extensive discussion of the bedroom as a site, perhaps even as the site of technologies in the home. As Mauss formulated in 1935, the concept of the bedroom being a locus of sleep and recuperation is wholly inaccurate. Historically, the bedroom is a venue where technologies and techniques are tried, tested, adopted and further extended into the domestic realm, generating the ‘technological habitus’ (Freund, 2004). The lack of analysis around bedroom culture and videogames requires recourse to original studies on girls’ bedroom culture from McRobbie and Garber (1976) and the recent revisions from Lincoln (2004), Byron (2008) and Bovill and Livingstone (2001), giving rise to the analysis of videogame usage by girls in the home during the 1980s.

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Having established that the bedroom is home to the technological habitus, the characteristics and dynamics which were idiosyncratic to bedroom cultures of the 1980s are examined through interview data attained from those who were intensively involved in copying and cracking and further informed by secondary data from coders in the 1980s. This is achieved via data acquired from eight (seven males, one female) participants who were interviewed in January 2015, in mutually accessible locations, conventionally their current residences. They all had a strong amateur or professional interest in the bedroom computing scene of the 1980s. They were selected via snowball sampling, with the majority historically and currently living in the English Midlands, with one participant from the Greater Manchester region. As the data gathered here includes illegal activities, all names are anonymized to prevent identification. Most striking from the participants is the level of invention and creativity evident in their interventions. From hardware imports of Sega Mega Drives from East Asia, copying games and distributing them in playgrounds, through to the adaption of media and technologies as an inspiration for play and recreation, bedrooms operated as separate but connected spaces which encouraged a welter of innovations and inventions to be tested and applied. Some of these were not always successful and often pushed the boundaries of legality, but, without exception for those coding, copying and cracking at the time, it was executed with the understanding that their actions were validated through their intrinsic benefit to wider society. Ultimately it is shown that videogames, balanced between work and play, copying and innovation, rules and transgression, private and public, offer a unique, but not yet completely dissipated, opportunity for creation and recreation.

Panic button Introversion Software’s DEFCON (2006) is the apotheosis of 1980s Cold War mania. Presenting a ‘big board’ outline of the globe familiar to viewers of brinksmanship techno-dystopias such as War Games, GoldenEye and Crimson Tide, it immediately patches the player into a world where the technical abstraction of war is hyperrealized. Vector graphics trace missile vertices of nuclear assault while their detonations recall the bulbous blooms of Atari’s Missile Command (1980). The films’ caveats are that the terminus of nuclear war is so unthinkable that even cartographers and computers cannot simulate it. Therefore total

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annihilation must be elided by deft diplomacy between humans, who are universally portrayed as the final failsafe in a computer-controlled system. DEFCON is dissatisfied with quotidian formulas of mutually assured destruction and balances of power. The ultimate goal of the game is complete destruction of the map and civilization. With its points system based on the win/loss ratio of megadeath (i.e. millions of deaths), and its escalation through the five DEFCON (Defence Condition) states, the player is impelled to destroy or be destroyed by the other players of the game, with the win condition being 80 per cent extermination of the globe. This clearly resonates with 1980s launch-detect/button-panic games, such as Nuclear War (1989) and Raid Over Moscow (1984). Unlike these interpretations, however, DEFCON is less concerned with the human element of warfare. If the game is left untended by the player, the CPU takes over proceedings and, in the majority of cases, immediately escalates to DEFCON 1 and full-scale nuclear conflict. Whether this is deliberate commentary on the folly of a war machine left to wage war on itself is not explored further by the game: its subtitle ‘Everybody Dies’ is a narrative that is as brief as fission and as chilling as nuclear winter. While DEFCON ’s content is dismissive of the human element, its structure is designed around a key component of the human condition:  work. This is not the ‘busywork’ of role playing games, where the gamer is given escort or fetch quests to increase the time-to-content quotient, or even the ‘ergodic’ (Aarseth, 1997)  interaction required when moving through levels or worlds within videogames, but the inclusion of failsafe mechanisms which means that the game can be played at work. The inclusion of an ‘office mode’ means that the gamelength matches that of the average working day. DEFCON ’s office mode runs the in-game clock in real time, with the developer acceding that eight hours is time enough ‘to end the world with nuclear conflict’ (Delay, 2006). During this time, the player is only availed to the most important events in the game, which take the form of alerts. Pinging the fugue of the everyday life of the office worker, the chinging of an email into an inbox or the ringing of a telephone form part of the wider technological habitus: notifications which demand attention and call the worker to action. The difference with office mode in DEFCON is that instead of an – often unwelcome – intrusion into the everyday, ignoring an alert results in the – often welcome – end of the everyday. To properly enable this simulated end to transpire, the game includes a ‘boss key’. Pressing the escape key twice allows the player to reduce the big board of the game to a ‘discreet icon in the system tray’ to mitigate work-based, war-game surveillance (Delay, 2006). Ascribed with

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the Kissinger-esque nomenclature ‘panic key’ by the developer, this allows the player to collapse Armageddon to the desktop, with the icon – a nuclear missile – quivering like a warhead in its silo if there is a strategic missile launch and not, presumably, teetering in response to failed work avoidance strategies. Even with its roots firmly in the absurdity of Cold War rationality, DEFCON is a fiercely contemporary game. It is immaterial at the point of sale, permitting the patron and publisher to engage in direct financial transaction. The purchasing of a videogame from the digital download site Steam is as straightforward as a status update on Facebook and expends the same effort as responding to an email. The lack of differentiation between production (as work/play) and consumption (as purchasing/play) moves the process closer to the ‘McDonaldization’ or ‘Ikeaization’ theses advanced by Ritzer (2001), where the consumer assumes responsibility for some, usually banal but always time-intensive, part of the production process. In contemporary McDonald’s of course, screens are available for ordering food, as the drive-thru moves to the front of house, while Android tablets provide sated children with easy access to Angry Birds and Bad Piggies, gaming the play/work of consumption yet further. Meanwhile, franchises such as Gran Turismo provide the gamer with a cash payment at the beginning of the month, mimicking the salaries paid to tertiary workers and ensuring that the time they spend away from their workstations is ably substituted by PlayStations.

Consumption as work In spite of the dalliances between work and play, previous research reveals that the professional development of videogames is closer to highly regimented, compartmentalized Fordist models of production. Here, staff possess tightly specified and highly specialized skill sets, where they will work on the same task for the life cycle of production, thus demonstrating the ‘self-contained and self-replicating nature of games’ cultures of production which ‘exhibit an extraordinarily high level of homogeneity’ (Dovey and Kennedy, 2006:  62). Economies of scale indicate that if a studio achieves vertical integration – for example, where the developer is also a publisher, such as Electronic Arts or Codemasters – employee numbers and budgets rise accordingly and increased bureaucratization follows. This duplicates models in other media industries such as book publishing or computer graphics imaging for films, where some parts of the process are externalized: in the production of videogames, the rendering of

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repetitive graphical models (e.g. trees in a racing game) is routinely outsourced to Asia, and particularly India and China (Wade, 2007). This demonstrates an adoption of ‘more formulaic, systematic and flexible productivity’ (Schilling, cited in Deuze, 2007: 231), widely used in high-technology production, whereby, in common with McDonaldization, less specifically skilled elements of production are externalized. Evidence of this can be seen in the sphere of consumption too, where end users are utilized as alpha- and beta-testers. Play and work become aligned as canny developers and publishers, aware of the long hype lead time of their product, release a game in an unfinished state and use the subsequent metrics to hone the product before the general boxed release. The use of gamers as crash-test dummies for alpha and beta products inverts the ‘warez’ model of distribution and piracy employed by hackers in the 1980s and 1990s. Warez are copyrighted software, often videogames, which were distributed via international postal networks and bulletin board systems into territories where they – often – weren’t sanctioned with an official release. Modified from their original form, they would include additional music, splash screens, digitized speech and, in a daring quirk, the addresses and telephone numbers of hackers, all of which served to harden loose arteries of distribution across national and international boundaries. This process, known as ‘cracking’, would often improve on the original product, including quick-loaders, virus killers and disk compression, with multi-disk games such as Shadow of the Beast (1989) reduced to half of their original size. Warez in the 1980s would subvert traditional logistical barriers, with Polish hacker Waldemar Czajkowski documenting his experience of distributing videogames behind the Iron Curtain in Poland and Czechoslovakia. He built links with members of the Polish Olympic shooting team to improve international contacts, used Action Replay cartridges to crack games and, at his network’s zenith, had eight Commodore 64 computers running asynchronously copying games to tape from a cracked master floppy disk (Czajkowski, 2009) with a sales network which stretched to Wrocław in the east, Warsaw in the north and across the border into Czechoslovakia in the south. With Poland under Soviet influence at the time – and not being subjected to copyright, intellectual property and creative commons licensing until 1994 – legislation and restrictions on piracy and cracking were a non sequitur. Many of these continental European hackers remain active today, particularly in the Baltic states, feeding into the ‘demoscene’, where skills learnt in coding digitized speech, music and graphics from Commodore games of the 1980s are part of

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the skill set of employees at Rovio, Remedy and Bugbear (Sotamaa, 2014). As seen in Chapter 2, the DIY culture established in the 1980s around Ikea-type computers, such as the Microbee, is mirrored in software development, further silhouetting the rich ludology characteristic of Scandinavian games culture. Meanwhile, as seen by the mods made to maps in Half Life and the graphical embellishments of Grand Theft Auto IV, the most critically acclaimed contemporary games continue to benefit from the expertise of the hacking and cracking community. These examples of production and consumption and work and play across a variety of times and spaces suggest that while there is standardization and even homogeneity in professional, or ‘traditional’ videogames’ production, their genealogical roots are rhizomatic, sprouting up in unexpected places, from the big board of DEFCON to the valleys of the Tatra mountains dividing Poland and Slovakia.

Silo mentality: in the bedroom If DEFCON vectors the past sum of all fears into a future which didn’t exterminate itself, Introversion Software’s present position draws deeply on the nascent gaming field, where experimentation and education were key to the development of the habitus and connaisance of 1980s videogames. Their self-styling as the ‘last of the bedroom coders’, places them in a specific time and place, which, in the present day has reached matinee-legend status with the film release of Bedrooms to Billions, the extensive documentation of Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders and the monthly ruminations of Retro Gamer. Bedroom coding is understood as the bedrock upon which the contemporary UK games industry is built. With similarities to the garage development culture of Silicon Valley in the United States (Hoefler, 1971), bedroom coders’ antecedents are in hacking and are highly influential on the subsequent cracking, demo and modding scenes. One of the most infamous early hacks in the United Kingdom involved the BBC’s Making the Most of your Micro – Live being subject to a deposition by an unknown poet (Anderson and Levene, 2012: 47). In a neat postmodern twist, the verse appeared on one of the BBC’s own microcomputers, while on air.1 This is an illustration of the synergies involved in networking across broadcast media, seen now in audience participation in talent shows and political programmes which makes near-instantaneous psephology possible. While present narratives lionize bedroom coding, it is the past which is important to the formation of these commentaries. With the widespread introduction

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of home computers into the UK domestic sphere in the early 1980s, there was a subtle alteration in the technological habitus. These machines were earnestly purchased on the twin validation that it dovetailed with schools’ involvement in the Computer Literacy Programme (see Chapter 3) and that it would ‘help with your homework’. Where radio and, in its early iterations, television would mainly be sited within one, often shared, room in the house (Silverstone, 1994), individuals using computers would silo themselves in bedrooms, dining rooms, attics and cellars to input programs from magazines and books. More often than not, the columns of code would contain typographical or technical errors which would require ad hoc correction in order to function correctly.2 As with the building of Lego, or the DIY of a mail-order computer, the basis of knowledge was built from playing with, or toying with, the technology. These tasks were often arduous and time-consuming, requiring attention to detail to isolate glitches in the code and the technical knowledge to remove them, challenges compounded by being undertaken in addition to school studies or full-time employment. While further hazing the boundaries between work and play, this process of production-as-pastime contributed to the generation of a knowledge base of connaissance which underpinned the emergent gaming field in the United Kingdom. As seen from the primary data below, toiling and playing in the altered habitus of these silos, separate yet attached to the quotidian, creates genuinely revised approaches to the use of new and established technologies, which were used to plant the seed for networks of knowledge and fearsomely creative methods of media consumption and production. Matthew Smith, fabled developer of Manic Miner (1983), used a self-modified Tandy TRS-80, which could only be used at night as the computer ‘crashed when someone put the kettle on’ (Smith, 2005). In spite of, or because of, his silo/solo nocturnal habits, Manic Miner was completed within eight weeks and became the first Spectrum game to feature in-game music, which, aptly for a game written at night and situated underground, was Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King. Meanwhile, Smith’s day job at a local Tandy store, then the locus of DIY electronics sales in the United Kingdom and United States, revealed a co-worker approached by an individual who was advertising videogames before their release and needed physical products to back his premature public relations campaign. Smith managed to code a game in three weeks, but his co-worker blanket copied Alligata’s Defender (1984),3 with the only difference being that ‘just the copyright message changed’ (Smith,

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2005). Smith’s rare interview details the habitus of an increasingly popular economic modus operandi of this time, ‘which permits domestic, artisanal . . . labour systems to revive and flourish as centrepieces rather than appendages of the production system’ (Harvey, 1989: 152). This can be manifested in the return to an ethos of cottage-industry manufacture, where individuals have full oversight over the means of production, and also towards a future where consumption itself is a function of production (Baudrillard, 1998). Even with these tensions and dynamics apparent in bedroom coding and its overlap with other social spheres, it is interesting to note that there is very little literature written during the 1980s which explores bedroom cultures, although excellent retrospective work has been undertaken by Swalwell in New Zealand and Australia. This is of particular sociological importance as there were studies undertaken prior to the 1980s which addressed the ‘alternative ways in which girls organized their cultural lives’ (Lincoln, 2004: 94), with the most significant being by McRobbie and Garber (1976). The timing of scholarly investigations by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies would appear to mesh neatly with the point at which silicon technologies were becoming pervasive in industrial society. Yet, contrary to the trends highlighted by the BBC’s Horizon documentary ‘The Chips are Down’ where software and microcomputers would extensively influence the everyday (see Chapter 3) empirical and critical research into the bedroom faded away and was practically non-existent at the end of the 1970s. It has only recently been revived by moral panics around social media use in the private sphere, triggering studies by Bovill and Livingstone (2001), Byron (2008) and Downs (2011). Ignoring the importance of the bedroom as a container for technology and a producer of culture means that sociological theory is under-conceptualized, poorly realized and scantly applied. Therefore, before drawing on the data which reveals the cultural nuances and niceties of the people who code and copy, it is necessary to situate the habitus of the bedroom in its wider sociological, technological and cultural context.

Technological habitus Following from Freund’s idea of the technological habitus which ‘allows individuals to function in a technological society’ (Freund, 2004: 273), it is instructive to see how the bedroom is a prime locus for the development of technology

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and one which has a principal technical effect upon the body.4 For Mauss, the idea of retiring to bed to sleep being as easy as falling out of bed is both ‘totally inaccurate’ and wrapped up in a blanket of technologies. For those used to the traversal of prairies on horseback, sleeping while riding is second nature, for others, sleeping on stones is less likely to incite insomnia than switching beds. This leads Mauss to equate the bed with being one of the prime and primary technologies, so much so that it is viewed as ‘instrumental assistance’ (Mauss, 1973: 80). This is a technology which, perhaps more than any other everyday object, completely changes human relationships with their surroundings at the natural and technical level, with a concurrent and equally significant effect on the social. First, the positioning of the person is modified to a horizontal posture, leaving the body, to all intents and purposes, prone, in terms of pose and in relation to outward threats. Second, the individual will often sleep with others, either as siblings, sexual partners, roommates or in protection of the young, thus mimicking other higher primates in communal sleeping. This encourages reproduction (outside of universal taboos such as incest) and rejects the modern mode of silo/solo sleeping, which, for many in the post-war generations of the West, is seen as something akin to a birthright. Third, although there seems to be nothing more natural – or indeed closer to nature – than sleeping, there remains the strange predilection for augmenting beds, and by extension bedrooms, with technologies. There are technologies to make the environment more comfortable and ‘closer to nature’, such as curtains and artwork; there are technologies that assist with temperature regulation, such as wool duvets and central heating; technologies that coax sleep, such as sleeping pills and hot drinks, while alarm clocks and energy drinks awake the somnambulant from slumber; there are even technologies such as white noise apps, which, by mimicking the noise of trains, central heating boilers and TV static (does that even exist any more?), send babies off to sleep so that mothers and fathers may sleep better and be more effective parents – and workers – the following day. There is apparently no end to the technical and instrumental assistance to which humans will subject themselves in order to maximize the quantity and quality of their sleep, so there is little wonder that this represents a substantial part of the ‘cyborgian prosthetic’ (Freund, 2004: 281), where the internal biorhythm of the ‘natural’ body attempts to adapt to the technical rhythms imposed upon it by external forces, thus generating ‘gaps or seams’ in the bodily and social habitus. This is well illustrated by the alarm clock, which in its everyday guise is used to wake an individual up at a certain point in the day. As the process

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is repeated over time, the body’s seams are opened by the technological habitus and permeate the bodily habitus (see Wacquant, 2004)  so that the individual wakes before the alarm clock, thereby internalising or sedimenting the technology into the techniques of the body. Therefore, waking up at that time becomes habit, a muscle memory that in contradiction to the idea of sleep and the techniques of the body, actually becomes more difficult to overcome the harder one tries to supplant it. It is little wonder then that the (English) language around going to sleep is filled with challenge and work: ‘climbing into bed’, tossing and turning’, ‘counting sheep’, ‘not able to switch off ’, all suggest a set of techniques that must be mastered before sleep can be achieved. Expanding on Mauss, it is not that there is nothing natural about the bed, but there is nothing natural about sleep. In the twenty-first century, mobile digital technologies have been introduced to the bedchamber, which, whether used as alarm clocks or a way of staying connected to the social media habitus, arrive with their own caveats in that the luminescence of their screens simulate nature too much in their mimicking of sunlight, thus making individuals more awake before they attempt to sleep (Crary, 2013). The techniques and technologies of sleep in the bedroom, originally a project to imitate nature through lullabies and reading stories, ends with humans flying too close to a simulated sun.

Gender in the bedroom With the techniques of sleep and its habitus so predisposed to the technological, it is unsurprising that the bedroom accommodates the latest innovations. From the wireless hi-fi alarm clock to the wi-fi of wireless digital mobile devices, the bedroom is a welcome host to the bold and the new. In the United Kingdom, the early work of McRobbie and Garber into girls’ bedroom culture was an explicit response to the male-homosocial research of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. They found bedrooms were venues for teenage girls to gossip about pop idols and boys while leafing through the pages of Jackie magazine (1976: 220). Lincoln (2004) perceives this as a ‘peer-centred’ culture and the separateness of the bedroom from siblings, parents and less welcome others results in creative co-creation across time and space. Girls would visit each other’s bedrooms and reproduce their experience from one venue to the next. This provides a ‘home-from-home’, a safe venue to undertake what Goffman has termed the ‘secret consumption’ of US teenage bedrooms of the early Cold War

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(1990: 51). The standardization of the setting and the experience is anticipatory of the ‘work-from-home’ mentality of bedroom coders, where individuals, with their peers, would code at home in the evenings alongside going out to a fulltime job in the day. There is also the early twinkling of the forthcoming homogeneity of contemporary modes of videogames production as witnessed by Deuze (2007) and Dovey and Kennedy (2007) above. With the scene set for extensive work into bedroom cultures, there is considerable surprise that these sites of innovations were not subject to more intensive and extensive sociological investigation. This may be due to the justified focus of McRobbie and Garber on the feminist angle of teen girls, where the majority of bedroom videogame consumption and production in the 1980s was performed by teen males (Haddon, 1990). In the United States, research on the use of Atari videogame console use at home found that families with all girls had the ‘highest percentage of recorded time spent playing with other family members’ but that girls as an overall percentage tended to play less than boys (Mitchell, 1984: 1). Interestingly, where girls would desist from playing alone, boys  – and their fathers  – were more likely to play alone, showing how the support of peers appears to be significant to girls across different elements of media consumption, whereas boys would be happy to continue solitary play. The paper ultimately argues that the use of videogames in the home environment adds a new dimension to fraternal interactions, with brothers and sisters playing games together and fathers and daughters provided with a sphere for cooperation, resulting in a ‘co-operative spirit which had freshly emerged within the family’ (Mitchell, 1984: 34). The caveats to the happy families scenario are that the source of this new-found cooperation is in competitive gaming, with one respondent affirming that ‘in male competitive sports, this is the only thing that’s come along that can bridge our gap, the gap between fathers and daughters’ (Mitchell, 1984: 18), suggesting that the lacuna needs to be bridged from the perspective of the teenage girl to the alpha male head of the household and not vice versa. The reportage by Mitchell is generally uncritical towards videogames in the private sphere with families only reporting a negative impact from the noise generated by the game and not from extended play or ‘addiction’, which was a widespread concern among families at the time (see, e.g., Loftus and Loftus, 1983). It is interesting to note then that arcades and their games are negatively reported by respondents. The reasons are due to the qualitative experience – ‘I like playing at home better. You don’t have to stand in line’; financial considerations – ‘I don’t waste my money on the ones that I play at home’; and

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gendering ‘one special arcade is his whole mission in life on Saturday . . . he won’t take his sister. He says it’s not a good place for her; only boys go there’ (Mitchell, 1984: 23). The home environment, being a place where females co-create and congregate is viewed as preferable to the testosterone darkness and threat posed by the arcade (see Chapter 5) and therefore a more suitable setting for children – of both sexes – to play videogames.

Bedroom cultures This highlights two important considerations, both of which are related to the historical formation of the contemporary technological habitus. The first is related to the timing and externalities involved in Mitchell’s study. Its publication a year after the videogame crash of 1983 and two years after the Atari Alamogordo incident, where millions of Atari home-console cartridges were buried, coincides with a period when Atari was in considerable financial assay. Its parent company, Warner Bros, already demonstrating cross-media synergy with Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld (1983), also funded Mitchell’s study with ‘a modest grant from the Institute for Education Action Research of Atari’ (Mitchell, 1984:  8). In spite of the generally positive report on home-gaming from Mitchell, there is no suggestion that her research was unduly influenced by Atari or Warner Bros, an observation borne out by its similarity to other academic studies of the time (e.g. Loftus and Loftus, 1983; Greenfield, 1984). It is, however, worth noting that Atari’s pop-charm offensive moved from Sudnow’s edgy, pathological obsession with the arcade in Breakout, to the relative domestic serenity of the home milieu. While it may have been too late to salve the wounds caused by the 1983 crash, the strategy of selling to families, and expressly females within that unit, is clearly viable. This was the approach of Nintendo’s Wii 20 years later, which was marketed to females with as much zeal as Microsoft to the core gaming audience, with advertisements prominent in female-directed fashion magazines Red, Glamour and Cosmopolitan. Nintendo’s development of the Wii-mote motion controller moved inputs away from the convoluted button-mashing of Sony and Microsoft consoles into an arena more closely allied to the bodily habitus (Wacquant, 2004). Here, the movement of the body in copying the motions associated with playing tennis or golf on Wii Sports (2006), was directly transferred onto the screen. Unlike Wacquant’s pugilistic purpose, however, there was no requirement for this to

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be learnt muscle-memory behaviour, but an approximation of the action. This could be achieved from watching how something is done, rather than having connaisance and technical mastery of the field.5 The relationship between the tactility of the body and the technological habitus is played out in the currency of touchscreen technology on digital mobile devices where females purchase the majority of smartphones and the games and apps which run on them. The times when females young and old played a ‘support role’ to the bedroom gamer and coder and were not ‘the definer of games purchases within the family and generally less visible . . . to producers’ (Haddon, 1990: 106) is today as antithetical as using an analogue dial to make a telephone call. Second, the recent revival of interest in the home, and specifically the bedroom, as a site for the study of media consumption, is situated on girls’ use of digital technologies. With girls’ recreation socially and historically situated in the bedroom, there is a stronger research base in this area, but there is also the patriarchal suggestion that their historical disconnection from the public sphere has made them less able to navigate the threats of the public-in-the-private area of social media and online games, as contemporary bedroom culture is ‘more screen-centred, more high-tech and hence more boy-friendly’ (Bovill and Livingstone, 2001: 5), inferring that girls are positioned as a group at considerable risk of online predation. Current policy by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre focuses, rightly or wrongly, on teenage girls taking responsibility for avoiding the pitfalls presented by sexting and online grooming, whereas boys figure less prominently, or are present as aggressors/agitators (CEOP, 2011; 2007). Research interest in the opportunities and threats of predation is growing as the bedroom bristles with technologies which connect the private with the public. The net result is that while the average 8–18-year-old uses media for 8.5 hours a day (Roberts et al., 2005: 37),6 they continue to use ‘old’ media, such as magazines, TV and radio, as seen in the studies by McRobbie and Goffman and the advertisements by Nintendo, thereby adhering to McLuhan’s maxim that new media tend to run alongside old media rather than supersede it. Instead, it is the replacement of one interaction with another which is significant as young people of both sexes use videogames and the Internet as a ‘substitute to going out’ (Byron, 2008: 46), swapping the social networks of bedroom cocreation with online social networks. Perhaps the appeal of social networks lie in their homogeneity, which is reminiscent of a home away from home? Perhaps their success is not that they are quantitatively different from the everyday, but they simulate and substitute the qualities of the everyday? Perhaps the networks

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that are grounded in the Cold War, of secret consumption and siloed production are an indicator of the subsequent mass engagement in the social media habitus? These are themes worthy of further consideration, and some are touched upon in the primary data below.

Zoning out: Computers in the bedrooms of the 1980s Identifying the standardization from one space to the next in teenage bedrooms provides a silhouette of the subsequent homogeneity evident in the commercial videogames’ industry. As with many silhouettes, it is what is elided that is often significant. Contemporary research on bedroom culture outlines the subtle but substantial differences manifest in ‘zones’, which Lincoln, following Lefebvre (1991), identifies as a ‘physical and visible arrangement of furniture, technical equipment . . . in fact any item that is ‘contained’ (Lincoln, 2004: 97). Lefebvre’s overlap with Bourdieu’s conception of socially organized spaces, a key component of his project of habitus (Bourdieu, 2010: 118–125) is apparent for all critics of these insular, but connected spaces that generate activities which ‘may not be fixed in physical or cognitive activities: zones can overlap or integrate’ (Lincoln: 2004: 97). This is an important observation and, for Lefebvre, writing originally in 1974, a prescient one as the bedrooms of the 1980s were themselves venues of technique, technical equipment and instrumental assistance. This is highlighted in the author’s interview with ‘Stuart’: I would have like the latest gizmos in there [my bedroom] and it would all feed into the games . . . it was like the computer was the most important thing and the bed was kind of secondary. I would lie on the bed and use the computer, the phone, the TV, but I wouldn’t always use it for sleeping . . . sometimes it seemed that sleeping got in the way of the kind of things that I really wanted to do, talking to friends, making copies of games, playing the latest crack [professionally copied game]. (Interview with Stuart)

The overlap and integration of the zones of the room ‘as a mediated and fluid construction’ (Lincoln, 2004: 97) is apparent here. Technologies that would once have been restricted to common living spaces are in widespread use in the bedroom. Telephones, once effectively hardwired to walls, became portable with the advent of jack-plug enabled ‘Inphones’ in 1981 and quickly became mobile with the advent of cordless technologies. Some individuals were able to introduce telecommunications networks to their habitus earlier than others

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The use of social networks to affect the growth in technological and telecoms networks appears as a universal theme here, and is as apparent from the piracy of central Europe to the quasi-legality of imports and exports in central England. While Czajkowski looked to the West for the latest software, John’s family reached East for the latest hardware, which by the end of the 1980s had effectively turned into a videogame hardware import and onward sales business: I’m not sure how many people knew about the controls that Sega had over Megadrives was really nothing more than the sizing of the cartridges . . . UK consoles had smaller slots than Jap7 ones. I would get a hot solder [soldering iron] and open up the top and sell them in the local paper as fully converted consoles. I didn’t have the overheads, so I could flog them with an imported game cheaper than the local shops like Console Concepts in Stoke were selling them. Everyone was happy: people were playing with hardware that normally wouldn’t play all of the games, so they could play games like Bare Knuckle [Streets of Rage] as a Jap cart before it was released here . . . and I was quids in . . . it might not have been fully legal, but I don’t think I broke the law. (Interview with John)

John is describing the position of ‘grey’ imports within the console markets of the 1980s. This was an important facet in the legality of hardware sales in the late 1980s and early 1990s and, while there was no tort of law, equally there were no guarantees if the console failed. Often grey imports would require simple modification; new plugs would have to be fitted to the power leads to convert from two-pin to three-pin systems and, on occasion, third party controllers were incompatible with them. The existence of Console Concepts, which was one of the United Kingdom’s largest importers of hardware and software with two stores in Staffordshire (Newcastle-Under-Lyme and Hanley), would have meant increased competition, but also an increased market as there was higher demand for early release software which ran on imported hardware. The quasi-legality of grey imports added a chancier dimension to the play and sale of games, one which magazines such as Mean Machines and Computer and Video Games

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would endorse and fetishize. Celebrity journalists such as Julian Rignall and Paul Glancey promoted East Asian software as being superior to UK/European versions8 with the exotic matt sheen of solid-state black boxes increasing their appeal among gamers of the time. Jeff finds that there was ‘something different about the Jap carts. It wasn’t [just] their sizing [they were often squatter than UK cartridges], it was the artwork, presentation, even the smell was different.’ The experience of import games at the end of the 1980s chimes with the ‘multistability’ of games that vintage games exhibited as they moved through their life course (Guins, 2014), but for Jeff at least there was more to it than merely the art and the aesthetic: They [gamers] often say that they prefer physical releases because of the touch, even the smell of unwrapping the cellophane, opening the instruction manual . . . there was even more of that back then, as if the journey from the other side of the world had made it more foreign somehow, more alien . . . but at the same time somehow putting you in touch with that foreignness. (Interview with Jeff )

Being in touch with foreignness, a kind of imagined community (Anderson, 1991) of games and gamers that stretched across the Pacific and the Atlantic is part of a wider globalized network of games that is enshrined in the ‘Super Mario factor’ where a game featuring an Italian plumber is designed by a Japanese company and finds its spiritual home in the United States, touching on all spaces and times in between. Arcade games were one of the first truly globalized consumer products, partly due to their anchoring in the universal language of play, partly due to the universalities of consumption, but sometimes due to their proclivity to generate genuinely significant childhood experiences. I was at an arcade in Yorkshire, I  think it was Scarborough and the OutRun machine was faulty . . . it was basically on free-play . . . When you’ve had free-play OutRun, the C64 version in a cold dining room on the black-and-white 14 inch [television] just doesn’t cut it any more, but you still play it, you still imagine that you’re back there and you’re feeling the Ferrari [hydraulics on the arcade cabinet] throwing you around. (Interview with Mark)

As seen in the discussion around savoir and connaissance at the end of the previous chapter, proficiency in the area of the gaming field permits access to areas of the culture not normally open to non-savants. Yet Mark’s abiding memory is not of completing the game, or of being proficient at it, but of being provided access to a game that would conventionally have cost many pounds to play. In distinction to savoir then, it is the technical failure of the game that provides access to

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a field which would conventionally be locked to the gamer. This is part of the field of videogames where special proficiency in an area creates a fail-state in the game, which, paradoxically, is highly desirous to players of some games as seen by being able to ‘turn the machine over’, where a game’s score resets to zero due to it being too large to calculate, or when accessing the legendary ‘labyrinth’ level 256 of Pac-Man.9 This is a position shared by developers. With programming teams looking to iterate franchises over years and even decades, the process of learning through trial and error is often one of the best ways to improve a title ‘it was because of the failure of Tekken 4 that we are successful today. In game development failures often teach us quite a lot’ (Harada, 2014: 95).

Public and private: copying culture The intersection and overlap between different spheres and zones is a key component of contemporary research into the social and cultural habitus of the bedroom, particularly in the recent work of Downs (2011) and Bovill and Livingstone (2001). This chapter has highlighted how these intersections do not always lead to diversity, but instead to elements of homogenization, which are evident in the technologies used, such as TVs, internet-connected devices and music players and also in the techniques used to try and negate the gadgetry, so that the technological habitus can be negotiated and the bedroom used for its primary purpose: sleep. Yet, the reality is that the legacy of bedroom coding in the United Kingdom is such that it is the Lydian Stone for an entire industry and one which some, such as Introversion Software, use as a means of differentiation from other studios as well as across time and space. While present retrospectives declare that the UK games industry is idiosyncratic in comparison to other European nations and Oceania, Asia and North America, there are also a range of interdependencies, as Chapter 2 has shown. In common with contemporary social theory,10 the formation of bedroom coding is dependent on techniques of copying from other media. The low-fidelity nature of graphics on 8- and 16-bit computers meant that games offered a representation of reality, a cold media which required the imagination of the gamer to properly connect it with the social world. Games such as this would often be created by a lone programmer coding in parallel with education or employment. The contrast to the large, specialist teams of today, compartmentalized into specific skill-sets to generate a simulacra of a western-front warzone is apparent. Yet as the respondents

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below illustrate, the culture of copying, so wonderfully – and sometimes terribly – realized in contemporary games, finds its genealogy in the play and work of the 1980s as the economic habitus develops from amateurism, to professionalamateurism to professionalism. With homogeneity in the workplace and the associated practice of contemporary developers, criticism of modern approaches to games production appears uncomplicated. Like alpha and beta testing, focus groups allow the designer to generate a game which will have the greatest proclivity for commercial success, with imagination a tertiary consideration. However, for those growing up using computers which could offer only representations of reality, the need to emulate and copy other media and art forms was in itself a means of exercising creativity. We’d play Super Huey or Gunship [helicopter simulators] and we’d line the computer up behind the joystick, so we had like a cockpit set-up. The guy at the front would be the pilot and behind would be the navigator . . . the screen would be the glass of the cockpit which we could both see . . . It was set-up like Blue Thunder, one my favourite shows of the time and when you pressed F1 and started the ignition the cockpit would light up like when Airwolf powers up, it was pretty fun pretending to be Dom or String [characters from Airwolf ]. (Interview with Darren)

The simulation of Cold War scenarios was one of the most commercially and critically successful avenues of games production in the 1980s games, such was its embeddedness in the social habitus. Paul Norman, a programmer at software house Cosmi had a particular interest in capturing the rational absurdity of the time with titles such as Chernobyl and Defcon 5 and was one of the first coders to introduce televisual/cinematic elements to his games (Wallstrom, 2002. It is Norman’s recollection of his development of Super Huey that reveals other media to be as much as an influence on the process of creativity in production as of its consumption: We all worked at home because there was no Cosmi company at the time . . . Cosmi tells the story that they wanted a flight sim and I didn’t. Actually, I said, ‘Fine, but it has to be a helicopter.’ (I was watching Airwolf on TV at the time) . . . because it was the first helicopter sim out and because choppers were becoming more and more popular in the media, the game took off and went straight up. (Norman, cited in Wallstrom, 2011)

Where Introversion’s DEFCON elides the difference between work and play, Super Huey, coded some 30 years earlier, follows a similar process. As a product

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and a consumable, a piece of work and a site of play, it was inspired by a narrative, in this case the Cold War techno-thriller Airwolf. The design of Norman’s game and the execution of Darren’s ‘cockpit’ draw inspiration from how the world is presented by television, arguably the dominant pop-culture media form of the time. The practices involved here are an indicator of how powerful digital cultures are in the advancement of convergence (Jenkins, 2006) where remediation and iteration are central to widespread engagement with popular culture, while reinforcing how the genealogy of videogames is inspired by a welter of influences. As with any convergence, some will be fresh and some fatigued, but all are deployed in the configuration of – what was then – a new field. The advent of any new field brings with it new opportunities and challenges. With videogames representing the ‘most significant manifestation of interactive media to date’ (Haddon, 1988: 52–53) changes abounded. Alterations to the economic modus operandi evidenced by crackers and coders operating out of their bedrooms brought a range of reactions, some of which directly impacted on the production of ancillary technologies. One of the reasons behind the early success of home computers as opposed to home games consoles was their flexibility, in terms of playing and producing games. Computers such as the Spectrum 48k and Commodore 64 had an additional benefit: their use of proprietary audio-cassettes. For publishers, using audio cassettes ensured that production costs stayed low, programs could be mass distributed11 and ‘jewel’ cassette boxes which could be stacked like Lego in every high street outlet from Boots the Chemist to the local newsagent. For developers, saving partly written or completed programs to tape allowed convenient distribution of games to a potential publisher or customer via mail order. For the end user, cassettes represented a ‘hidden selling point’ (Bagnall, 2005: 468), and the benefits were legion. Blank audio cassettes were cheap, widely available and easily copied as crackers and hackers from a ‘sophisticated piracy network imported the latest games from around the globe so Commodore 64 owners received the latest hits free’ (Bagnall, 2005: 468). Just as DVD, Blu-Ray and high definition technology bootstraps onto contemporary consoles to influence and encourage audiovisual purchases, so the ‘rampant piracy network among teenagers’ (Bagnall, 2005: 468) brought a new dimension to the bedroom’s technological habitus. It was Christmas and my mum and dad bought me this Philips tape deck . . . It had something on it, I think it was called dubbing . . . You put the original [cassette/game] in one side and in the other a blank tape, press record and play . . . and you could play a game while you waited for it to copy. I can’t believe that

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they [Philips] would have designed it for anything but copying, as it had this ‘high-speed dubbing’ setting which did it in half the time . . . [but] they might have been thinking about music, not games, cos you could copy from the radio too. (Interview with Ronnie)

Ronnie’s experience was not an isolated one among gamers of the time, the only difference being that he didn’t use the technologies for economic gain. For others, the sophisticated global networks so familiar to hackers and crackers who ensured that no game was off limits no matter the territory was also fully operational at the local level, with so-called playground copying: My dad would run me and my mates out to this village at the weekend and there’d be a guy there with all the latest games and you’d borrow them for a week and then give them back. The price of a title meant that you had to pay more for the arcade conversions . . . we’d rent them and then copy them. All three of us were copying them . . . we’d swap over the weekend so that we all had copies of the game . . . we’d have a library of games, we’d list them on the computer, print it off and then flog them at school the next week. Kids of all ages from first years to sixth formers were buying them from us . . . it was mint as they’d even provide the tapes and my old man [dad] rented the games so it was sheer profit! . . . We even had a name for our company: Copyline UK . . . Unfortunately it wasn’t so easy when my mate went to a 386 [PC] and my dad bought an Amiga as disks were harder to copy without the proper hardware. (Interview with John)

While the piracy John and his friends executed was not on the scale of Czajkowski’s efforts in Poland, similar principles applied: games were acquired from an unconnected source, multiple copies made and distributed into spaces far removed from the domestic environment, but still connected dynamically and fluidly. It is unlikely that either John’s or Czajkowski’s piracy efforts would have been possible without the use of a separate, connected space to undertake their ventures. The separateness of the school playground from the bedroom minimizes risk and allows copying to be undertaken in private and away from authority figures such as parents and teachers, who through computer clubs, technology purchases and game rentals, were inadvertently assisting in copying efforts as well as enhancing coding skills. Meanwhile, the networks connected through and with the bedroom permitted quick reproduction through high-speed dubbing, easier distribution via landline telephones and information sharing through the use of dot-matrix printers. In effect, copying, in parallel with coding, was holistic, with the individual responsible for all segments of acquisition, (re)production and distribution. Similar to the crafts of coopering,

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cobbling and metalwork before it and PC-building and app-development after it, copying and coding is part of a genealogy of cottage industries which is seen as ‘ennobling, humanizing and hence the ideal means through which individuals could express their humanity’ (Campbell, 2005: 24–25). The ethos that videogames offered a public good was manifest throughout the culture. While R. J. Mical, the acclaimed arcade game designer acclaims, ‘I wanted to make something meaningful and significant, something that was good for me and brought together all my skills . . . so I had the idea I ought to go into videogames’ (Mical, cited in Bagnall, 2005: 414), the (then) teenager copying in his bedroom affirms, [T]hey’re just games aren’t they? But sometimes they’re more than that. There was this one lad at school and he was really keen on getting games from us . . . every week he would buy a new game, always the latest ones. He said his mum used to give him money to buy games like Armalyte from us, but, I don’t know, I got the feeling that he might not have been able to afford full-priced games, so what we did helped that lad have games that he might not have had. (Interview with John)12

Fierce independence, forged through the interdependence of networks led to the creation of an industry marked by its play and playfulness. Bedrooms and playgrounds, a traditional habitus of ad hoc play with train sets and balls became a technological habitus where playing videogames was but one activity in a wider toying with technology. This transferred from individual pastimes in separate but connected environments to influence hardware manufacture, with those who coded and copied in their spare time being ultimately – and legitimately – financially rewarded for their endeavours. There was a sense of youthful fun in the [Commodore] UK offices . . . Commodore UK employees derived a large degree of satisfaction from what they were engaged in, and this was no accident. Commodore UK had a strategy of hiring hobbyists. The young staff loved to come into work each day, since Commodore paid them for doing something they would do without pay. (Bagnall, 2005: 83)

Play to work The experience of working in the UK offices of Commodore in the 1980s brings the genealogy of coding and copying full circle. DEFCON, a game idealized, developed, programmed and distributed by the ‘last of the bedroom coders’ blurs the lines between production/play and consumption/work with the same

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nicety as a proxy war in South East Asia. Yet the bedroom, a space traditionally viewed as a venue for refuge, to silo the solo from the pressures of the everyday, particularly for teenage girls, is also a space where ancillary technologies are introduced to the home and the nexus for a separate but connected technological habitus. The study of this habitus first by Mauss and then McRobbie and Garber and Goffman, builds on the idea of the cottage industry as an individual and public good and affirms that print and communication technologies provide a welcoming ‘home-from-home’. This homogenized space, replicated in other bedrooms across the West acts as a gateway for the introduction of computer and digital technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and is the bedrock for the copying, coding and cracking discussed in this chapter and further developed in Chapter 6. While some of homogeneities are evident in the practice of videogame developers today who exhibit extraordinarily high divisions of labour and specialized skill sets, the inculcation of technology into the habitus of yesteryear provides a realm for experiential learning, for connaissance of trial and error, failure and success, which has developed into the savoir of the present day. With tools and skill sets honed in the bedroom, copying, cracking and coding was valued as much by Rovio as it was by Commodore and was exalted as much by Bedrooms to Billions as it was denigrated by politicians in the 1980s. The contemporary desire to curate this culture, seen in the Barbican’s touring ‘Game On’ exhibition and the National Museum of Scotland’s 2015 Game Masters exhibition, is itself a form of copying of these spaces and times. Meanwhile, the National Videogame Arcade, which opened in Nottingham in 2015, promises to ‘make digital creativity accessible to everyone, to inspire and develop the game-makers of tomorrow’ (Gamecity, 2014). The desire to replicate the halcyon days of bedroom cultures is evident in the provision of a ‘permanent educational space to provide lessons in game development’ in the ‘world’s first cultural centre for gaming’ (Retro Gamer, 2014: 10), providing a fixed address in Nottingham city centre to attempt to crack the code of the phenomenon of bedroom coding. The standardized, globalized space of the museum (Castells, 2001) is caught in a peculiar temporal bind between inspiring and creating a future legion of programmers by snaring a past time and space which is celebrated, but quickly fading, and, due to a lack of primary sociological research, poorly understood in its economic and cultural context. The particular difficulty then, for policy-makers and politicians, for teachers and students, is in the copying and replication of the environment that

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surrounded videogames of the time. As this chapter has shown, the generation of the technological habitus is unique to that period, even if many of the dynamics involved in its generation were reliant on the gradual development of generic technologies which were widely available and flexible in their application. The result was siloed spaces which were separate, but connected, to the public realm, a predicate familiar to many Internet-connected homes and businesses around the country, where screens are the key mediator in relationships. Ultimately, the common theme from the coders, copiers and crackers of the time appears to be that it is only by offering the opportunity to play and toy around with technology, often on the borders of legality, that ‘entirely new sectors of production’ can be enervated (Harvey, 1989: 147). While initiatives such as the National Videogame Arcade and Raspberry Pi represent the building blocks of this process, the concurrent habitus that allows – if not permits – the experiential learning process to take place is no longer apparent in contemporary cultures around videogame development, as seen in the research of Deuze, and Dovey and Kennedy, which emphasize just how homogenising the processes are, even if the skills acquired during this time are well deployed in the current industry.

Back to work? As this chapter shows, homogenized spaces and copying and recreation of products was popular and widespread in bedroom cultures, but the processes themselves, the creative use of new and established technologies were novel, with individuals and teams inspired by a kaleidoscope of sources from Airwolf to the ZX Spectrum. These influences, twinned with the overriding ethos that videogames were a moral and ethical enterprise which benefitted wider society, justified the use of technology for ends for which it was not primarily designed, exceeding homework, listening to music or idly chatting on the telephone. The kernel of resistance found in the spirit of the time is summed up neatly by Eugene Jarvis, developer of Defender, one of the most copied and cloned games of all time: ‘[I]n the infancy of videogames we spent a lot of time watching TV – a broadcast medium that was dictated. We were being “programmed” and the videogame was a kind of revolt’ (Jarvis, 2014: 61). So, while different media were being appropriated by games, gamers, coders, copiers and crackers, this was in the service of a new medium and the wider manipulation of the technological habitus.

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It is Introversion Software’s built-in resistance to work evidenced in the boss keys and icons of DEFCON which perhaps provides a vector to follow in the future: the viewing of play as productive pursuit rather than as mere pastime, an ends within itself rather than a means to the ends of leisure, and a realization that games themselves involve a toying with rules and norms that is central to recreation and the creation of novel ideas. While the alternative is not nuclear Armageddon, it is an unwelcome thought that the last of the bedroom coders should also represent the last of the culture which gave rise to them.

Notes 1 The hacker remained anonymous for over 30 years until Retro Gamer revealed it to be ex-Argonaut CEO Jez San in 2015 (Retro Gamer, 2015: 95). 2 My own experience of this stretches to copying 50 lines of BASIC into a Commodore 64 to make a hot-air balloon with a ‘Commodore’ insignia move across the screen. After three hours of typing onto a black-and-white television, only half the balloon was visible. Needless to say, I didn’t have the wherewithal to go back and change the faulty code. 3 It is assumed that the game that Smith is referring to is Guardian (1984), which is a clone of Williams’ Defender (1980). However, there is evidence that the game was released under several different titles as it attempted to negotiate and negate the problems surrounding copyright infringement, including copying the original arcade nomenclature of Defender on its initial retail release in the United Kingdom. 4 It is important to see that scholars of technology, whether critical or affirmative, see the discipline both as abstract, as in the development of schemas, simulations and drawings, which are solidified into components and tools and ultimately used in production and consumption and as applied, as in a set of practices to achieve a preset outcome such as with programming, surgery or teaching. This demonstrates an overlap with contemporary understandings of habitus, which is viewed as ‘the mediating category, straddling the divide between the objective and the subjective’ (Wacquant, 2004a: 391). For further discussion of the impact of abstract and applied technologies on society, see, for example, Arthur (2009) and Lefebvre (1991). 5 As seen in the primary data, the presentation of how the world is seen, for example, through other media, rather than how the world actually is, for example, how it is individually perceived, is fundamental to the development of successful videogames.

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6 This figure is adjusted for the methods by which individuals multi-screen, for example, using the internet while the TV is on: one hour may pass, but their media usage is equated to two hours due to the two media being used concurrently, however uneven the engagement. 7 It is important to recall that the nomenclature ‘JAP’ was used by specialist magazines to denote the origin of the hardware/software of the time. This was not related to ethnic origin and was closer to a method of identifying the differences in audiovisual output (e.g., UK = PAL; NTSC = US/JAP), to allow ‘grey’ purchasing of hardware and software imports to take place. 8 Very often this was the case as UK/PAL versions would run at a lower resolution and in a letterbox format, providing a technically degraded experienced for native hardware and software. This was particularly prevalent on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. 9 See Juul (2013) for further discussion of the complex relationship between failure and games. 10 For further discussion around the impact of simulations and substitution on society, see especially Baudrillard (1990), Bauman (2000) and Virilio (2008). 11 US Gold, one of the largest vertically integrated software houses in the United Kingdom, was founded on the back of the success of Centresoft, which distributed games to major high-street retailers (Anderson, 1985: 47). Having these networks in place was central to US Gold’s success from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, and Centresoft remains one of the most influential boxed and digital games’ distributors in the United Kingdom today. 12 The challenges proffered by breaking the law in the quest for profit are justified at an individual level by John’s belief that copying is a kind of Tobin tax on videogames: redistributing the most expensive and desirable software to those who can least afford it. Institutions charged with protecting copyright in the United Kingdom were unimpressed by the general acceptance of piracy being inherent in home computer use. The European Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) launched advertising campaigns to prohibit and prosecute individuals who pirated software, yet with the advertisements appearing as comic strips, their approach to enforcement seemed to be as playful as the games themselves. The focus was on monetary reward for information relating to piracy with one advert encouraging schoolchildren to report teachers who allowed copying at an after-school computer club (Campbell, 2006). This, to all intents and purposes, was a contradiction. Much of the copying undertaken at the time was to save money on purchases, not to make it: the principle of delayed gratification doesn’t apply when the latest conversion of a Capcom coinop can be procured in 20 minutes with minimum financial outlay.

5

Deeper Underground: Inside the Arcaves

Put your money in kid, and join me in the funhouse. Edward Trapunski, Special When Lit

Insert coin Perhaps more than videogames themselves, amusement arcades are viewed warily by cultural commentators. One of the first places in which coin-op games  – and not only videogames  – could be played, they have long been a venue where the banalities of the quotidian are suspended and a special, separate space of the game is created that allows goals to be achieved through pre-agreed rules, latitude in innovation and the safe execution of risk. With both the games and the arcades themselves viewed in such a way, the transformative impact of the games and their habitus is demonstrated. As Kocurek (2012a) argues, they are able to permeate the membrane of this special space and change the way other, interconnected parts of society are perceived. This chapter explores the spaces created in, through and with arcades. Historically viewed as an unflattering venue where deviancy and dereliction run as free as the youth who populated them (see, e.g., Fisher 1995; Huff and Collinson, 1987) they are now just as often viewed as being as dilapidated as the seaside towns that pay host to them (Gazzard, 2014). Yet their legacy as a progenitor of separate spaces, which have rebellious, subterranean (Young, 2010) or even magical properties (Salen and Zimmerman, 2005), must be examined both on their own terms of deviancy and dereliction and within the tactically pure form of games themselves. This analysis, along with examples from pinball, gambling and videogames also takes note of court and field games and pugilism to properly ascertain where, why and how interactions take place within

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the arcade habitus, or the arcaves of the title of this chapter. Informed through recourse to Marcuse’s (2002) observation of a wargame in the basement of the RAND corporation, the creation of arcaves are further evidenced by the slant of their geographical occupation of liminal non-places, their position in subculture, their political vilification, their generation of social deviancy and their positioning as the driver of legally dubious economic relationships. These separate spaces are examined in detail through references to empirical data gathered in interviews with those who played and worked in amusement arcades in the 1980s. With many of these respondents still personally, economically and socially invested in arcades, detailed biographies, comparisons between arcades past and the present and discussion around the future of arcades is enabled, providing (almost) a seaside postcard of this most compelling and contradictory area of the history of videogames in the United Kingdom.

Press start It is early twenty-first-century Detroit. The breathless implosion of Western civilization is pervasive. Teens stand slack-jawed and idle, sullenly admiring their burnt-off braids reflected in video screens of Midnight Resistance and Bad Dudes vs DragonNinja. Tattoos etched onto pale skin are silhouetted by gaudy neon, the fluorescent tubes curved into arrows showing shortcuts towards ‘CHANGE’ and ‘WC’. The white-death mixture of salt and sugar mushes in eager young mouths, Pac-Men feasting on fast-food cartons of popcorn and pop-tarts. Babylon AD screech appositely ‘The Kid Goes Wild’ through blown loudspeakers that pulse elastically to the thumping bass. Below deck, like a rat carrying Weil’s disease, a corrupt police officer searches through arcade cabinets for a secure station for his drug stash. Upstairs, another police officer, his cyber-synth voice cutting through the horde of punk-kids enquires, ‘Isn’t this a school day?’ The response is uniform in its derision, food and invective bounce off his silver-blue suit, as unimpeachable as the integrity of the officer inside of it. It is early twenty-first-century Salt Lake City. Families gather on the mountainside, basking in a late-summer sun, which, tinged with autumn, is still warming to the face. A group of youngsters in a lift follow the signs to ‘–1: Games Room’. They discover that the games room is not soft play or table-tennis, but an amusement arcade for coin-op machines. There is no natural light in this corner of the spacious Snowbird Resort in Utah. The only illumination is proffered by

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fluorescents tinking arrhythmically over the pool table with the screens of Ridge Racer and Beatmania blinking and burnt, picking out signs: ‘No Food or Drink’ and ‘Machines are Token-only’. Avoiding the rips in the sticky carpet, the young teens turn and head for the exit and back into the wholesome Wasatch Mountain air. The zombies gawking out of the murk on House of the Dead II remain, consigned to the stale basement of the –1: Games Room. While both vignettes describe contemporary perceptions of arcades, their genealogy is very different. The first, ostensibly of Detroit, but diffracted through Hollywood, is an opening scene from the 1990 film RoboCop 2 and represents the 1980s view of the present/future of amusement arcades. As the locus for disenfranchized Western youth, they are no-go areas for anyone above the age of 25; the only rules followed are in the games themselves, and even the appearance of the eponymous cybernetic future of law enforcement cannot dispel the fug of underage tobacco smoke, drug-deals, bullying and the exchange of stolen goods, all compounded by collective educational truancy. This image of amusement arcades, popular in the visual ethnographies of the early 1980s and here refracted through a science-fiction vision of near-future America1 means that extrapolation may be difficult. Yet, the theme appears as persistent enough in the literature as to be universal. A large-scale study by the Centre for Leisure Research in the United Kingdom found that 80 per cent of 2739 respondents disagreed that amusement arcades provided young people with a safe place to go, while 59 per cent of the same cohort agreed that young people should be banned from amusement arcades (Centre for Leisure Research, 1990). Another UK survey of 789 respondents showed that over 20 per cent of those who frequented amusement arcades had been involved in a fight, and nearly a fifth ‘had been approached by someone who makes them feel uncomfortable’ (Huxley and Carroll, 1992). The quantitative data of the late 1980s appears to augment what Amis, Sudnow and Bloom found in the arcades of the early 1980s, of being ‘shadowy places where naughty things might happen’ (Alcorn, 2014: 25). As discussed below, this depiction is essential to understanding the social and cultural habitus of amusement arcades and the perception of them as a ‘subterranean world of play’ (Young, 2010). The second depiction is of my own, recent experience of an amusement arcade. The 2014 Digital Games Research Association conference was held at the Snowbird Resort near Salt Lake City, Utah: whether the organizers deliberately chose this venue due to its having an arcade was not clear. Located far away from thoroughfares and stairwells, restaurants and bars, this was the perfect position

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for the subterranean world of play, where young people of the late-twentieth century could escape from panoptical parents. Yet the games room remained deserted and even the muted attract modes of the machine screens could not impel children of the twenty-first century to insert their coin. This is the contemporary reality of the arcade and its machines; the decline in popularity of coin-op videogames has generated the ‘undead arcade’. In common with the zombies of The House of the Dead II they are ‘long past their zenith’, proffering an experience ‘that cannot be recaptured, and yet, it lives’ (Kocurek and Tobin, 2014). As with the first vignette, while this is an international phenomenon, the United Kingdom’s encounter with this trend is unique, for while there was little or no production of amusement arcade videogames in the country,2 the eventual effects of the withdrawal of coin-op videogames are arguably greater than in North America or Europe, with the slow, but certain, socio-economic decline of seaside towns (Gazzard, 2014), where rows of machines face out across channels and oceans, willing the last punter to play a final game. Together, the representations above offer a discourse on the habitus of amusement arcades and the machines nestled within them. Both representations are accurate, yet  also contradictory. The purpose of this chapter is to chart how arcades and their games could offer such disparate legacies, places that were – almost simultaneously – deviant and disreputable dens and then, in the drop of a coin, destitute and desolate necropolises. As highlighted in previous writing, (e.g. Guins, 2004), there is a divide between the arcade game and the environment in which subcultures of play, work, education, socialization and associated behaviours take place, with Tobin identifying that while the ‘game unit is central to the arcade as an organizing object’, they generated ‘only limited interactions with game narratives, screens and joysticks’ as people in the arcade were ‘there to do something other than play them’ (Tobin, 2014: 2), behaviours that could range from potential child abuse (Amis, 1982: 20), drug-taking (Fisher, 1995: 81) or going to the toilet. Although there is clearly a divide between the arcade as habitus, and the arcade as game, the development of both are intertwined and, while the narratives of games will not be expressly discussed here,3 it is important to analyse the form and content of the games and their genealogical development alongside wider frameworks of economy, politics and society. In addition, the analysis of amusement arcades, although focussed on the United Kingdom, is placed within its international context. This allows for comparisons in contrast and commonality to be undertaken, a theme central to this book.

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Sacrosanct and subterranean: subcultures and games As outlined in Chapter 3, videogames have a long and ongoing relationship with moral outrage. With the majority of time spent, like an old arcade game, in the recesses, they achieve recognition only when fomenting moral panic, so that the play of games is both elided and potentially perilous:  it is simultaneously a waste of time and dangerous. In the contemporary realm, where videogames are a mature medium, this practice is both welcomed and used as a badge of honour. For example, where Grand Theft Auto holds a mirror up to the absurdity of gaming, it also critiques cliques of contemporary society. From sewage companies to banking, religious sects to gun lobbies, the finger-to-nose satire of Rockstar’s franchise impels the mortal hand-wringing of politicians. Their Pavlovian responses, including first amendment debates, class action lawsuits and prohibition has the strange effect of adding gravitas to the ‘trivial’ position of games, while trivializing the grave business of politics. Yet most games cannot, or do not, achieve this level of notoriety in the wider consciousness: games continue to be viewed as a medium, much less an art form, which is positioned ‘beneath’ popular culture (Southern, 2001:  2). By exploring the literature that examines a variety of games from an historical perspective, including gambling, pinball, simulations and videogames, this section explores why games occupy this venue ‘below’, ‘to the side’ and ‘away from’ everyday life and how this contributes to the generation of subterranean subcultures. The position of games occupying a separate space is pervasive in studies throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. Writing in 1949, Huizinga observes that a game involves a ‘stepping out of real life into a sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own’ (Huizinga, 1970: 26). Fifteen years later, Caillois identifies with games as a ‘protected universe, a pure space’ (Caillois, 2001: 7), as Goffman had similarly viewed games as ‘a little cosmos all of its own’ (Goffman, 1961: 27). As capitalist society becomes more familiar with the use of ludic language in its description of social interactions as a game to be played and its subsequent winners and losers, the French theory of Barthes (1982) and Lefebvre (2002) explores its impact on everyday life. By the time Salen and Zimmerman (2005) wrote their famous treatise on the ‘magic circle’, developers of games were provided with an algorithm for the production of the gaming pleasure principle that remains based very much in the Huizingian method of the separation of games and play as it is ‘a closed circle . . . enclosed from the real world . . . is

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where the game takes place’ (Salen and Zimmerman: 2005: 76). While the magic circle has been extensively contested and critiqued, particularly by sociologists, it remains a pervasive concept within games studies, where the rub between narrative and the game was and remains particularly prevalent. Indeed, it is Castronova’s (2005) evolution of the magic circle to inhere a ‘membrane’ where different meanings and cultures can permeate that is of particular importance to the arcaves of this chapter. The theme perpetuated through the sociology of games and play is that their internal worlds are inviolate, that the space that they create, both perceptually and conceptually, should be sacred, special or hallowed. They can be studied, but their uniqueness is such that they should not be interfered with. The special stance of games within culture is the propensity that each and every one offers for novelty and innovation within the boundaries of recognized and pre-agreed rules.4 This can only take place if the rules are accepted by all participants both inside and outside of the game. For instance, while players may grudgingly accept a dog piercing the membrane of the magic circle and joyfully chasing a ball around a jumpers-for-goalposts game of football, incursion by other animals, for example, uninvited humans is unwanted and unacceptable: the pitch is marked out by bicycles and branches and to all intents and purposes remains sacrosanct. In the English language, which is widely recognized as exceptional in having different words to describe ‘play’, ‘game’ and ‘sport’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 119), the etymology of the words used for the venues of games and play demonstrate this significance. The ‘court’ of racquet games originates from holding court with aristocracy: real tennis (‘the sport of kings’) is played in a gallery, with windows and penthouses providing a view for the royal court to watch the game, while also being part of the court of the game. The aristocracy also assisted in the formalization of boxing (also known as ‘the sport of kings’), with the Marquis of Queensbury ratifying how individuals were to fight in the square circle of the ring (Boddy, 2008: 91). The ‘fields’ of football, rugby and cricket, with their teams in diametric opposition are ludic mimes of battlefields,5 with captains taking the place of officers in the objective of capturing the flag replicated in goalscoring, points-scoring and hitting and catching balls. The popularity, history, etymology and theoretical position of games underpins their social value. Tennis, cricket and boxing engage and entrance great swathes of the population, even non-savants in the case of the Championships at Wimbledon, the Ashes and heavyweight title fights. Meanwhile, even at their zenith, arcade games, whether situated in

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amusement arcades, midways, piers, supermarkets, bars or cafes, were at best treated with disdain and at worst with revulsion by non-savants not engaged in their play, curation or analysis. While the traditional class position of games being allied with aristocracy enables them to attain an enviable position in the public eye, the influence of print and broadcast media on the discourse is clearly evident. The Daily Mail, Private Eye and Fox News, among others, have whorled the general population and their elected representatives into uninformed and sometimes unrestrained commentary on videogames.6 It is tempting  – and occasionally justified  – to dismiss this as a fearful attack by ‘old’ media on a ‘new’ media that is as threatening as it is incomprehensible (see Brown, 2008). Yet the question remains: why, if games such as tennis and boxing, where the ultimate aim is to beat the opponent, are so revered, are games where the aim is to learn about the pleasures and hazards of work (e.g. Paperboy, Tapper) so reviled? The solution can be partly discovered in games such as Paperboy and, by extension, the previous chapter on home coding where traditional boundaries of work and play were obviated by the introduction of technologies to the domestic habitus so that the ‘world of leisure and work are intimately related’ (Young, 2010: 3). For Young, originally writing in 1971, there was a tension, played out in the spheres of production and consumption, which suggested that ‘subterranean values’, such as hedonism, autonomy and activities performed as ends within themselves were becoming more prevalent in subsections of society. These subsections with their own values generated subcultures that had greater truck with the leisure of play than with the work ethic: the focus on immediate gratification, rather than a delayed one was the aim of Young’s study of drug takers. The same ideal of the subterranean values of play, of inverting norms in pursuit of hedonism, are presented in the working classes as they take nascent trips to the British seaside in the late eighteenth century and revel in the revulsion of Crowded, noisy, vulgar, unbuttoned, uninhibited enjoyment, for better or worse. They epitomised carnival, saturnalia, the temporary triumph of the periphery over the core, the world turned upside down, the suspension of dignity and inhibitions, the temporary reversal of the civilising process, the reign of gluttony, extravagance and licentiousness. (Walton, cited in Downs, 2010: 56)

With home coding, there was a revival of pre-industrial modes of production. It flourished as a cottage industry, achieving the Marxist ideal of utopia between

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work and play. This did not happen in isolation and neither was it entirely technologically determined. A similar confluence is seen in the insertion of amusement arcades into the popular consciousness. Bank holidays, inaugurated in 1872, were the first of many revisions of social policy that lead to a ‘huge growth in demand, both for leisure time, and for activities to fill that leisure time’ (Downs, 2010: 56), with paid holidays from labour enabling people to take a week’s trip to the seaside. In common with the sociology of games, these trips offered holidaymakers the opportunity to ‘experience a world set-apart from the everyday’ (Downs, 2010: 57). Encouraged by these opportunities, entrepreneurs invested in and increased the quality and quantity of attractions on offer at seaside resorts. Influential economic models of Keynes and Ford where consumption was the function of production, meant that ‘hedonism [was] closely tied to productivity’ (Young, 2010: 3) and subterranean values gained ground, even when they were not valued or condoned by moral guardians. This was particularly pertinent as many of the revellers and the practices they indulged in focussed on gambling. While gambling was available in working-class communities, it had much the same relationship as contemporary high-street bookmakers have with casinos in Las Vegas: while the former is secluded and somewhat furtive, the latter is a celebratory orgy of spending someone else’s money.

Tilt or quit: the form of arcade games Gambling assumes a primary role in the formation of amusement arcades, in the games that populated them and the subcultures in which they thrived. In regards to games in the United States, bagatelle, a precursor to pinball, was identified by moral guardians as harmful to youth, with a condemnation in 1892 that prefigured George Foulkes’ 1981 Control of Space Invaders Bill (see Chapter 3) by nearly a century: I met a young man one day who told me that he had been a constant player on these machines and lost several hundred dollars, in consequence of which he was unable to complete his education by going to college as he intended: but he received an ‘education’ that will follow him through life. (Quinn, cited in Trapunski, 1979: 95–96)

Prominence is given to the education of the individual here, but the learning conferred by gaming and gambling is the late-nineteenth-century equivalent of

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being prosecuted for possession of soft drugs in the twenty-first century: a stain that will tar a young person’s reputation for life. The framing of games and gambling within the same arena is seen by sociologists of games as antithetical (see Caillois, 2001; Huizinga, 1970; Juul, 2005). This is because the game, as a relatively anodyne environment, should provide a forum for latitude in experimentation and innovation, so that mistakes are only punitive within pre-established, separate boundaries: this is the acceptable side of learning by failure. When a game is allied with the loss of money, the effects are extraneous and it impacts upon the individual’s day-to-day life: this is the unacceptable aspect of learning by failure. In this respect, videogames are markedly different from one-arm bandits, early pinball and pachinko as they are a vendor of amusement and therefore ‘always do two things: [they] take your money and deliver something of equal value in return’, whereas a gambling machine ‘takes your money, determines the payout through chance, and it controls the paying out of winning, which must be a “thing of value” ’ (Trapunski, 1979: 99). Pinball, following from bagatelle, in its early iteration as ‘kew-ball’7 was originally a game of pure alea, which in the first instance rewarded the player with money. Changes to gambling laws brokered that the machines must pay out in gifts and then tokens and that an element of skill (around 15 per cent) must be involved in negotiating the game’s outcome, hence the introduction of flippers to keep the ball in play. Ultimately, pinball games shifted away from tangible rewards to offer free balls and games as rewards for proficient play. Programming glitches and poor collision detection apart, arcade videogames relied almost entirely on player skill to amass high scores and extra lives: even such deus ex machina as the ‘hyperspace’ button in Defender (1981) and Asteroids (1979) were run through an algorithm before execution and inevitable collision with a rock or the ground. Interestingly, although all videogames continue to provide schedules where risk and reward are part of the same continuum (Loftus and Loftus, 1983), more recently, videogames have gone beyond offering extra lives and extended play to award achievements, trophies, skins and avatars to players. This is seen in titles such as Forza Horizon 2 (2014) offering in-game bandits to bolster money or cars, not to mention using videogame technology to render graphical user interfaces in blackjack, poker and bingo games on online gambling sites. So, close examination appears to delineate a clear break between pinball and arcade videogames. While the form of pinball finds its genesis in games of luck and gambling, arcade videogames were formed through their relationship to

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agon, of being a direct competition between human and machine. Ultimately, both ended up sharing the same risk/reward schedule when pinball tables and arcade cabinets coexisted in amusement arcades in the 1970s to the 1990s, with the convergence – and eventual elision – of one form over the other evidenced in the simulation of pinball by videogames. The coin-op Video Pinball (1978) formed the buttress of Atari’s shift into the home videogame market, with a release for the Atari 2600 in 1980, before David’s Midnight Magic (1982) appeared on US home computers, followed by Pinball Dreams (1992) for 16-bit machines and the Pinball FX (2010) franchise for contemporary systems. This parallels the replacement of gambling machines in amusement arcades in the 1970s and 1980s by video and pinball games, before fruit machines reaffirmed the predilection for gambling in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The durability of pinball as a genre in videogame form is instructive of a genealogy that is considerable, if often overlooked (see DeLeon, 2014), and worthy of further examination here. Pong (1972)8 is widely recalled as ‘video tennis’ (Herman, 2012: 55), a game that emulates racquet sports such as tennis or table tennis, through the use of ‘bats’ (Donovan, 2010: 23) or paddles, respectively, to hit a ball from one side of the screen to the other. Yet, its form also takes a great deal from the construction of a pinball table: there are two paddles, or ‘flippers’, that the ball rebounds off at an angle dependent on where it is hit; a ‘dead zone’ at the top of the screen that the player cannot defend, mimicking the area above the central drain on the pinball table, while the lumber used to construct the svelte cabinet was an archetype of pinball manufacture (Trapunski, 1979: 11). Pong ’s beta test in Andy Capp’s Tavern, a spit and sawdust bar in Silicon Valley, situated the arcade videogame in the same deviant sites where pinball became the politician’s pariah, but also offered a glimpse of sexual equality: both women and men frequented bars and had access to arcade videogames from their inception (Kocurek, 2012a: 196). These tributaries lead to the theoretical generation of the space where the game is played, a membrane that encapsulates ‘the little universe’ or ‘magic circle’. In pinball this is the ‘playfield’, its ascription immediately linking with games played on the fields of gridiron and baseball, field hockey and football; the one-to-one (and many-to-many) tussles characteristic of how these games are pitched as battles. Pinball follows in this tradition with its human-againstmachine ethos, while Pong, football and baseball (alongside Spacewar! with its ‘starfield’) provide two or more players with the opportunity to duel. Central to their composition is that these are games are tactically pure. Tactically pure

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games present all information to the player at all times. Information is not withheld as in card games of blackjack or poker; it is not deliberately hidden from view as seen in the fog-of-war of real time RPGs and it is not obviated by content, as with buildings in open-world games. Chess, although viewed as a game of deep strategy, is tactically pure: both players are able to view all of the playfield, that is, the board, at all times and can make fully informed judgements and moves based on this information, while Monopoly, with its use of dice and cards is not representative of a tactically pure game, as the feed of information to the player is partly contingent on dice rolls and card draws. Tactically pure games can be large in scale, as with football, or small, as with bar skittles. They are not necessarily dependent on technological advancements: in spite of gains in processor power, tactically pure games continue to be developed to critical and commercial acclaim. The twin stick shooter Geometry Wars 3 (2014) the game-within-a-game in Project Gotham Racing, continues to be developed even after the cessation of its parent franchise. Many early arcade videogames followed the form and function of pinball. Ball-and-paddle games such as Breakout (1976), which so obsessed the pilgrim Sudnow (1983), continue to entertain and frustrate in equal measure with clones such as Shatter (2009), through the use of ball and flippers in a tactically pure configuration. Wolf (2012: 3) argues that beyond form and function, the content of pinball is highly influential with iterations evident in Space Invaders (1978) and Tempest (1980) and DeLeon (2014: 54) shows how Peggle’s (2007) genealogy draws on parlour bagatelle games. The ball movement in cyberpunk future-sports game Speedball 2 (1990) is based on Pro-Pinball, with many of the mechanics of the game ‘based on a pinball machine’ (Montgomery, 2015: 66). Manicpanic-button games, such as Missile Command (1980) (also see Chapter 4), used trackballs as an input method, the rapid-response interface recalling the frantic movement of the pinball across the playfield  – while the mouse on personal computers still uses the trackball as a means of navigation across all programs from Microsoft Office to Minecraft, the ball moving from the playfield to the generation of a new field (videogames) into the field of work and heuristic learning. This is not limited to the acquisition of knowledge in using information technology, or silicon Lego, but encompasses the wider economic context. As Kocurek notes in her adroit essay on 1980s American arcades, the movement from the production of goods to the consumption of services is mirrored in the shortterm spectacle of arcade videogame play (Kocurek, 2012a: 199). Yet even within this obligation to consumption there remains the avowed commitment to follow

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the rules of the game, gamers can ‘beat the house, only by becoming exceptional . . . usually through hours of play’ (Kocurek, 2012a: 203–204). Experiential learning, practice and diligence informed a kind of voodoo economics: one coin can theoretically last all day; hard work is rewarded by extended play. For the Third Way meritocracies of Blair and Clinton this was nirvana:  a pay-to-play economic model ensured acceptance of flexibility in work contracts, in leisure activities, in wealth and debt accumulation. The reward schedules were not high scores or extra lives, but credit cards and 125 per cent mortgages and, in a neat parallel with the decline of amusement arcades from Blackpool to Utah, it was ultimately seen as a gamble on a future that never came to pass.

Labyrinths Yet, as Marcuse recalls, capitalism is a ‘system of countervailing powers’ (2002: 54). Just as the player of Pac-Man (1980)9 is able to use the escape tunnel of ‘wraparound avenue’ (Amis, 1982: 57) as a shortcut, so players could ‘lurk’ in Asteroids (1979), prolonging play with minimal input, and ‘loiter’ (Tobin, 2014) with or without the intent to pay-to-play in arcades. Indeed, the countervailing powers provide a nice tension between the magic circle of the games and their deviancy, both in their form and function and their setting of the habitus of where they take part. This can be seen in an often-elided passage from Marcuse’s own One Dimensional Man (2002), which illustrates the links between games, their habitus and subsequent impact on the wider social, political and economic world. Marcuse identifies the happy consciousness as a ‘good way of life which mitigates against qualitative change’ (2002:  14), an inertia that leads to the eponymous one-dimensional man. This person does not question the status quo, but lives within it, rather like Kocurek’s gamers who adhere to the new – often changing – rules of the game in order to succeed. In common with the throngs of the working class who decamped to the seaside to gamble and gallivant, the games played within the happy consciousness are contradictory, simultaneously governed by rules and deviant behaviour, ‘it has no limits – it arranges games with death and disfiguration in which fun, team work and strategic importance mix in rewarding social harmony’ (Marcuse, 2002: 83–84). Yet Marcuse, writing in 1964, is not describing penny arcades or pinball, Death Race (1976)10 or Computer Space (1971) but a wargame at the RAND Corporation. Here, the

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elite gather to mix tactics and meld minds, ‘players come from almost every department at RAND as well as the Air Force, we might find a physicist, an engineer, and an economist’, with the game guarding ‘the nation and the free world’ (Marcuse, 2002: 84). While it is apparent then that the seafronts and midways of the United Kingdom and the United States were important to the geographical location of amusement arcades, elites were also eminent in their formation, in structure, location, form and content. Elite players at RAND shared the subterranean values of hedonism, autonomy and excitement common to working-class thrill seekers, ‘the rockets are rattling, the H-bomb is waiting, and the space-flights are flying’ (Marcuse, 2002:  84). In common with the kaleidoscopic vertigo of amusements at the seaside where vacation from the quotidian resulted in lower inhibitions and higher spending, so RAND exhibits a similar separation from the everyday, ‘the world becomes a map and the missiles merely symbols . . . and wars just plans written down on paper’ (Marcuse, 2002: 84), the abstraction of war into soothing semiotics familiar to any gamer of Missile Command (1980) or Raid Over Moscow (1984). Ultimately, RAND were able to synthesize ‘the world into an interesting technological game’ (Marcuse, 2002: 84) and followed many of the tropes used in board-game iterations of war at the time, such as providing players with powerups and perks  – ‘menus on the wall of the Red and Blue rooms list available weapons and hardware that the teams buy’ (Marcuse, 2002: 85). Interestingly, when power-ups were finally used in videogames, with the introduction of power-pills to Pac-Man in 1980, Amis did not view them primarily as a means to maximize points scoring – although this was certainly a useful by-product – instead, they were a ‘legitimate defensive tool – good for tight corners as well as for accumulating points’ (Amis 1982: 57), thereby resembling first-strike battlefield weapons. This was a key component of nuclear policy in the Cold War, with Herman Kahn, a proponent and keen player of kreigspiel at RAND in the 1950s, proposing that their deployment could act as a prophylaxis, with limited destruction able to prevent escalation to the less palatable outcome of global annihilation (Kahn, 1984). The paradox is obvious and well-founded in game theory: the greater potential for destruction, the greater the propensity to play games to mitigate the risk. If games allow risk and reward to be compartmentalized within the magic circle or the habitus where games are played, impact can be measured, mitigated and mediated, as seen with the popular thought experiment of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This extrapolation is wholly the point

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of wargames and the dynamic is followed in other games where individuals and groups learn, covertly or overtly, of the wider rules of the game, thus reproducing dominant social and economic principles, even if this learning takes place within the framework of subterranean values. As seen at the start of this chapter, there is a widely held perception that amusement arcades and, by extension, videogames are a ‘subculture’, and therefore operate apart from, away from or even beneath other popular culture and is seen in the literature around their moral panics and also in their formulation of a space that is set apart from the everyday. The wargame at RAND is no exception, but this high-concept, high-stakes game shares much with the subterranean subcultures of the arcades. The geographical location of games and their relationship to the human universal of eating is central to this. ‘Cocktail’ arcade cabinets (as opposed to upright cabinets) in their flat, thighhigh configuration, allowed patrons to stack pints of beer, baskets of chips and cigarettes on top of wallets, purses and keys, a sheet of laminated glass shielding the game from liquid, grease and ash.11 As Guins (2004) notes, videogames were ubiquitous in fast-food outlets, where being able to eat quickly while standing assured throughput of patrons. Contrary to upright cabinets, cocktails encouraged sitting and multitasking of gaming, drinking, eating and smoking, these primeval playstations anticipating the workstations of the service sector, where mobile phones sidle alongside hastily eaten sandwiches and salads. The fusion of videogames and food is evidenced in BurgerTime (1982) and commercially integrated with Nolan Bushnell’s ‘Chuck E. Cheese’ game and pizza franchise. Similarly at RAND Corp, there is the opportunity for food and recuperation after a tiring wargame, a time to reflect over ‘coffee, cake and ideas’, but it is the location near a fast food outlet ‘down in our labyrinthe basement – somewhere under the snack bar’ (Marcuse, 2002: 85) that is most instructive: even wargames exercized by elites are placed out of the way, underneath, sub rosa, a perfect place for subcultures of simulation to foment so ‘the military planners can gain valuable “synthetic” experience without risk’ (Marcuse, 2002: 84). These are the arcaves, the labyrinths and underground caverns where everyday life is put on hold both in the magic circle of the game and in the settings that house them. In spite of this apparent stasis, arcaves are not isolated from the culture that gave rise to them, but instead bleed through the membrane of the magic circle and transfuse the habitus that generated them. As Chapter 2 shows, programmers of early mainframe computers were heavily invested in

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the wargame genre and it was a short progression from wargames to ‘programmers attempting their own recreations of their favourite wargames’ (Barnes, 2015: 50). No sooner had RAND scientists toyed with the prophylaxis of World War III, than the general population was given the opportunity to protect cities from nuclear assault in Missile Command, avert potential meltdowns at nuclear power plants in Gottleib’s Reactor (1982), with the strategic defence initiative of SDI (1986) moving the umbrella of protection to space-based lasers. The position of arcaves, which are both culturally and geographically underground, reveals a genealogy, almost an archaeology that is as complex as it is fascinating. No matter how far underground or to the margins amusement arcades and their videogames are pushed, they reveal seams that are instructive to the contemporary formation of an industrial society that used subterranean values as much as the Protestant work ethic to further its development. Just as capitalism is formed from countervailing powers, so videogames ‘did not emerge from one gaming tradition’ (DeLeon, 2014:  54), so among other influences, amusement arcades and their videogames take their form, structure and content from the arenas of tactically pure playfields of pinball, the alea of gambling or the agon of nuclear strategy. The remainder of this chapter examines how the games and their habitus were experienced in practice, with primary data from individuals who played and worked in these arcaves during the 1980s, exploring how amusement arcades were dens of disrepute and then, suddenly, denizens of decline.

Getting into games To practically explore the arcaves theoretically positioned here, a series of interviews were undertaken with four individuals in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, in March 2015. As veterans of arcades in the United Kingdom of the 1970s and 1980s, all witnessed the introduction of videogames to amusement arcades. Similarly, as they all continue to have gainful employment in arcades either as gamblers, employees or owners of amusement arcades, they witnessed the retrenchment of videogames within amusement arcades in the late 1990s and have seen a concurrent rise in interest around retro arcades. The names of the participants have been anonymized and three-letter initials (e.g. PSD, FSH) that would traditionally have been input into high-score tables have been used in their stead.

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As shown throughout this chapter, the introduction of amusement arcade videogames is a relatively recent development in the genealogy of amusement arcades, coinciding with the commercial use of silicon technology. As Downs (2010) notes, arcades were a popular leisure destination for the working class throughout the twentieth century and provided an induction into games via other coin-op games. This is observed very early on by PSD who recalls the introduction of ‘videos’ to arcades in the mid-1970s: The golden age in the US is talked about as ‘79–‘83, but mine was earlier, probably ‘72–‘76. We’d go on a week’s holiday every year to Blackpool . . . and I’d be allowed to go into an arcade on my own. It felt like an hour, but you know it was probably only ten minutes . . . I was only seven as the coin-drop machines would take the pennies which went out of circulation in 1973. (PSD) 12

This initiation into videogames through amusement arcades seems to follow the line of deviant, even criminal, behaviour referred to in studies undertaken at the time. PSD’s recollection is of parents who gave their son some change so that he could entertain himself while they did something else, therefore increasing the propensity for less palatable practices. The lack of surveillance from a moral guardian is in itself an attract mode to young people visiting arcades (Tobin, 2014), which, quixotically, allows them to engage in ‘adult leisure which adolescents are impatient to experience’ (Fisher, 1995: 74), including gambling. Yet this is reflexive: a lack of surveillance results not in maturity, but a greater propensity for ‘criminal’ behaviour both qualitatively, in terms of the seriousness of the crime, and quantitatively, in terms of the number of convictions made (see Huff and Collinson, 1987). In fact arcade videogames were viewed, like the escape tunnels of Pac-Man, as a thoroughfare to antisocial behaviour. It is therefore possible to conjecture that the earlier young people start to play video games, the greater the likelihood of their committing some form of larceny, or the converse whereby money acquired at an early age through theft is readily available for putting into video machines. (Huff and Collinson, 1987: 407)

Arcade videogames are portrayed as the gateway to a wealth of potential problems. ‘Video machines’ are not neutral depositories of money: either they motivate young people to steal money or they are a receptacle for stolen money. This position is entirely consistent with coin-op machines throughout history, its cash-rich base impelling the involvement of organized crime, with videogame and pinball manufacturer Bally a serial host to inquisitions by the FBI and Securities Exchange Commission (Trapunski, 1979: 104). The intersection

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between young people, videogames and deviant behaviour appears to be malleable and not wholly dependent on entering amusement arcades, as young people were ‘far more likely at an early age to encounter video games – widely spread throughout large stores, cafes, chip-shops etc’ (Huff and Collinson, 1987: 407). Therefore, deviancy becomes associated not only with amusement arcades, where young people smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol and experimented with other soft drugs (Fisher, 1995), but with the games themselves:  subterranean values of play extended beyond arcaves and into the formal, adult, social world. Yet these locations were not adult, or even value-neutral proprietors of work and consumption. Instead, by selling fast, hot and cheap food, they offered some respite from school dinners and, by hosting the odd cabinet or two, escape through the membrane of the magic circle. Additionally, they were a gateway to new subterranean experiences and excitement, with hot practices playing fast and loose with the law to maximize revenue, even extending to illegal sales. I’d go into a Chinese and pay 50p for three goes on the videos.13 There was this chip-shop where you’d get a fag and a match for 5p, a portion of chips for 25p and the rest for the videos. I was 12. Totally illegal of course. (FSH)

It is unclear if it is arcade videogames, the ‘videos’ FSH makes reference to, increasing demand from young people for cigarettes (due to arcades being a venue for surreptitious smoking) or if proprietors believed that the critical mass of young people, disposable income and videogames provided an opportunity for revenue maximization  – whatever the cost. Where the literature and historical recall of those who experienced that era are in agreement is in the sheer pervasiveness of arcade videogames: The charm of the arcades then was the noise of the electromechanicals [pinball, shovellers] dovetailing with the cutting edge of the videogames. Those games really made a difference. It was louder then [1970s] as there was no carpet in a lot of arcades, then by the 1980s arcades became better at making money and they had carpets. The videogames really made money. (PSD)

The psychology employed here has a legacy that stretches back to Blackpool pleasure beach of the early twentieth century, where machines were ‘bright and beautiful; coin chutes were designed to maximize the sounds of falling pennies to encourage the sensation of significant winnings’ (Downs, 2010: 58), with the appeal in the late 1970s and 1980s now augmented by videogame attract modes. The potential for making money operated in reverse too, with working-class towns hosting inland arcades in town centres, transferring the seaside to the

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urban. Ultimately, this found its extreme in an arcade in Workington, where arcade games quite literally ‘came home’. There were arcades everywhere back then [in 1981]. Silloth, Blackpool, Carlisle, Workington. Inland arcades too. One day I  remember going a short cut into town [Workington] and in the middle of this street, in this terraced house there was an arcade. This wasn’t a room, it was every room. These huge cabinets in a 100 square foot house, there wasn’t enough room to breathe. Can you imagine being a neighbour to an arcade? It got shut down by the Council a fortnight later. It was just totally against the law. (HAM)

While arcade videogames were not ostensibly portable, they were able to be used in most locations. This was enabled by the use of generic ‘woody’ or ‘candy cabs’, which were uniform in size and used a standard 240v electrical outlet, allowing planning for a terraced arcade a relatively straightforward task. This terraced arcade described by HAM, open in 1981, popped up in parallel with the renaissance of the cottage industries of home cracking, coding and copying seen in Chapter 4, part of a wider trend towards the production of ‘events, spectacles that have an almost instantaneous turnover time’ (Harvey, 1989:  157)  and prefigures the seasonal pop-up shops of contemporary high streets by over 30 years. In the contemporary realm, the emphasis of sheen over situation has been taken to its logical conclusion. Recent arcade spectacles such as SnoCross (2012) or Star Wars: Battlepod (2014), have an emphasis on quick turnover – of money and personnel – evident in the time limits imposed on the length of their game. Irrespective of the skill of the player, exposure to the game (generally on-rails racers/shooters) remains broadly the same:  while practice and skill may improve social standing on the high-score table, it will never extend play either for the player, or into locations outside of the amusement arcade, where space is at a premium and tablets can be used instead. In this regard, modern arcade videogames are tactically pure: the player knows with surety what the game will hold, both in terms of the on-rails form of the game and the time/financial investment required to play.

Gaming the game If arcade games were flexible in their location, they were equally flexible in the experiences that they proffered, not only to the user, but to the arcade operator or proprietor. Printed circuit boards (PCBs) could be swapped in the same

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cabinet, often leading to a humorous disjuncture between cabinet art and the actual game.14 Dipswitch changes allowed different difficulty levels, including lives per credit and time limits, but most importantly allowed alterations to credits per coin. Changes to the price structures of ‘videos’ appeared to have the most dramatic impact as to how games were played within arcades. I think it was Galaxian that came out and it was like 20p a play. Full colour, lovely backgrounds, but that was like twice the price of Pac-Man or Space Invaders or Asteroids. That’s a big hike . . . for the faces [arcade regulars] they had to find ways to deal with this . . . you either got very good, found something else, or got good at playing the floor. (FSH)

The construction and maintenance of ‘being a face’, of social standing, was dependent on being proficient at a certain game. Proficiency required an investment of time matched only by the deposit of money. In distinction to Trapunski’s idea that a coin offers quid pro quo and Kocurek’s observation that play can be extended through practice and skill, there is a different type of connaisance here, away from the extended play of the game, to playing, or ‘gaming’ the wider habitus. FSH notes a clear delineation between being ‘very good’ at playing the game, and being ‘good at playing the floor’. Playing the floor would normally mean gambling on fruit machines to increase funds, but sometimes involved practices that stretched or punctured the boundaries of legality and the membrane of the magic circle. I’d see it as a floorwalker.15 I’d go up to the change machine to get the money out and it’d just be water. People had put 50p pieces made of ice into the slot and it had given them 50p’s worth of change in 10s. I guess they would go back into the videos. They were primitive then, you can’t do it now of course. (FSH)

The tricks and ‘systems’ used to game the games show how ‘flexibility can sometimes be mutually beneficial’ (Harvey, 1989: 151). From red diesel to playground piracy, where prices do not fit with pre-existing models or markets, workarounds, often with recourse to current and affordable technology are explored and exploited. Whether this would constitute the larceny and theft, the literature of the time is not clear: FSH observed that he never caught patrons stealing directly from change, fruit or video machines, but that, on occasion, employees such as technicians were caught stealing cash from pinball and arcade games. In this instance, it is not the deviancy of young people, but the autonomy of workers in the arcave that buoys subterranean values to the surface, a by-product of unsupervised employment at the low-end of a cash-rich

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industry (Kent, 2001: 50). Akin to anti-piracy measures by publishers, proprietors attempted to negate the widespread use of cash by using tokens,16 this resulted in more sophisticated, ‘grey’ workarounds, which involved collusion between staff and faces. You’ve got to work every angle. This is a minimum wage business, like a lot of entertainment industries, you end up spending your money where you’ve earned it, on highscores on videos or pinballs . . . I would get the floorwalkers to tell me when they think a machine is going to pay [tokens]. I’d get the tokens and put them in low-pay machine. Tokens in, cash out. They’d keep the cash and I’d keep half the tokens and put them in Defender or Asteroids. (VIV)

There were simpler approaches to achieving free games. FSH recalled that removing the piezzo electric element from a cigarette lighter and arcing it across the coin slot of Moon Cresta (1980) could acquire ‘free plays, but sometimes it would just blow it up’, while others consisted of ‘changing the coin slot on shovellers so it took 2p instead of 10p, less money in, more money out’ (VIV). It seems then that the ‘nightclub-dark’ (Needham, 1982: 54) of the arcaves impelled individuals to collude and organize winning strategies, not in the social status of playing proficiently, but in the cultural capital of gaming the game. Both sides adapted within an arms race of institutional rules versus guerrilla tactics where the prize was cash and credit to play games. For many of the respondents, following their childhood initiation to arcades, their interest was maintained not by new games and graphics, but by learning about the challenges posed by new technology, how to overcome them and how to use the habitus of the arcade to their advantage. These advantages could be employed maliciously, with the predilection for sexual assault noted by Amis (1982), Sudnow (1983) and Foulkes (1981) and emphasized by the observation of FSH: You remember Donkey Kong? There was this girl playing it and she was so into it that this guy just came up behind her and lifted her skirt up. She didn’t even notice! He had it up all the time she was playing just because she was so into it [the game]. (FSH)

This advances the idea of the arcave being closer to a casino or nightclub, where ‘electronic jingles and pop music suppress normal conversation and keep the mind focused on the machines’ (Fisher, 1995: 75) to the point where this girl was unaware of the position of her vestiary. The proclivity of screens to captivate individuals – young and old – is a debate that continues from Minecraft to Snapchat. Knowledge gleaned from the arcades of the 1980s shows that these

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concerns are not new and with the problems associated with sexual bullying and online predation, neither are they trivial.

Game on The two vignettes at the start of this chapter outline two very different realities for the present/future arcade. The first, from Robocop 2, is the dereliction of the values of the formal world of work and maturity replaced by deviancy and dissent. A space so separate as to be alien to moral guardians. The second, from the Snowbird resort in Utah, is the decline of the arcade as a traditional arena for adolescent experimentation. A space so ignored as to have passed into irrelevancy. The recollection of 1980s arcades and their games by the informants in this chapter points towards arenas that were marked by a desire to play games, but not always to play to regulation:  to use shortcuts, like the escape tunnels of Pac-Man, to pre-empt and nullify any alterations to the rules of the game; to short-circuit, like FSH on Moon Cresta, the historically held thesis that a game is sacred and inviolate and that incursions puncture the membrane of the magic circle. The deviancy exhibited by social and technological interaction cohering with the concept of arcaves as a ‘time capsule devoid of any reference to the natural world. Daylight is replaced by neon strips or spotlights’ (Fisher, 1995: 75), a situation familiar to casinos, strip clubs, shopping centres, internet shopping and fast food outlets which resemble a video game in which players are treated to incomparable spectacle if they can suspend their sense of reality and distance themselves from their physical surroundings and immerse themselves completely in the game world. (Ritzer 1999: 162)

This dreamlike state is the experience of the arcades. This is an existence between the public and the private; on the margins of society, but being a focus of it; of being part of an underground subculture of the arcaves; of at once inhabiting the magic circle, but trying to negotiate it; of having an awareness of morality and ethics, but perhaps not being mindful enough to apply them equally to all interactions, human and machine. It appears to resemble the seaside of towns which are so central to the continued existence of amusement arcades, not necessarily in the decline observed by Gazzard, but in that non-place where the sea meets

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the land and the sky touches the ocean. It is a mentality founded in the holidays of the working class from the eighteenth century, a ‘type of leisure that occupies the space between two recognised cultural loci, occurring . . . in a gap between the real world and a self or group-created world’ (Downs, 2010: 61), the antecedent to the ‘the undead arcade’ which ‘isn’t dead, nor does it merely continue: It dies and is reconfigured’ (Kocurek and Tobin, 2014). Similarly, the dreamlike state of being away from the quotidian  – on holiday – seems to permeate the motivation to re-enervate the arcades and reset the arcade scores for one last game. Reconfiguration of old Track and Field (1983) and Pac-Man cabinets to accept modern 10-pence pieces is not possible: old tens are exchanged at the counter for new ones; vast sums of personal wealth accrued in safer industries is reconfigured into a mammoth risk-and-reward schedule, dropped like a coin into the slot as FSH, a floorwalker in a contemporary arcade on Southend seafront notes: I think the owner of this place, owned three scrapyards, not sure if he still does or not. Do you know how much it [the arcade] cost? Three million quid. That’s the money he’s holding in the place. When it was closed one day he lost £3000, not sure if that was revenue or profit, but it’s not bad for a day’s play. (FSH)

Akin to the floorwalker in an arcade in the 1980s, the owner of a retro arcade in a city centre can only spend his money one way: by putting it back into arcade machines. I was a professional gambler until 2005. On the ferry between Portsmouth and Bilbao I could clear £2000–£3000 a trip . . . When I opened this place I put 250 thousand of my own money into it, but it doesn’t pay for itself, that’s why we need adult fruits [fruit machines with high payouts] to support the retro gaming. (PSD)

While the situation may be different in other areas of the United Kingdom, arcades in Southend continue to flaunt the latest amusement videogames close to the strip-light, neon-nights of arcade entrances. Southend has ‘done pretty well as arcades go as people know what they’re getting, gambling, fairground, chip shops, fresh fish’ (FSH) and the same seems to apply to the videogames the seafront hosts. Older titles, such as Out Run 2006 (2006), are reconfigured to appeal to couples and families, their legacy trading on the whimsical 1980s Americana of Out Run (1986) from 20  years before, while Pac-Man Battle Royale (2011) presents Nancy from Chase HQ (1988) as a master of ceremonies,

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her nostalgic interlude brimming from the pachinko arcades of Japan to the arcaves of Southend-on-Sea. Indeed, Southend-on-Sea with its retro arcades, videogame spectacles and constant breaching and renegotiation of the membrane of the magic circle is a town itself which seems to gives lie to the many spaces of the arcade, being as it is not on the sea at all, but on the freshwater estuary of the Thames.

Game after Following discussion of the position of arcades within contemporary Britain, this chapter posited that the magic circle, in spite of the sociological contestation around the term, continues to be a pervasive and relevant point of discussion within games studies. The concept, modified in writing from throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century, as being a separate space remains useful in constructing analysis around the playfields and spaces of the game from bar-skittles to kew-ball to pinball to Peggle. It is in how this membrane is permeated by recourse to gambling and ethically hazy activities, practices which have been part of the habitus of arcades from their inception as a venue which illuminates the nightclub-dark of the arcades and throws light on how they garner suspension from the everyday: a tenet as fitting for working-class leisure at the seaside as elite-class war-gaming at the RAND corporation. Much of the literature written of the time and at the time reflects these notions that arcades, with their position geographically and culturally underground, gave rise to subcultures which grew out of the experimentation and innovation which were common to the use of computing technologies in thrall to videogames. With the individuals interviewed within this chapter who grew up during the 1970s and 1980s supporting much of the extant research and investigation into the changes wrought by videogames’ introduction into amusement arcades, their position on the cusp between legality and playfulness, public and private, games and work is assured. Yet is in how these social, financial and cultural notions intersect in the creation of arcaves which makes them a germane and rich arena for research and critique. With the undead arcade slowly but surely mummifying and desiccating underground, the requirement for further examination is urgent and necessary before arcaves slip away into darkness of the neon-night forever.

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Notes 1 One of the major plotlines of RoboCop 2 was its assumption that Detroit would devolve into bankruptcy. This was realised in 2013, with its filing for municipal bankruptcy estimated at between USD18–20bn, the largest in American history (Davey and Walsh, 2013: 1). 2 Although amusement arcade videogames were not produced in the United Kingdom, Brenco of Weston Super-Mare manufactured fruit machines, fortunetelling and redemption coin-operated machines until 1981. Harry Levy’s in Margate continue to manufacture ‘scooper’ or ‘pusher’ machines, with contemporary models such as Sharp Shooter incorporating mechanics from light-gun arcade videogames such as Duck Hunt and House of the Dead. 3 See Chapter 7 for extensive discussion of the narratives and sociocultural context of 1980s videogames. 4 This has been extensively discussed in game studies, so this section serves to provide an outline to progress the wider thesis, and the divisions between games and play will not be engaged with here. Nevertheless, for a clear, contemporary contribution to the debate see Juul (2005). 5 The French chants, which literally translates to ‘field’ in English, shares some of this etymology, where its meaning is closer to ‘battlefield’ in French. 6 One of the most infamous and amusing occasions of this was the Fox News report of a love scene in Mass Effect. Entitled ‘ “Se’xbox?” New video game shows full nudity and sex’, a discussion around the game was introduced as encouraging players ‘to engage in graphic sex’ (Fox News, 2008), when the reality was not quite as racy or interesting, with one scene showing two characters embracing on a bed. In the United Kingdom, and less anodyne, was The Daily Mail ’s assertion that a young boy who was killed by his friend, was ‘murdered by PlayStation’ (The Daily Mail, 2004). Keith Vaz, Labour MP for Leicester East, where the killing occurred, demonstrated his ignorance of issue at hand by asserting that there were videogames that encourage players to ‘rape women’ (Vaz, 2008), an assertion countered by Edward Vaizey the Conservative MP for Wantage. 7 ‘Kew-ball’ derives from the mechanism for launching the ball that resembled a cue striking a cue ball on a billiard or pool table. There was little control over the direction of the ball following launch, hence its position as a game of pure luck. See Trapunski (1979: 19) for further discussion. 8 There is widespread debate around the position of Pong in the canon of arcade videogames. This, and the relationship between Nolan Bushnell, Ralph Baer and Steve Russell, are important to the history of the medium, but would distract from the thesis presented here. For further discussion, on ‘getting things straight’, see Baer (2012).

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9 I have discussed the happy consciousness in relation to modern and historical games, and particularly Pac-Man in other writing (Wade, 2015). 10 See Kocurek (2012b) for discussion regarding the context of violence in Exidy’s Death Race. 11 An amusing anecdote as to how to act and eat while seated at a cocktail cabinet is offered by Michael Rubin teaching ‘gamers to learn to throw down their food and grab the controls with a full mouth when player 2 gets wiped out at an untimely moment’ (Rubin, 1982: 105). 12 Decimalisation in the United Kingdom occurred in 1971, so the pennies that PSD mentions would likely have been out of circulation by 1973. However, it is possible that arcades offered conversion of decimal money to older denominations as they continue to do that today with the newer, smaller 10 pence pieces being exchanged for larger ones in old arcade machines. Thanks to Nick Webber for highlighting this. 13 ‘Videos’ are the UK vernacular term given to amusement arcade videogames. This contrasted them from ‘fruits’ (fruit machine gamblers), ‘shovellers’ or ‘scoopers’ (penny drop machines) and ‘bandits’ (one armed bandits). 14 For extended discussion on the pertinence of cabinet artwork to arcade videogames, see Guins (2014: 112–122). 15 Floorwalker refers to the front-of-house staff who assisted patrons with change, if a machine went wrong or to prevent, identify and stop deviant behaviour. It is interesting that their attire is similar to that of front-of-house staff at restaurants with neckerchiefs and bow-ties with white shirts/blouses and waistcoats, recalling a time when all classes would wear shirts and ties as uniform for work and leisure. 16 Although this was not the only reason for using tokens, as legislation changed cash-payouts on fruit machines, it would have been a key motivation in their hurried adoption by proprietors, before far-reaching changes were made to the Gambling Act (2005).

6

Format(ive) Wars: Building an Industry

I wanted something that indicated sensitivity and a determination to win, and an eye gazing into a distant, imagined, future or past. Oliver Frey, on the design of Thalamus’s logo

Foundations The habitus which exists around videogames does not belong exclusively to one country, one developer, one publisher or one media outlet. Some arenas may have a longer engagement with the history of games, while others will have hidden histories, stories that are not yet told. Written or unwritten, all have equal primacy and relevance in the genealogy of videogames. Yet the fact remains that North America, and in particular the United States, has its hand firmly on the joystick of the history of videogames. This is after all where the 1983 crash was a global phenomenon, and the console wars found their traction in the late1980s and early 1990s battles between Sega and Nintendo, Sonic and Mario, before being rolled out across the world with the entry of Apple, Sony and later Microsoft to the pitched platform battles that were fought as much in magazines as on the hardware and brand power of the consoles. However, for those involved in the investigation of histories outside of the United States, there has been a tacit acceptance that the United Kingdom is the ‘rarefied home of the format wars’ (Wade, 2007: 682), embodied in the battles between the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum. Nowhere were these battles more evident than in the playgrounds, bedrooms and magazines of the mid1980s where pupils, publishers and programmers would profess their loyalty to a platform due to its quirks, idiosyncrasies and – sometimes lack of – technical prowess. The format wars battle between the bald-headed boffin of Sinclair

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and the beige bread-bin of Commodore repeats over time and has a peculiarly British flavour: recently both Eurogamer and Retro Gamer have run extensive features detailing the technical, cultural and social ramifications of the 8-bit format wars, which were often credited as being central to the buoyancy of the contemporary UK videogames industry. That these machines and their software were influential is not open to debate; they do, for better or worse, form the bedrock of the UK games industry, with many luminaries who worked in games development, publishing and magazines during the ‘format wars’ now in senior positions throughout a global industry. Yet recent methodological approaches, particularly from Therrien and Picard (2015), Guins (2014), Kirkpatrick (2015) and Newman (2012) explicitly or implicitly reject the idea of ‘format wars’ tied as they are to unhelpful metaphors that privilege a linear-generational model which emphasizes technological prowess as opposed to the cultures and context of which they are a part. The refocusing of theory and methodology onto different areas, such as magazines, and the ‘post-histories’ of videogames is a welcome sign of the maturation of the medium and the medium as a form of study. With these revisions in mind, this chapter revisits the formation of the videogames industry in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Starting with a review of the literature in the area, including some strategic management research, which aligns the end user or consumer as the most important focus of technological industries, it is argued that everyone involved in their formation constitutes an end user, or consumer, due to their intrinsic relationships with one another. These relationships can be seen as battles, wars or fights, but there were nuanced and subtle dimensions which were tied to genuinely innovative strategies. These relationships, between developers, publishers, distributors, marketing consultants and journalists, are explored in depth through recourse to primary interview data and the ample literature of the time, which examines the position of Sinclair (the man, the myth, the machine and the company), Sensible Software, Hewson Consultants, Mirrorsoft, high-street chain stores and the magazines of Newsfield Publications, in a whorl of capital and consumption, repetition and innovation. The position of these individuals and institutions, the values they expound and the tactics they employ is examined through the prism of Jean Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society, which remains a text critical to the comprehension of a society no longer defined by means of production, but relations of consumption. Ultimately, it is seen that the endless circulation of consumption in the games industry and the changes wrought by it, has its nexus in the

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quintessential videogames habitus of the mid 1980s, where all of these relationships and influences meet around Thalamus, a publishing and software house.

Format wars? Strategic management research literature accepts that pitched battles between two companies or alliances, ‘standards wars’ or ‘format wars’, have historical precedent in industrial societies, but have become more prevalent in post-industrial societies as ‘battles for market dominance between incompatible technologies are a fixture of the information age’ (Shapiro and Varian, 1999: 8). Videogames, with their histories in the ivory towers of universities and the subcultures of arcaves occupy a strange position in the histories of format development. An arcade game requires compatibility with local currency (money) and currents (electricity), and while it may be possible to swap one circuit board from one cabinet to another, Sega’s System 16 hardware used in Outrun (1986) will not host Taito’s Z System used in Chase HQ (1988), in spite of them sharing the Z80 processor. Bespoke mainframes which played Spacewar! (1962) were impossible to play outside of their faculty institutions, hardwired as they were to power grids and the requisite intellectual savoir to access the programs. For some commentators, the incompatibility across platforms is easily explained, as there is no coincidence in there being a ‘single worldwide standard for fax machines (for which compatibility is crucial) . . . while multiple formats persist for . . . digital television (for which compatibility across regions is far less important)’ (Shapiro and Varian, 1999: 13). Yet the videogames industry occupies another perplexing position here, one which runs not with the linear progression of technology, but in cycles. For example, with the demise of the Commodore Amiga as a significant commercial and gaming enterprise in the mid-1990s (Maher, 2012), the PC was poised to take advantage. Based on a past-present-future continuum where the platform had backwards compatibility and offered the capacity to bolt-on hardware upgrades, the PC was effectively future-proof. Indeed, in 1995 it was expected that the United Kingdom would follow the United States as ‘IBM-compatible PCs are becoming the standard [videogames] format as has been the case in the USA for many years’ (Hayes and Dinsey, 1995: 48). There were several reasons for this optimism. The PC was uninhibited by region locking and was a genuinely open platform, meaning users could develop and run software from

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around the globe. Developers often innovated first on the PC, with revisions to the flight simulator, driving and first-person shooter genres complemented by access to internet-enabled multiplayer games. Publishing models were equally novel: Doom (1993) was distributed as shareware, the quality of the game pushing up registration and adoption with Doom II (1994) moving to a ‘heroinware’ model where the user was persuaded to purchase the product due to its innate qualities.1 PC gaming even possessed high-network effects (see Schilling, 2003; Katz and Shapiro, 1994) where users, often personally invested early adopters, drive demand for a product, their allegiance iterating uptake of hardware and software. Yet, even with these attributes in its favour, the PC remained a platform which didn’t impart the same zeal as earlier computers from Atari, Commodore and Spectrum and never replicated their commercial success as a games platform. Indeed, the opposite occurred. The mid-1990s witnessed a massification and diversification of hardware, with platforms from Sony, Apple, the 3DO Company and Atari complementing and competing with the then dominant Sega and Nintendo duopoly. It seemed as if this desiccation reflected the wider geopolitical habitus, where consumers, citizens and entire societies were not sure what they wanted, but they were sure it wasn’t the status quo. So, while reunification was offered, there was a splintering of interests as power bases shifted and new players, in the production and end user spheres, entered the field. There are explanations as to why users preferred the closed-platform model offered by console manufacturers to the flexible model proffered by the PC. On the side of consumption, these include ease-of-use (Kirkpatrick, 2013:  122– 123), which splits users as hackers, who had closer affiliation with the bedroom cultures discussed in Chapter 4, from users as consumers who were more likely to buy a console or game to play than to mod or copy it; the continuing prevalence of the platform-exclusive, where an emblematic title would guarantee quality and increase network effects through its status as a system-seller, with the synergy between Pajitnov’s Tetris (1989) and Nintendo’s Game Boy being the hardware-software combination par excellence. On the side of production, these include favourable licensing and royalty agreements evinced by Sega in response to Nintendo’s gold standard ‘Seal of Approval’. This limited publisher output to five titles per annum, a draconian tactic compounded by Kyoto’s meagre offer of slim developer royalty rewards and shifting risk away from Nintendo and onto the developer (Schilling, 2003:  23); the proclivity of vertical integration, where a hardware manufacturer can tie in with its other projects, as seen with Sega’s arcade division providing a stream of popular titles for its home-console

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division and by physically manufacturing the cartridges which house the games; and finally by following the ‘Microsoft maxim’ of ‘produce product, capture emerging market, be bought by Microsoft’ (Shapiro and Varian, 1999: 23). This strategy was employed successfully by Japanese hardware manufacturers looking to leverage their market in the mid-1990s as the videogame industry talent nurtured in the 1980s matured. It reached fruition with Nintendo’s partnership with Argonaut’s FX chip (Anderson and Levene, 2012) and Sony’s purchase of Psygnosis and its debutant clubbers’ hit, WipEout (1995). These fractious, restrictive relationships between individuals and institutions give lie to the contemporary ideology around home computer and console format wars. At the cusp is the appearance of an antagonistic dialectic, usually between two hardware companies, where so much of the discourse is self-evident that it is no longer subject to critique. Writing and research use the term ‘format wars’ as a wraparound term for an entire industry and its culture. Examples are legion: Tom Kalinske directs the hipsters of Sega against the child-proof seal-ofapproval of Nintendo (Harris, 2014) so that Genesis does what Nintedont; the decimation of Sega by Sony, even when Sega’s Dreamcast was first to market and inhered greater technical innovation than Sony’s PlayStation 2, such as visual memory units and an in-built modem (Kent, 2001); the arrival of productivity giant Microsoft as hardware manufacturer and first-party games developer to gain a placeholder in the battle for the living room (Takahashi, 2002); Sony’s siren call that their next generation starts upon their proclamation (Morris, 2006); Sony’s subsequent realignment with their core audience as Microsoft’s Xbox One became a multimedia box rather than a videogames platform and ended up being an attenuated version of both (Rogowsky, 2014); culminating with the current speculation in outlets such as Edge, Games TM and NeoGAF that this will be the last console generation with a tired, stretched videogames industry moving to a standardized platform. Twenty years on from Hayes and Dinsey’s prediction, this is, once again, expected to be a generic PC variant.

Crossing the line: beyond the format wars The circularity evident in the examples above demonstrates how the linear generational format is problematic, not least as its dependence on the passage of time also situates histories spatially: the reliance on the North American ‘pre-crash’ or ‘golden age’, while useful for nostalgic commentary, does not

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allow for the different experiences of DIY home micros in Australia and New Zealand, the mod scene in Scandinavia, piracy networks in Eastern Europe, or home-coding in the United Kingdom. As Guins (2014) contends, the bias towards linear-generational histories will continue to be didactic in the absence of a games studies critique placed within wider social and media considerations. Following from this (see also Huhmato, 2005), there are indications of resistance to the linear-generational model in scholarly activity. The Platform Studies Series (see, e.g., Montfort and Bogost, 2009; Maher, 2012) encourages broad and deep discussion of the idiosyncrasies of a specific format, and therefore is not tied to an explicit linear-generational model or an implicit space and time. Newman, like Guins, provides an exhaustive review of games history from the position of the end user, his practical ties to the National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham informing a critique of the ‘fairly uncontested chronology’ of progression (Newman, 2012:  41). Kirkpatrick (2015), following from his 2013 work on the formation of ‘gaming culture’ around UK videogames magazines, examines how the print media, specifically magazines from Newsfield and EMAP, were influential, not only in the formation of opinion, but in the generation of the ‘field’ of videogames, primarily concerned with the ‘cultural turn’ associated with the term ‘gameplay’ in UK magazines in the mid-1980s. Similarly capitalizing on the widespread availability of scans of early videogames magazines, Therrien and Picard rail against the extensive deployment of military and biological metaphors of ‘bit wars’ and ‘generations’, which ‘distort the complexity of techno-industrial development’ (Therrien and Picard, 2015: 14). There are emergent themes in the literature. As a collective, all of the above implore different theoretical and methodological tacks to games history, the majority of which are centred on the ‘standard’, ‘generational’, ‘bit’, ‘platform’ or ‘format’ paradigm, which encourages a didactic, dialectic tradition to be used as a substitute for a thorough investigation of the field and interrogation of the discipline. Therrien is particularly averse to the current state of play: By integrating field work and theoretical propositions from sociology and psychology to reform the unavoidable techno-industrial account, video game history as a discipline can truly propose a synthesizing point of view living up to the complexity of its object. (Therrien, 2012: 26)

The complexity of study in the field is due to its position in time and space, its genealogy, connected to its position in society and culture, its habitus, with savoir

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and conniassance required to comprehend the complex and fluid positions generated through, with and by the game. Cognitively, bodily, semantically and semiotically, the position of the end user, that is, the consumer, in relation to the field of the videogame and its context is essential to this learning process, after all, a videogame ‘without a player is just so much dead code’ (Atkins, 2003: 135). The literature which rejects the linear-generational account is focused on the relationships of the end user and how these form and inform one another. It is at this point that Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society is invaluable as a method of critique as in the ‘modern consumer society we consume not only goods, but also human services and therefore human relationships’ (Ritzer, 1998: 15). It is important to remember then that the end user in the 1980s was not limited to groups of teenage boys waggling joysticks while purveying POKEs in Crash, but those involved in the sales, distribution, logistics, journalism and the publication of games were just as much part of the experience of being an end user as gamers. They were – whether aware of it at the time or not – engaged in experiential learning around the potentials and pitfalls found in the creation of a new field, their experiences were formative and inform the generation of the new field of videogames. With this position of the end user in mind, the second part of this chapter examines the influence of the range of trades involved in the formation of the videogame industry. It draws on interviews with Jon Hare of Tower Studios, previously of Sensible Software, and with Andrew Hewson, founder of Hewson Consultants. The interview with Hare was carried out in May 2015 at his offices in Ely, Cambridgeshire, and the interview with Hewson through an elicitation interview via email, also in May 2015. The primary data is supported by extensive and exhaustive analysis of the substantial, but often overlooked, literature around the rise of microcomputers in the 1980s and videogames’ role in this.

The ends justifies the means: sales and distribution While the escalation of videogames in the public consciousness was influenced by their appearance in videogames magazines, this should be couched – as with all genealogical approaches – in their emergence through, with and alongside other media, means, tactics and strategies. As seen in Chapters 2 and 3, the position of Sinclair as a patron of microcomputers in the 1980s was greatly reliant on the interests of the DIY hobbyist, where the consumer would construct

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the hardware and then code the software to run on it. This had considerable influence on the phenomenon of bedroom coding and the – sometimes illegal – practices involved in it. Yet, the role of mail order was complicit in this, both as a means to introduce innovative technological products and as a way of manipulating rules and regulations to achieve a desired outcome, which, after all, is central to the lore – and laws – of computer programming. For instance, Chris Yates2 was able to manipulate mail-order to learn how to code for free. We had no money, so Chris got a ZX81 out of the Kayes catalogue on a month’s free trial. He sent it back after a month, and then found two other catalogues that did the same thing. So in three months he taught himself to program for free and had made himself a demo of Snoopy flying around on his kennel. (interview with Jon Hare)

Enabling this sleight of hand to take place was not new to the industry and especially Sinclair. As early as 1962, Sinclair Radionics was using the ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’ mechanism to sell amplifiers (Dale, 1985: 16). Additionally, where English was becoming the lingua franca, mail order theoretically opened the United Kingdom to a global market. This was developed through the reach of hobbyist magazines, which traded in all-consuming desires of individuals where [b]rowsing through the advertisements over and over again is as much a part of the excitement as reading editorial and building and using the equipment itself . . . The content [of the adverts] varied little . . . but it was sufficiently differently arranged to give the armchair enthusiast a new thrill every time he came across a Sinclair advertisement. (Dale, 1985: 16–17)

The direct communication undertaken with the target market is a socializing function which operates at an individual and collective level. With advertising ‘addressing each individual, it is addressing them all, thus simulating a consumer totality’ (Baudrillard, 1998:  125). This is a fundamental of strategic management where markets are first availed to a new technology, before adoption of the technology reinforces its position. In the specific realm of videogames, it is seen individually in the coding and copying of videogames via audiocassettes and then collectively in the distribution of those cassettes in playgrounds and classrooms, where it is then underpinned by the introduction of complementary hardware (e.g. peripherals such as joysticks) and supporting software (e.g. firstparty titles), where the cycle begins again through advertising and distribution. The trick for burgeoning technology businesses lies in how to continue growth in expanding and emerging markets.

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The consumer society is contingent on the role of advertising to titillate and tempt, persuade and purchase. Advertising is seduction. For hobbyists browsing magazines, the process is moot as they are already always seduced by the medium and the message. The challenge for the microcomputer industry in general, and for Sinclair specifically, lay in how to sell the computer to ‘ “the man in the street” . . . the middle-class male professional with a taste for technological chic’ (Adamson and Kennedy, 1986: 88). To fulfil this, the home computer needed to be perceived as much as a technology for professionals to toy with as a tool for professional tinkering. The position of hardware and software as technologies to be toyed with are seen in Kline et al. (2003) and Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter (2009) as tenets for the movement of home computers away from science and towards consumer electronics. The process for undertaking this alteration is reliant on the conjunction between advertising and complementary technologies, which change individual and collective relationships with an object. Ultimately, the object is rendered consumable by being ‘filtered, fragmented and reworked by a whole industrial chain of production – the mass media – into a finished product’ (Baudrillard, 1998:  125–6). When finished, through advertising and accordant launch events, unboxings, promotion and PR exercises, the product moves from being an object to an event, where image is the only referent. Clive Sinclair, ‘almost entirely a product of public relations’ (Adamson and Kennedy, 1986: 13), was reified as a deity for the United Kingdom’s hi-tech industries and gained favour with politicians, investors and consumers as a result. Sinclair’s use of the image as referent percolated through the mythology of a charismatic leader, to the point where he took on the representation of a fraternal mafia don known as ‘Uncle Clive’ (Dale, 1985: 107). Arguably, this was one of the first examples of the promotion of a tech-brand based on star power: a tack duplicated on a global scale in the United States by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

On the high street: chain stores and chains of approval For the cash-rich, middle-class white professional widely known as the ‘yuppie’, looking for a toy to while away weekends, the onus was less on hobbyism and home-coding and more on engagement with smart new tech. Alongside the sheen of PR, Sinclair’s unique selling point was of ‘being first with products, often aimed at a market that didn’t know it existed’ (Dale, 1985:  95), extending the model of experimentation from technology and public relations into distribution, sales

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and marketing. Fortunately high street department stores are a ‘positive laboratory and social testing ground’ (Baudrillard, 1998:  166)  for new products and the microcomputers of the 1980s were rapidly embedded in the habitus, with the stationary store WH Smiths an earlier adopter of the ZX81 in 1981, and the Spectrum 48K embraced by an array of stores in 1983.3 Sinclair thus ‘pioneered a change in the high street’ (Dale, 1985: 113) so now, in a contemporary supermarket, it is not unusual to buy a new Apple or Blackberry with a bunch of bananas. This did not unpeel in isolation but was part of a process already embedded in the stores which were familiar with the concept of multimedia, particularly as regards to music media, which included Boots, the world’s largest pharmacy; WH Smiths, an international stationers; and Woolworths, a giant US hardware retailer, whose British arm was under UK ownership from 1988. The sales dynamic has changed now. Back then the creation of new products and the retail of them was about innovation and breaking new ground. I think that those classic high street stores and what Clive Sinclair was doing with his machines found a convergence point in the form of the cassette format. The biggest seller of music cassettes in those days was Woolworths. Boots sold them too, so it was not a big jump to see them selling games cassettes on the C64 and Spectrum as well. (Interview with Jon Hare)

The historical position of these shops as places of learning in and of themselves (the purchase of a textbook from Smiths, randomized controlled trials for the drugs on sale in Boots) means that they are familiar with experimentation and the adoption of the novel and innovative. It explains why, throughout the 1980s, it was possible to acquire antidepressants and the latest US Gold release in the same venue:  ‘the drugstore takes in everything in kaleidoscopic mode’ (Baudrillard, 1998:  28). Yet the stores’ function at the nexus of unfathomed markets and suppressed demand had further social and economic implications. The demand for the antiquated audio cassette magnetic media used for coding, copying and cracking, which Sinclair couldn’t, or refused, to meet meant that WH Smith’s produced its own peripheral ‘data recorder’ for Sinclair computers and sold 100,000 units in 18 months (Adamson and Kennedy, 1986: 112). Meanwhile, in the software stream, Smith’s acted as informal quality control. You also had this ‘chain of approval’ before a new title hit the shops. It would have been someone’s job at Smith’s and the smaller independent retailers to decide which titles to stock more of, so they’ve got all of these different publishers pitching stuff at them and they’re saying ‘we don’t like that one but this one

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can go on that big shelf over there and we’ll have ten copies of it a month’. In general at this time they were very open minded about the games they stocked. (Interview with Jon Hare)

As seen below, the impact of publishers on the development of the UK software industry was profound. Here, it is the buyers who are – literally – setting the stall out for the visible point of sale of the product. With their involvement in hardware production and distribution, previous boundaries around manufacture, production and supply are distorted and therefore mirror the hardware themselves, which were entrained in ‘grey’ practice in pursuit of the emergence of a new field. This meddling with other economic arenas is normed now: a purchase of an Apple or Blackberry can be funded by signing up for store credit or a customer card, but again, in the 1980s, this was a novel occurrence although, perhaps given the movement towards toying with gadgets and consumer electronics, an unsurprising one, as the socioeconomic relationship is playful, with the ‘ludic becoming the dominant tone of our daily habitus’ (Baudrillard, 1998: 113–114). The playfulness of postmodernism, so prevalent in word games, literature, architecture and videogames also played games with notional boundaries of distribution and production. The millennial purchasing an 18-rated game and the screenager fixed to the phone in 2016 can be presaged in W. H. Smith’s on a Saturday morning in the 1980s, which proffered ‘shelves of software and whizz-kids playing on the computers’ (Dale, 1985: 113). The ends are impelled by the means. The production of play in postmodernity is aided by the litany of the ludic in postindustrial methods of distribution, advertising and marketing. The production of hardware was key to this, but there was equal novelty and invention in distribution, advertising, public relations and marketing. This was dependent on pre-existing networks, tastes and values and their legacy on playgrounds and in bedrooms, offices and schools, work and leisure can be seen today in the integration of the ludic in all areas of consumption. From Saturday morning at ‘Game’, to exhibits in the National Videogame Arcade, to the BBC micro:bit distributed to all 11-year olds in the UK, there is a litany of the ludic.

Profiting from publication The common conception among contemporary consumers of videogames is of publishers being in a position of such power that they are able to wring the last iota of talent from crunched developers, then fleece the customer with special

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editions, in-application purchases and downloadable content. Meanwhile, talented teams, such as Rare, replete with seminal intellectual products are taken away from a position of relative autonomy where innovation is valued and redeployed in the interests of hardware – and corporate – advancement. Criterion’s recent amalgamation into associated EA studios continues a culture of assimilatory acquisitions and mergers which Electronic Arts specializes in. It is the Microsoft maxim taken to its lowest common denominator, where consumers and producers pay a price, in cultural or financial capital, to ensure that the latest iteration of the Formula 1 or FIFA franchise succeeds where more purportedly worthy titles fail, for the sake of establishment of brand names, increased economies of scale, flexible accumulation, all of which are inequitably balanced by risk-averse publishers. The aversion to risk should not be seen as a contemporary phenomenon which plagues the closed-platform model where hardware manufacturers, distributors, retailers, developers, magazines, and advertising agencies all demand a piece of the software pie to justify their existence. Sega’s gradual, but no less spectacular, downfall is as much due to the decline of vertical integration provided by its arcade operations division as to poor choices in consumer electronics; similarly, Namco’s second-party alliance with Sony via Ridge Racer and Tekken has fallen away to be replaced by an uneasy relationship with Japanese toy-manufacturer and Hollywood lapdog Bandai. The flux and flow of constant convergence and divergence between brands demonstrates the balance of supremacy: ebbing away from star power, it is brand power that is now key. It is less about the ethos of Sinclair and Gates, McClean and Jarvis, and more about the name on the box. Publication reflects this shift. The development of the Call of Duty franchise moved from Infinity Ward to Treyarch to maintain a two-year cycle so that developers could implement new ideas away from the traditional and draconian 12-monthly iterative process which inevitably lead to developer franchise fatigue. The upkeep of annual iterations of brand power is risky and financially costly and one which even the film industry would not attempt with its largest franchises. This is demand led and facilitated by a customer base reliant on ‘constant demand for improved quality from its consumers’, which ‘requires huge investment to fund the research, development and man-hours which go into producing a good quality game’ with the cost ‘running into millions of dollars over several years’ (Hayes and Dinsey, 1995: 36). The twin bind is apparent: publishers must fund a title, based on projected (but not guaranteed) earnings, where every

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screenshot and rumour is lasciviously salivated over by a demanding consumer base, which must at once be fed hype and restrained from disappointment at the inevitable delay to release or day-one patch. The relationship between publisher and those around them is both intense and tenuous. The risk aversion of iteration that is seen as a plague of the industry is perhaps one of the few ways of providing consumers with what they desire and at the same time ensuring teams are employed without mass redundancies – one of the most unfortunate facets of a brand-driven industry. As with all stereotypes, subscription to the belief that the videogame industry was not always so ratcheted up in its own ever-decreasing whorl of consumption, where developers didn’t sell out to mammoth corporations and consumers did not drive janky code and premature release dates is pleasing because it contains a granule of truth. Consider this comparison between the 1980s and 1990s by Jon Hare: When the console era came in home computers went niche, they had keyboards on them for a start, which made them a bit intimidating to the average console fan. Whereas home computer users were generally a bit more exploratory and open minded to new game ideas, meaning the demand on games was different from home computers. Look at Populous for example. A console gamer would probably have gone ‘this is a bit weird’ and not played it. With consoles, demand through the shop was for a certain more graphically focused type of game, this was passed onto the distributor, then to the publisher and eventually it rolls down to the dev. This was how the dynamic changed from the early days. (Interview with Jon Hare)

Once again, the primacy of the closed-platform model evinces the mantra that the future is an open-platform model, such as the PC, where control lies with the user. Yet as seen throughout this book, there is a significant difference between the end user who toys with hardware and software and the consumer who plays with electronics. Unlike being confronted with 36 different ice creams at a gelataria, brand power is contingent on values, which, being shared, suggests conformity and their ‘satisfaction has the sense of signing up to these values’ (Baudrillard, 1998: 70), hence the need to sign-in to Xbox Live or PlayStation Network to access the ‘services’ which indeed used to be proffered as physical products or games. The opinion would seem to be that games remain just that, something to play and toy with and not a serious pursuit in and of themselves. This is countered through Apple’s, Sony’s, Microsoft’s and Google’s involvement in games development. For Sinclair, the propagator of innovative machines for an unheralded

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market, this cannot even be excused as ignorance, but a tacit strategy in brand development which became a critical failure, with the development of the Spectrum peripheral, the Microdrive, a ‘deliberate Sinclair policy to discourage software houses from writing games’ (Dale, 1985: 134). This affirmative action, based on the ‘mistaken principle that it would make it look like a games machine, must have played a part in dissuading potential customers’ (Dale: 1985: 142), meant that Sinclair was unable to move from the mythical PR cult of charismatic leadership that served the company so well in its early days, to being able to sell a product based on the name on the box. In retrospect, it is difficult to overestimate the impact of videogames on a burgeoning postindustrial market. Sharing Kocurek’s (2012a) theme of arcade games inuring Americans to flexible capitalism, the Spectrum’s launch was to be a ‘critical factor in the massive expansion of the microcomputer market’ (Adamson and Kennedy, 1986:  124). The subsequent change in tack for the Sinclair QL (Quantum Leap) away from games and towards a more serious domain is rendered doubly strange with the knowledge that Sinclair, in partnership with Psion, arguably introduced the idea of ‘second party’ videogame development and the innovations which were employed alongside it. For instance, Chequered Flag (1983) credited with the introduction of the 3D-sim/ racer to home computers, went beyond being mere cloneware of Pole Position (1982) by drawing on Psion’s history of simulation development by requiring the player to manage fuel and engine heat. Other notable titles published under the Sinclair nomenclature include the Pac-Man-alike Horace and its no less popular clone sequels of Frogger (Horace Goes Skiing) and Donkey Kong (Horace and the Spiders). By the end of 1983, Psion had been brought back from dabbling in handheld hardware to produce second-party titles for the stuttering QL, the ill-fated follow-up to the Sinclair Spectrum. Yet the game was up. Even a £4M star-power advertising campaign featuring ‘Sir Clive in a long scarf doing a jump over rival machines’ (Adamson and Kennedy, 1986: 182) could not reverse the fortunes of a microcomputer without games to play. It is here that the values of an industry driven by incessant reinvention and renewal, seen in Sinclair’s explicit rejection of videogames as a toy, are haunted by repetition and reassimilation where there is realization that games offer a bona fide method to ensure the core audience is properly engaged. Indeed, lessons from the past seem to be rarely heeded: Microsoft’s Xbox One console, initially launched as a media centre has been purposefully rebranded as a ‘games first’ platform in light of poor uptake among its core audience – gamers.

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Volumes of critical theory and, latterly, games studies literature (e.g. DyerWitherford and de Peuter 2009; Kirkpatrick, 2015)  proclaim that capitalist values produced by consumer electronics are not positive or even neutral, but have a general, if not totally debilitative, effect on those involved in the circulation of financial, cultural and social capital within the technological habitus. Firms such as Sinclair were able to gain advantage from these values through network effects garnered by communication technologies. While the Apple tenet ‘Designed in California’, elides the product’s assembly at Foxconn City in Shenzen, it is foreshadowed by Sinclair’s proclivity to outsource: ‘it is no coincidence that the last generation of Sinclair products was developed in affluent Cambridge, but manufactured in impoverished regions in Scotland and Wales’ (Adamson and Kennedy, 1986: 12). Yet there are unintended halo effects to this strategy. The Timex factory in Dundee that produced Sinclair computers also introduced the local population to new possibilities, with Dave Jones, founder of DMA Design and Realtime Worlds, employed there in the early 1980s. The legacy of his firms is considerable, with innovation in the open-world genre (the Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown series) and Lemmings, a game that genuinely defies genre-definition. The publication and production of videogames exist in liminal space, somewhere between the consumer and the developer, the ethical quandary of hardware and software manufacture and the fun intrinsic to the consumption of play. This liminality is almost exclusive to the ludic, which is representative of a ‘very particular type of investment, it is not economic and not symbolic’ (Baudrillard, 1998: 114). This gives credence to those aware of videogames’ global position at the heart of ‘capital’s most dynamic and strategic sectors’ (Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter, 2009: 4) and all of the conflicts it carries with it, but also chooses to ignore its contradictions. The connection to the liminal ludic is precisely the reason why gamers are more likely to be upset by ‘bullshots’ or ‘vapourware’,4 than by the origin of their branded black boxes. Both exist in a liminal space in-between the actual and the imaginary and are a playful, often ethically dubious, and yet extremely viable means of building relationships, no matter how tenuous or tense the network of relationships between developer, publisher and consumer. Unsurprisingly, Sinclair’s relationships with distributors, journalists, the buying public and suppliers, invested in the execution of such strategies. At the launch event for the QL, ‘it was “revealed” that the screen-shots which had illustrated the publicity matter had not been QL-generated’ (Dale, 1985: 139). Fulfilling the maxim of star-power PR mythology, the question is posed ‘Why

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should they have been? . . . if the end is the same, the means is hardly relevant; it is not as though there is some intent to deceive’ (ibid.). Yet this appears to be precisely the point of the ludic (ludicrous?) strategy of the ‘publication’ of vapourware and bullshots: the product that doesn’t exist is more important than the one that does exist. Such is the future orientation of the videogames roundabout: a title which is delayed, cancelled or has never moved beyond the concept phase generates a myth of its own, with the deluge of new – and often safely similar – releases unable to fill the lacuna.

Disappearing into the mirror For games developers of the 1980s, building relationships with publishers was no less a ludic process, but instead of being enabled by network effects or strategies of absence, developers utilized tactics of conciliation and star power honed through relationships to other, often overlapping media and creative industries. A lot of developers moaned about publishers because we had to go through them to reach the market. At Sensible we learned how to work this model to our advantage and pitched the same game around for different deals with different publishers at the same time, they didn’t like it but we did it because we could get all of the offers on the table and then pick the one that we liked best. It was definitely a case of dev power in those days for the experienced developers. It was so great that at any given time we could count on at least three publishers waiting for our brand new IP, the reason being, without exception, that publishers, at that time, had someone heading them up who had a publishing mentality. He wasn’t a finance guy. In those days they were thinking about building up portfolios, to attract more talent and establish their brand as a great publishing house. (Interview with Jon Hare)

This suggests that the relationship between developer and publisher is closer to that of an A&R (artist and repertoire) manager in the music industry, based on support of the artist by the record label. As seen above and in Chapter  4, the connection between the physical media of audio cassettes and tape decks used for distribution – both legal and illegal – of videogames is central to videogames’ penetration of the UK high street in the 1980s. Less well known is that many developers had expertise in music, both in its artistic creation and its publicity. Jon Hare and Chris Yates formed Dark Globe, a band which ultimately gave rise to the development team Sensible Software. Their experience of music

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promotion, meant that negotiations with publishers was already ingrained into their creative habitus. Chris [Yates] and I were used to making stuff, and dragging people into places so they could see our stuff. We were drawing the art for our music cassettes. Recording our songs on a 4-track recorder. We were very used to making stuff creatively before we ever touched games . . . so with games we would do the same thing, knock up a demo and persuade Renegade or Palace or Virgin or Ocean to sign with us [Sensible Software]. They were willing to pay us an advance against royalties and also absorb manufacturing which was like 50p or £1 for the box disk thing [packaging and media]. (Interview with Jon Hare)

The experience here, of publishers’ interactions with developers suggests that silhouettes and echoes from other creative industries were equally as important, particularly in arenas such as A&R development and music publishing where Britain was already pre-eminent. Before its success in micro-computers, Sinclair developed speakers, amplifiers and home stereo equipment. The BBC, famed for its Micro in the 1980s, started as a radio broadcaster in the 1920s. Similarly, while music artists of the 1980s experimented with the sounds of a Roland or Casio synthesizer, some artists, such as Martin Galway and Rob Hubbard, would exclusively use computers for making music for videogames, since realised as ‘chiptunes’. The study of videogames, so used to seeing the narrative and technical devices of television and cinema as their natural antecedents, would perhaps benefit from a greater awareness of the influence of wider artistic endeavours that were formative in the videogames industry. It was the sway of another pre-eminent British industry, newspaper publishing, which was to make waves far beyond its own primary sphere of influence. Mirrorsoft, a videogames publishing company founded in 1983 by Jim Mackonochie, an ex-military pilot, and Robert Maxwell, a veteran of the Czechoslovakian and UK army and then owner of Mirror Group Newspapers,5 traces a red line back and forth through the formation of the UK industry. In 1971, Robert Maxwell, then owner of Pergamon Publishing, was encouraged to assume a chief executive role in the Sinclair-AIM group of companies in exchange for ‘just a little more investment’ (Dale, 1985: 34), in order to avert financial disaster among the companies whose financial plight saw them being sucked into the silicon fens of Cambridge. In this instance, in spite of his interest, Maxwell did not invest. Yet the relationships built in the branding of the technological nexus were extensive as the publisher was placed in the role of medium between the ludic liminality of job losses and pursuit of capital, consumer and

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developer, and risk aversion and innovation. In Mirrosoft’s case, and, in distinction to Sinclair, this was marked by long-term awareness of the educational and financial value of the videogames market, with innovative, scientific techniques used to measure the potential inherent in a young market. All the market surveys showed that the main users of home computers were in the 12–17 year old age group . . . If you’re looking for the long term you have to recognise it’s a very young industry . . . It’s a long-term market with a long shelflife [and] if you promote over a long time you generate sales. (Mackonochie, cited in Minson, 1985)

The long-term strategy paid off in the short term. By 1985, Mirrorsoft were one of the largest publishers in the United Kingdom, part of a family of companies constituted by ‘information services with massive databases and the Rediffusion cable network’ (Minson, 1985)  and Hollis, which offered £12M to acquire the videogame-averse and troubled Sinclair firm in 1985. Maxwell was pictured on the front page of one of his own newspapers, The Daily Mirror, apportioning Sinclair with the star-power of being a ‘brilliant inventive genius’ (Dale, 1985: 177). Ultimately, their partnership was never consummated due to financial inconsistencies in Sinclair’s accounts. Nevertheless, the frantic acquisition of technology firms from Mirrorsoft continued. Eventually Sensible Software found themselves at the centre of international intrigue when Robert Maxwell died mysteriously in the Atlantic Ocean near the Canary Islands, taking Mirrorsoft with him. It [Mega Lo Mania] suffered because it was signed to Mirrorsoft and it was actually released two months before Maxwell [allegedly] jumped off his boat. What we lost when he [allegedly] jumped off his boat was all the royalties. We lost £75,000 in royalties and 75% of our turnover that year. It wasn’t just Sensible, but all of us developers signed with them. Bitmap [Brothers] signed to them, Probe had loads of stuff, I think Vivid Image, Revolution, Graftgold. Basically all the best devs were signed to Mirrorsoft when they went down. They were certainly in a very dominant position with UK developers. We didn’t realise how many of us were signed until we were gathered in a room together with the administrators . . . After this point many of us developers continued to talk to each other and share information on our deals, someone would say ‘we got 20% [royalties] last time and we would think we’ll try 25% next time’. (Interview with Jon Hare)

While the fracture of the videogames industry in the United Kingdom can be seen as part of a wider, global shift to the closed platforms of American and Japanese consumer electronics firms, the potential inherent in Pergamon Publishing’s

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squid-like network of software, hardware and network services is apparent. The absence of Mirrorsoft and the companies that sank with it point towards an empire that was at least in as advanced a position as News International, in terms of its use of information and communication technologies. The collapse of Mirrorsoft may have brought the best UK videogames developers together into one room for the first time, so that they could play social games of negotiation and brinksmanship with other, less savvy publishers, but it is the disappearance of this publisher which generates the most unanswered questions. Would Pergamon have rivalled News International? Could the suite of developers for open platforms from Commodore, Spectrum and Atari remained intact in the face of closed-platform rivalry from Sony, Sega and Nintendo? Would publishing through the Rediffusion network presage internet or cable distribution seen with Steam? As with any strategy of absence or disappearance, from star-power to bullshots, it is the dearth which piques the greatest interest and, ultimately, generates the myth.

Press for success: magazines Both Therrien’s and Kirkpatrick’s current research into videogames’ magazines of the 1980s outline particular cultural responses around the consumption of microcomputers and videogames. Magazines formed a significant part of these responses, able to titillate the DIY hobbyist and gadgeteer into the early adoption of new technologies and entered the circle of feedback to encourage innovation in hardware and software development, while being part of the process of repetition and reassimilation. Trawling advertisements and editorial of UK magazines reveals the introduction of terms such as ‘gameplay’ and ‘shoot ‘em up’ to the global gaming lexicon. Both Kirkpatrick and Therrien’s research is acutely aware that a focus on magazines is able to argue against the conventional technological, linear-generation associated with the ‘bit wars’ or ‘format wars’ that characterize so much of videogames’ discourse from San Francisco to Sydney and Shibuya to Stockholm. The considered and thoughtful movement away from these metaphors is a useful direction for games studies research to take. The conclusion to Kirkpatrick’s (2015) most recent treatise on games and magazines, recognizes the the limitations encountered by Sinclair and others in focusing too much (or not enough) on videogames to the detriment of other interests. This tension, evident in the liminal ludic, means that videogames and their associated scholarly investigation, ‘constrains as it stimulates’ (Kirkpatrick,

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2015: 130). At the same time, the personal relationship many scholars of game history maintain with videogame technology explains why ‘we buy so easily into the marketing practices which led to the bit wars [and] indulge in 8- or 16-bit nostalgia’ (Therrien and Picard, 2014: 14). Yet, as seen above, this ‘buying into of marketing practices’ is as much due to chicanery in the relationships of publishers, developers, manufacturers, distributors as the naiveté of the early adopter, casually seduced by the latest glossy magazine or advert. The value of magazines to the videogame industry is vital. Perhaps even more important are the values they transmit, which ultimately ‘contributes to a change in the ethos of gaming, which is now adversarial, challenging and defiantly unconcerned with parental approval’ (Kirkpatrick, 2015: 119). As seen throughout this book, these are values embedded across the industry, from bedroom coders to arcade workers to hardware manufacturers, with hazy ethics employed in the name of innovation. Consequently, editorial and reviews in games’ magazines can be seen as a reflection, or a frame of the industry, but they are not solely generative of the diverse culture around videogames. Therefore, it is important to see that the magazines from Newsfield, Dennis and EMAP as possessing their own culture which merits sociological investigation. By approaching magazines with recourse to primary data as part of a network of relationships with software houses, distributors, publishers and hardware manufacturers, idiosyncrasies and commonalities are revealed which can inform current and future quantitative and qualitative analyses of magazines. Crash and Zzap!64, published by Newsfield, covered Spectrum and Commodore machines, respectively. Some of the first magazines to engage with videogames as a distinct topic, they gained critical mass from the diametric opposition that each magazine set out in relation to one another, often manifested in trash talk between the staff of each magazine. As any reader at the time would know, the magazines were not only of the same Newsfield stable, operating from the same headquarters in Ludlow, Shropshire, but shared finance structures, cultural capital and staff. This shows how videogame magazines were, akin to other elements of the industry, in retail, development and publishing, able to innovate from a position of reassimilation and repetition They [Crash and Zzap! were set up by the Freys. Oli and Franco Frey. A guy called Roger Kean and a guy called Dave Weston, they set it all up. The guys who ran Newsfield prior to that were running some gay magazines amongst other publications. So they were used to doing stuff that was a bit countercultural, a bit edgy as games would have been considered at the time . . . they

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basically empowered young journalists like Gary Penn, Julian Rignall, Gary Liddon, Steve Jarret, Paul Glancey to set the tone for the nation. We would be showing them games and it was their decision whether they liked them or not. If they liked it they would give it a glowing review in the magazine, if they didn’t they would mercilessly slate it, there was no middle ground and no bribes or anything in those days . . . the rivalry between Crash and Zzap was probably cultivated. Working in the same building, sharing the same houses, I think they created it as a no-lose competition . . . and they did very well. (Interview with Jon Hare)

If the editorial and artwork of the magazines pointed towards conflict and tension, cultivated as generating competition between Sinclair and Commodore, then the inner workings consisted of relationships that were based very much on quid pro quo between magazines and developers:  journalists needed copy and developers needed their product to be promoted. The editorial team were provided with the autonomy to make decisions about a product similar to the ‘chain-of-approval’ supply and marketing mechanism seen in high-street software sales. If journalists buy into the product, then the product sells to the market. The use of three reviewers in Zzap! meant that consumers were provided with a broad palette of opinions, which sometimes contradicted one another dependent on the tastes and perception of the reviewers. While this provided guidance for readers, it is also a filtering role common to print media so that in a ‘confused, conflictual, contradictory world each medium imposes its more abstract, more coherent logic’ (Baudrillard, 1998: 124). This abstraction reaches its zenith in the letters page of both Crash and Zzap!, where the editor was ‘Lloyd Mangram’. Staff played with their identities in the construction of Mangram, a mythical composite of writers from Newsfield, who would situate the character as a medium between both magazines and play with the loyalties of individuals invested in Sinclair and Commodore computers.6 The rarefied position of journalists, where they effectively vet software before release and encourage network effects among rival platforms is, in the first instance, an exercise in self-promotion worthy of Sinclair himself. Yet, by encouraging conflict and competition the magazines actually served to increase the critical mass of the magazines themselves, balkanize loyalties among gamers and contribute to an imagined format war, which, in its circulation, generated more sales and interest across the industry. These practices may have been nepotistic and chimed with the wider ethical haze of videogames, but the recent afflictions of videogame journalism – where journalists are provided with guides to reviewing a game,

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scores are swayed through advertising stakes and reviews are purchased outright – were not in evidence. While the turn away from the linear-generational metaphors reduces the influence of technology, it is important that conniassance, the technical knowledge acquired by developers in the development of games is properly recognized. For instance, Uridium, programmed by Andrew Braybook and published by Hewson Consultants, is identified as being responsible for a major cultural shift in the lexicon around videogames. This was due to the use of the term ‘arcade’ in the advertising of the game in Crash, which was ‘clearly intended to convey the idea that something of the arcade experience was making its way into games played on the Spectrum machine’ (Kirkpatrick, 2015: 61), which was widely perceived as being too underpowered to run the game. Yet the term was originally used by Andrew Braybook to describe Paradroid, the precursor to Uridium when the title was in pre-production for the Commodore 64: ‘It’s not really an arcade adventure  – it leans more towards arcade’ (Braybook, 1986). The apportioning of a significant cultural turn on a term used in a magazine advertisement minimizes the importance of the techniques of the programmer and the technology involved. It also elides the role of genealogy in how terms are constructed and understood: as seen in the previous chapter, the concept of the arcade, particularly in the United Kingdom, is highly contested. Equally important to sociology is that such usage minimizes the complex entanglement of relationships between the publisher, Hewson Consultants, the developer, Andrew Braybook, journalists and the subsequent promotion of the game, all of which are of manifest importance to Hewson Consultants’ founder, Andrew Hewson. We were very fortunate to have some incredibly talented programmers producing games for us, so Hewson games were generally very well received. I  certainly remember being ecstatic about landing the Paradroid Diaries feature with Zzap!64 and getting Uridium on the cover of C&VG [Computer and Video Games] because I understood how powerful that was for the marketing. (Interview with Andrew Hewson)

Videogame habitus: the formation of the industry It is these relationships forged between those working in the videogames industry that are indicative of the values which were reflected in magazines

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and media of the time. After all, it was end users, copying, cracking and coding in bedrooms and dining rooms while browsing Zzap! or Crash, who drove the renaissance for audiocassettes as a storage medium due to their ease of distribution. The amalgamation, the disappearance, of consumption into production is part of this whorl of cultural, financial and social capital where developers would spend as much time reading magazines as appearing in them,7 editorial staff would circulate from Newsfield to EMAP to Dennis Publishing, videogame publishers would write books providing hints and tips on how to develop games for Sinclair machines8 and journalists would shift into videogame development with the firms that they originally helped to promote. The tactics used by Sinclair, Newsfield, Sensible Software and Hewson Consultants found their origin in other, closely meshed industries, before being refined and evolved into a industry that was truly pioneering in its application of a range of end-user, consumer-focused strategies. Historically this is one of the messages of the videogame industry and one that chimes true today: that innovation is contingent on repetition and reassimilation. For Baudrillard, the message sent out by a society which recirculates signs, simulations and capital in the pursuit of economic and technological progression is of ‘the deep structural change (of scale, of model, of habitus) wrought in human relations’ (Baudrillard, 1998:  123). Here, it is the change from means of production to relations of consumption, each individual interchangeable and fluid, roles swapped as quickly as a disk in a drive. As characteristic as this was of the formative years of the industry, perhaps the nexus is found in a house in the Home Counties, a kind of omega point of the history, influences and relationships that informed the industry, as Jon Hare explains: I shared a house in Ilford, Essex in 1986–87 with my mate Ian and Gary Liddon, who was one of the original Newsfield journos who has since been in development for years and after a while our house turned into a proper dev house. Chris would be there a lot, Gary Penn slept on our sofa, Stavros Fasoulas, who did Sanxion, stayed for a while too, Martin Galway would come round and I’d work with him on the music. Then there would be our friends who were games journos and other guys from the publishing side visiting sometimes. We’d all be there programming away and learning about what each other was doing. (Interview with Jon Hare)

This is the quintessential videogames habitus, a domestic environment which brought the different elements of videogames together under one roof. Learning

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was taking place in areas that initially appeared disparate, but through collaboration were adapted and applied to development, journalism and publishing. Such is the degree of circulation of social, financial and cultural capital, that effects of these relationships are still in evidence 30 years later.9 Gary Liddon, so influential in the early days of Zzap! and Crash! was also central to the inauguration of Thalamus, Newsfield’s software development and publishing house, which employed Stavros Fasoulas as a coder for its early releases. Newsfield’s nepotism, founded on informal relationships so important to the promotion of new titles, fuelled Thalamus’s games sales with – often fully justified – positive reviews for its games.10 Martin Galway composed the soundtrack to Sensible Software’s Wizball (1987), which Zzap! subsequently recognized as its greatest ever game in 1988 and Retro Gamer anointed as the second-best Commodore 64 game of all time behind Paradroid. The ever-decreasing circulation of cultural, social and financial capital reached its own omega point as extended lead times and squeezing of developer royalties by the publisher forced Thalamus to a management buyout that ‘definitely contributed’ to Newsfield Publications’ demise in 1991 (Dean, cited in Fisher 2015: 63).

Future development Andrew Braybrook recognizes 1991 as the end of the lone programmer era in the United Kingdom, a time which coincides with the demise of Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 as primary platforms for games development and publication and more widely perceived as the ‘end of 8-bit’. Larger development teams were required for computers with faster processors, and these changes contribute to the common, yet flawed, perception of the ‘bit wars’, ‘format wars’, ‘home computer wars’ or ‘console wars’ and the subsequent obsession with the linear-generational model. The challenge set by this chapter and to the wider literature is, alongside an avowed shift from the spaces of US-centrism and vertical technological-chronologies, a recognition that videogame culture is not only found in the magazines of Newsfield, EMAP and Dennis, but in how the videogame habitus draws on the circuits, circles and circulation of relationships found in the mail order, public relations, disappearances, print media, music promotion, silicon technology, knowledge capital, royalty deals and high-street drug stores of the consumer society.

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Notes 1 Although the term ‘heroinware’ originally referred to the distribution model ‘where users would play the game for long enough to purchase the remaining play levels’ (Parberry, 1997), it appears to be used by some psychologists as term for a game with addictive and ultimately negative qualities (see Rajender et al, 2009). 2 With Jon Hare, Chris Yates was one of the founder members of UK games developers Sensible Software. 3 These included Boots (pharmacists); Currys (electronics); John Menzies (stationers); and John Lewis, House of Fraser and Debenhams (department stores). Jon Hare, one of the interviewees in this chapter, purchased a Spectrum from Debenhams. 4 ‘Bullshots’ are images, usually released by a publisher via an exclusive agreement with a magazine or online news outlet, that purport to be from the game, but are often pre-rendered or touched up to make the game look better than its actual release. Vapourware is the announcement of a product or a service before it is ready for release, and more commonly in the videogame industry does not exist at all, such as Agent from Rockstar Games. See Shapiro and Varian (1999) for further discussion. 5 Pergamon Press was the parent company for a range of media interests that included Mirror Group Newspapers, which had in its stable The Daily Mirror and The Daily Record. The etymology of Mirrorsoft suggests a direct link between newspaper and videogame publishing, with an interview with Jim Mackonochie declaring that ‘Mirrorsoft have also used the group’s resources to ensure high standards of presentation, conscious of the fact that their image reflects back on the image of the newspapers in the group. They’ve drawn on the journalistic talents contained within the organisation to produce properly edited documentation’ (Minson, 1985). 6 Mangram’s popularity as a 1980s videogame iconoclast saw his spirit resurrected in magazines from Imagine Publishing in the 2000s, with magazines such as GamesTM and Retro Gamer carrying a strong focus on the UK videogame industry from the 1980s. 7 Jon Hare stated during the interview: ‘I remember reading the magazines as much as being in them. I think that we were lucky that our relationship was very good with them over those few years.’ 8 During the interview Andrew Hewson stated: ‘[M]y initial goal was to write a book, which I achieved with Hints & Tips for the ZX80 and a few more books followed. I wrote a Hangman game and a Lunar Lander simulator but after my Hewson’s Helpline column appeared in the first issue of Sinclair User my career took a different path. People began sending me their games and Hewson Consultants ultimately became a publisher.’

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9 During the research for this chapter, I contacted the majority of people who Jon Hare lived with. As far as I’m aware, Stavros Fasoulas is the only individual not currently active in the contemporary games industry. 10 It is interesting to note that Beyond Software, set up in 1983, were a precursor to Thalamus. They operated in synergy with EMAP Publishing, and were prolific videogame publishers throughout the mid-1980s.

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The Politics of British Videogames in the 1980s

The difference with video games is that your dream or fantasy can actually begin to become a reality. How else could England ever win the World Cup again? Michael Hayes and Stuart Dinsey, Games War

Divisions By any measurement, Britain was a divided nation in the 1980s. The election of the Conservative government in 1979 in response to the ‘winter of discontent’ where there was widespread failure of public services was the backcloth, if not the impetus, to a decade of often violent discord. Some of this conflict, such as the Falklands War of 1981, was a reaction to external threats, but many, such as the miner’s strikes of 1984 and inner city riots of the early 1980s, were individual and group retorts to what were perceived as state and institutional impingement on everyday life, in ways of working, expressions of ethnicity and traditional hierarchies. The changes wrought by this tumultuous decade, expressed most keenly in the shift from an industrial society based around production, to a postindustrial society based on services and consumption, continue to ripple around discourses today. The interdependency of economies, inexorably linked to the big bang of 1986, the return to a West-East Cold War, the implication for middleEastern refugees displaced by ideological proxy wars, the seemingly endless rise in property prices, the reliance on the rapid assimilation and dissemination of information rather than physical graft coupled with the general insecurity of employment it brings with it are all apparent in contemporary Britain.

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Far from being a trivial aside to the divisiveness which surrounded them, videogames produced in Britain provided a commentary on the habitus. The struggles which typified a society moving from primary and secondary industries to tertiary and quaternary services can be seen at an elemental level in the primacy given to miners in games such as Manic Miner (1983) and the Monty series. Issues of race and immigration were played out in licensed videogames, from the largely positive (if stereotypical) role models of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (1984) and Frank Bruno’s Boxing (1985) to the street-level subversiveness of Ghettoblaster (1985). Gender, often seen as missing in contemporary videogames, could be seen as active, if in a rather hegemonic manner, in games which roundly focused on the emotional labour required in the transition from blue-collar to white- and pink-collar professions. This chapter examines the roles that videogames have played in informing a critical understanding of the 1980s. As an art form which came to prominence throughout the decade, it subjects games which relate to class, race and gender to analysis within the wider culture. The focus is very much on the abstraction and presentation that videogames permitted, in their presentation and play and has a particular onus on the content, mechanics and music used within games. It starts with a discussion of work and class, with the bleak critique of Cederstrom and Fleming (2012) showing how videogames and labour share common themes, particularly around how work is invested in them and the way in which rewards are central to the replication of capitalist modes of production and consumption. Such was the eclecticism of the games at the time, titles such as Hampstead (1984) parodied the upward mobility of Conservative Britain, while Super Pipeline (1983) offered a counterpoint to the shift from the industrial to the postindustrial. The racial position of the body, so apparent in the licensed sports games mentioned above, is examined with recourse to Barry McGuigan’s World Championship Boxing (1985) and the habitus of the fighter ethnographically studied in Wacquant’s (2004) seminal Body and Soul alongside Baerg’s (2007) interrogation of the role of the fighter in Fight Night Round 2 (2005). This illuminates that boxing, like the inner city ghettoes which give birth to so many great fighters, hosts a contested space of race, the body and class. Ultimately, this is realized in Tony Gibson’s Ghettoblaster, a title which, like so much of his work, scrutinizes the habitus for opportunities of parody, satire and, in some cases, genuine resistance to the status quo.

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As Nooney, following Guins, observes in her exhaustive investigation of the role of Roberta Williams in the formation of Sierra On-Line, women exist at the threshold of new innovations, between external domestic/care requirements placed upon them by existing socioeconomic forces and their personal desire to explore and experiment with these new innovations. These are manifest in the games themselves, such as Mad Nurse (1986) and in those that women develop, such as Trollie Wallie (1984) The position of women, as Nooney is keen to articulate, is not their lack of presence, but how they are presented in the history of games. It is the method of this presentation, through abstraction, contested spaces, music, licensing and politics which suggests that videogames, in common with their popular-media stablemates, have much to offer in terms of critical commentary on this most divided of decades.

Just another brick in the wall: work and class From the arcade workers of Southend, to the crackers and copiers of the bedroom through to the developers of software and hardware, the work that takes place around videogames is axiomatic to the formation of the field of videogames. One of the most important contributions to the analysis of videogames focuses on the ‘ergodic’ construction of the game between the player (or reader) and the game (or narrative), an interaction which, through its non-triviality, assumes the position of work (Aarseth, 1997). Labour has taken up such prominence in videogames that ‘grinding’ for incremental experience points and ‘farming’ for gold and wealth are synonymous with the experience and terms which are immediately connected to the graft and slog of the rat race. Yet, even toil takes liberties with the separate space of the game and play: in how many other pursuits (including work itself) would an individual continue to undertake repetitive tasks ad infinitum such as breaking bricks in a wall (Breakout; Tetris), digging trenches (Viva Pinata; Minecraft), wandering around wastelands (Mad Max; Fallout) or reducing human interaction to its lowest common denominator (Game Dev Story; Papers Please)? The reason such chores are undertaken – often unquestioningly – is due to the unique position of the game, so that, just as unquestioningly, fun is implicit (if not explicit).1 As anyone who has seen a bad loser on the squash court, or a controller crunch into a wall, games are not always fun. Therefore, if fun is supplanted by frustration, the time and effort expended in the pursuit of the

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non-trivial takes the form of the ‘reward schedule’ (Loftus and Loftus, 1983). This can manifest itself in many ways, including the primacy of the high-score table, a mechanism of one-upmanship borrowed from league tables in competitive games, or in the more subtle, but no less influential, social advancement found in level-ups, power-ups, experience points or extra lives, again evident in other games where experience sets the veteran apart from the neophyte. Reward schedules themselves are divested into a sociopolitical narrative where ‘work pays’ and there is a tangible return on investment, so that greater effectiveness can be engendered on the construction site, farm, prairie or office.2 In effect, the effort, or work, invested in the game by the individual or team pays three times over: first, in the reward schedule of the individual striving to get ahead in the rat race – hard work is equal to more pay and greater status; second, in the use of games at/with/as work to improve ‘enjoyment’ of work via serious games and gamification; and third, in that the capitalist system reaps the rewards of skilled, gamified workers via increased productivity, capital gains and profit. Everyone’s a winner. Ultimately, when the competitive worker employs the mantra ‘it’s all a bit of game’ when striving for the reward schedules proffered by both games and work, work and play are no longer distinguishable from one another with the result being the ‘exact opposite of play, fun and real living’ (Cederstrom and Fleming, 2012: 15). The hazing of the boundaries of work, play and consumption are profound themes in this book and it is instructive to see how different habitus engender different responses to the transition between industrial and postindustrial society. IBM, one of the leaders of the revolution in information technology maintained a binary ‘sharp line between work and non-work’ (Cederstrom and Fleming, 2012: 12) in its corporate culture of the 1980s, itself founded on earlyto-mid-twentieth-century models of production. Meanwhile, videogame companies of the time, suckling on flexible accumulation, would use a consumer-led model of production, with the most notorious being Atari, where illicit sex, illegal drugs and theft combined to generate a tech firm which found success in its excess (Bushnell, cited in Kent, 2001: 51–52). With the prevalence of the videogame form and the flexible formation of its production, there is a concomitant alteration around play, so ‘as cultures change, so do games’ (McLuhan, 2001: 260). Videogames reflected this in content too. Atari’s Paperboy (1985) converted for home computers by Lichfield’s Elite Systems shows a teenager being gently inured into the world of work, with early morning starts and access to a BMX track as a reward for

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completing deliveries. Nevertheless, the thieves and bees, skaters and valley girls who populate Easy Street suggest a more nefarious characterization of clapboard suburban USA. While the handlebars on the arcade cabinet and the technical proficiency of Atari’s System 2 board permitted a realistic view of the street, the characters make the setting surreal. UK videogames were even more whimsical in setting and characterization: so ‘limited were the graphics capability of the early games, the medium was forced to remain relatively abstract’ (Wolf, 2003:  47), best seen in the flipping toilet lids and wind-up ducks of Manic Miner (1983). Traditional blue-collar trades from the primary and secondary industries were well enacted in UK videogames of the 1980s and drew on trades such as mining, poster pasting and refuse collection. Homages to a changing technological habitus moved from heavy industry, embedded in Fordist models of production, to the knowledge work of software production. Here, the abstraction of the videogame operates at two levels. First, by reaching back to outmoded, endangered and often class-defined professions, the content of games provided a figurative bridge between the industrial, represented by games such as Taskset’s Super Pipeline (1983) and Poster Paster (1984) and the postindustrial, represented by those who coded the game and the machines they worked on. Second, the simple avatars used abstraction as a method that ‘aids identification rather than alienating the player’ (Aldred, 2012:  92). This is especially pronounced when the character does not have a name, so, in lieu of being assigned a nomenclature and personality at the start of a game, it is easier to transition the player’s identity onto the avatar, which can result in greater personal investment and empathy. This is coupled with everyday scenarios, such as seeing a refuse lorry on a suburban street, which would have been experienced in the wider habitus. Trashman even goes as far as to mimic the recruitment process by advertising the role as a Job Centre ‘situation vacant’. Responding to the advertisement, the player is required to input their name before the game begins. In-game, the reward schedule draws on an ever-decreasing score which impacts on Trashman’s leisure time and therefore the amount of drinks to be imbibed at cease of work, further reinforcing the blue-collar ideal of piecemeal work framed by definite and Fordist notions of the work/non-work binary. The coupling of the abstract and the quotidian appealed to baby-boomers, who had some semblance of permanence in employment – and who would ultimately buy the games – and to Gen Xers, who were required to be adaptable in work and education – and who would ultimately play the games.

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The switching from one job to another, from miner to pipeline attendant to refuse collector, is a key tenet in the flexibility required by the industries of energy production, car manufacturing and telecoms that required regularly updated skill sets from their personnel, almost as often as companies would privatize and change their name, but at least games provided music and soundtracks to this impermanence. The inclusion of classical  – and classic  – musical ditties in videogames acts as a bridge between the past, present and future. The theme tune from the Laurel and Hardy TV show is played in Super Pipeline, underlining the teamwork required by the on-screen characters. Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ is a particularly apt tune for a game that was coded at night by Matthew Smith and is set in a welter of underground caverns. It is perhaps the title theme to Trashman, ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’, which most emphasizes the class relationship between occupation and modes of consumption, with the eponymous dustman wearing ‘Cor blimey trousers’ while ‘living in a council flat’. The song’s popularity in 1950s music halls resonated at once with early boomers, and the topics of both the game and the music, such as the use of everyday objects as musical instruments, were instructive to the hobbyist, DIY culture which grew up around computers and videogames in the United Kingdom and further afield.3 Remediation across time and space could also be found in the US’s appropriation of blue-collar work:  Paperboy’s attract mode elicits America’s elevation of the ‘old’ media of print journalism above the 24-hour news anchor – ‘Paperboy, stopping at nothing in his valiant efforts to save this land from TV journalism’, with an all-American boy grinning from behind a sheaf of The Daily Sun’s, a popular title for newspapers published throughout north America. These re-enactments of Fordist trades, enabled by post-Fordist methods of work and machine educes a theme of goal-oriented autonomy, a position reinforced by their almost exclusive use of the single-player mechanic. Tasks must be prioritized, problems solved and alien invaders neutralized, all useful individual skills when purveying the inbox, the ballot box, or immigrants boxed into trailers en route to Britain from the Schengen Zone. These are skills also essential to one of the quirkiest games of the early 1980s, Hampstead (1983), which is portrayed as an adventure game for would-be social climbers. For those who have never played one before, an adventure game generally depends on the use of brainpower. Speed of reaction isn’t so important. What matters is the ability to solve

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complex problems, which get harder the further you proceed in the game. (Hampstead, instruction booklet)

Hampstead is idiosyncratic as the player does not start with a trade or profession. The aim is to strive and attain the paradise of the leafy north London suburb ‘Hampstead’ through any means necessary. Whether intended or not, it is interesting to note that the instruction booklet does not differentiate between the term of the genre ‘adventure game’, the art of being a ‘social climber’ and the requirement to ‘solve problems’: they are in effect one and the same, a key component of a society where work and play are undifferentiated. In one sense then, this is a game very much of its time. It effectively starts as an account of unemployed life, a common occurrence for the ‘1 in 10’, ‘UB40s’ or simply the 3.1 million out of work in 1983. The experience of being a benefits signatory to the underclass is at once rendered abstract (and ergodic) and therefore intensely personal, by being a text-based adventure presented in the second-person register of ‘you are in the lounge of a smelly council flat’. Being part of the unemployed underclass tasked with watching daytime quiz shows is not an abstraction – or aberration – that Hampstead will entertain for long. Instead, the game demands that the player, in common with the goals of the developers, ‘ “attain” Hampstead rather than just physically get to Hampstead. We saw (and still see) Hampstead as more a state of mind.’ The developers, whose aim was to spoof the ‘high water mark of Thatcherism and the social aspiration that came with it’ (Lever, cited in Osley 2014), were convinced that it was the most anti-commercial game that they could conceive, yet publishers queued to sign it to their portfolio, and it won awards on its release. To reinforce the genealogy of the game as being both of its time and somehow out of joint, Hampstead was re-released in 2014 onto mobile platforms, neatly coinciding with the high-water mark of a special brand of liberal-conservative capitalism in which the narrow narrative of hard-working aspirational families gives lie to Hampstead, where even owning a homestead is beyond the economic range of many. For its proponents, capitalism is the only game in town. The smooth nonplaces of the mall, motorway and mobile media have not only rubbed away the differences between work and leisure, but between work and life. The time of leisure, of fun and games is no longer immune to flexible accumulation, but is instead absolutely essential and central to it. Videogames of the 1980s can help indicate how the transition between the industrial and the postindustrial

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took place, with the life-skills plied in-game slowly, surely, replacing the bluecollar worker with the tertiary worker, and eventually with the emotional labour of a disenfranchised underclass employed in cafes, supermarkets, nurseries and fast-food restaurants (see Jones, 2012). This new normative work involves problem-solving, time-management and task-prioritization, thus exercising a ‘displacement of the management function onto labor itself ’ (Cederstrom and Fleming, 2012: 13), exemplified in the rise of the gig economy where all ancillary employment functions, such as taxation, insurance, sickness and welfare management, are shifted from the company to the individual. Foucault himself would be astonished that this extends into the world of non-work and unemployment too: missing a meeting with a ‘work mentor’ does not result in a quizzically raised eyebrow from a civil servant, but an incursion of benefits, an amplification of the assault on leisure-time experienced by Trashman, except this extends beyond alcohol to the core essentials of food and shelter. Non-compliance to the wonderful new world of (non-)work won’t mean a job emptying bins, but eating out of them.

Racing, race, punched in the face: the bodily habitus Abstraction and competition are also necessary parts of the formation of videogames based around sports. The very earliest iterations mimicked tennis (Tennis for Two) and table-tennis, (Pong), respectively. That the view provided was as a spectator (courtside or over-table) and required two players at a time was as much a commentary as to how games were perceived as jointly competitive endeavours experienced via television as a rejoinder to processing power. Franchises built around sports games reflected this experience:  Cinemaware’s ‘TV Sports’ series covered baseball, boxing and gridiron; Electronic Arts’ status is heavily reliant on the EA Sports brand (‘if it’s in the game, it’s in the game’); while Gamestar, inaugurated in 1982, was a software house dedicated entirely to sports (Hawken, 2015: 84). Gamestar crossed over from the US market to the lucrative UK home computer market with one of the first games licensed to a sports personality with Barry McGuigan’s World Championship Boxing (1985).4 Professional boxing, its popularity as a TV sport boosted by its appearance in the Rocky sequels of the 1980s, was ideally suited to being represented in videogames. It takes place within a well-delineated, easily represented space, clearly marked by boundaries of time and the win/loss condition, which permitted two

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protagonists to – safely – take part in a sport where the direct aim is to hurt the opponent through the infliction of harm, a recurring trope in videogames from Spacewar! to Star Wars. Boxing games are a ring-walk into the bodily habitus embedded into sports videogames. Instead of adherence to a post-human condition where the body is negated, there is a requirement that ‘physical action and perception are interdependent’ making ‘us embodied subjects while engaged in our experiences’, which are both ‘tactile and kinaesthetic’ (Dovey and Kennedy, 2006: 106–107), mediated through the graphical interface, avatar and controller. This is in contradistinction to a game such as Tennis for Two, which appears to be the manifestation of the Deleuzian notion of the body without organs, as there is no visible on-screen referent of the player, either as avatar or abstraction (e.g. a floating tennis racquet). This lack of a graphical representation of the body is rarely evidenced in videogames. Even first-person shooters and the body controllers of Wii-Motion and Kinect will not overlook the importance of the somatic in acknowledgement of the alienation that complete disembodiment imposes on the player. This is taken to its lowest common denominator with the constant and complete failure of all iterations of virtual reality, where the most distinct reminder of being part of the corporeal is dizzyingly unpleasant simulation sickness. It is arguable, therefore, that the first-person perspective, widely seen as empowering (and embodying) the player, actually has the opposite effect, in that player identification decreases alongside a decline in abstraction directly related to technological improvements:  if an object or character can be represented through a render, why symbolize with a sprite? A good example of this can be seen through the analysis of EA Sports Fight Night Round 2, where Andrew Baerg observes that personal avatar creation, where the player can design an on-screen representation of their choosing, ‘objectifies’ and ‘short-circuits’ the corporeal nature of boxing (Baerg, 2007: 338), by the game forcibly removing connection between the player and the avatar. This is particularly evident in the between-rounds mini-games where the player also acts as the cutman and swabs the inevitable facial injuries caused by boxing. At one level, this adheres to the bodily habitus experienced by the pugilist, where the body inured, almost nurtured, through boxing demands special care and the ‘pugilist’s body is at once the tool of his work and the target of his opponent’ (Wacquant, 2004:  127). This highlights the importance of training, diet and physiological management before, during, after and between fights. Yet the disconnection is evident. The only time when the player moves into a first person

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perspective is when they undertake the role of cut-man whose task is to ‘make sure his boxer is not handicapped by a wound to the face . . . His instruments are rudimentary, an icepack, cotton swabs, an “enswell” ’ (Wacquant, 2004: 160). The cutman works through the connaisance of darning a bloody face together, the technological application of instruments allowing the body to quite literally remain at the cutting edge, with everything else ancillary to the minute’s break between rounds. The creation of the physiological, racial and psychological characteristics of the avatar, all of the bag-work, speedball and physical conditioning prior to the fight are elided by the use of the hands, not for violence but for healing, embodied in Fight Night Round 2 by twirling the thumbstick on a joypad. The reward schedule for success is another round of controlled aggression. Non-compliance leads to a technical knockout as a cut and bloody body is not healthy and disciplined, but a violated and therefore non-violent body, rendering it useless for the player and boxing. Ultimately, therefore, the most important person to the fight is rendered in the first person, but this is precisely the person that the player cannot control the physical, racial, personal, technical or psychological attributes of, disembodying and disembedding the player from the taste and ache of action. With boxing known as the ‘sweet science’, instrumentalization and objectification are par for the course. The ‘tale of the tape’ informs participants and observers of the measurements of a fighter, including height, reach and weight, while unquantifiable bodily terms, such as ‘chin’ and ‘heart’, are spoken about in mystical terms, a quality which cannot be trained irrespective of the hours spent at training camps, and prominent in attributes of boxers in the Fight Night series of games. Barry McGuigan’s World Championship Boxing is germane in this regard. When the player starts the game, the player chooses the type of boxer. This leads to settings regarding race and hair and skin colour, which defaults to black for all options. In contemporary games, having an avatar with a non-white skin colour is unusual, but during the 1980s, the tendency was for less binary choices particularly as many of the sports games of the day included black avatars, often due to licensing, such as Daley Thompson’s Decathlon and Frank Bruno’s Boxing. Baerg is critical of the choice of race occurring in a contextual vacuum, where, following Wacquant, the social habitus of the ‘deskilled labour market, and the activities and networks that make up the predatory economy of the street’ (Wacquant, 2004: 18) are obviated. The sacrifice of boxing, of time, of energy, of dedication to muscle memory, in the face of street-gangs, drugs, prostitution and causal violence wrapped in an ideology of poverty where education

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is a non-sequitur, is not rendered by the game, while the music of the street, the fast-talk and attitude, is given countenance. Boxing throughout the twentieth century, but particularly the 1980s, offered an alternative pathway to crime, alcoholism and illegal drugs that ravaged Black, ethnic and minority neighbourhoods of the inner cities5 and was particularly visible with its appearance on terrestrial TV, explicitly acknowledged by Frank Bruno’s Boxing showing a loading screen with a television broadcasting boxing. Yet the abstraction in boxing games appears closer to cinema and the Rocky fairytale where the Black champion somehow permits the White contender to fight for the belt: an instrument by which to short-circuit the great white hope to the world championship at the expense of the Black incumbent. Boxing’s reliance on the body as a tool and technology for progression in income, status and respect is attenuated in McGuigan’s Boxing through quantifying physical characteristics, which nevertheless require investment into the body. The player chooses from a variety of different training methods, such as roadwork for endurance, bagwork for speed and weights for strength, all which serves the corpus, to be able to put something away for fight night. Following this, the player chooses the personal characteristics of the boxer, including fighting style (slugger, dancer) and ‘image’ (‘erratic’, ‘loudmouth’). Choices made here impact on the following screen with the ‘attitude’ of the boxer, which, irrespective of the choices made previously, will default to ‘negative’. Mired in the perception of a sport where more of the fighting is done in the trash-talk of pre-fight press conferences than in the square-circle of the ring, being able to talk a good game is almost as important to status and respect – and therefore income – as good footwork and defence. The fact that the majority of boxers are Black, Asian or Hispanic and are placed in front of cameras and news outlets hungry for soundbites and the connection appears obvious: the ‘blackitude’ of the ghetto, of fast-talking street smarts, is as important to the boxer as fast hands and feet. This is fair game as long as it takes place within the separate space of the inner city, ring, press-room or courtroom and doesn’t impinge on purse or TV revenue.6 Boxing’s links with music go far beyond the ring-walk and ‘Eye of the Tiger’ montage of Rocky. Like boxing, the music of jazz, hip-hop, blues and rap have ties to the socioeconomic habitus of the ghetto (McLeod, 2009). By the 1980s, ghettoes in the United Kingdom, predominantly those with links to the Caribbean islands had forged their own identities. The advent of portable music systems, their dual tape-decks so beloved of the pirates of the bedroom copying and cracking crowd, were also widely used in urban spaces as a way of providing an

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impromptu soundtrack to the inner cities. This was enshrined in their nomenclature of ‘ghettoblaster’ or ‘Brixton Briefcase’.7 Technologically flexible, they used many of the same techniques as bedroom copiers in that turntables could be plugged in and mixtapes produced. Culturally, they were a symbol of resistance among Black youth with sound-offs being deemed an urban nuisance and individuals targeted as part of wider clampdown on unrest in the British inner cities of Toxteth, Handsworth and Brixton of the 1980s (Stewart, 2013: 91). The connection between technology and the street was fully fused in Virgin Games’ release of Tony Gibson’s Ghettoblaster (1985). Gibson previously programmed arguably the first videogame with a Black lead when Taskset released Jammin’ (1983), a game based around collecting musical notes to a range of soundtracks. Both Ghettoblaster and Jammin’ sported covers with a smiling Rastafarian listening to music, but where Jammin’ was a completely abstract music game in the vein of later ‘rhythm action’ titles, Ghettoblaster moved away from abstraction and focussed on a fictional, but recognisable London (Funky Town) with melodic street names, such as Electric Avenue and Gasoline Alley. The protagonist, Rockin’ Rodney, wandered around the city putting together mixtapes, repairing broken equipment and attending parties. To succeed in his task, Rodney puts the locals into a ‘dance trance’ by playing loud music, which attracts the attention of ‘the fuzz’, who must be avoided at all costs on risk of arrest – a bewildered looking police constable is central to the magazine advert for the game. The role of resistance in the game is given further credence by the place names of ‘Stoney End’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’.8 Entering Itchycoo Park inevitably means Rodney runs into magic mushrooms, resulting in a kaleidoscopic screen flash, while an encounter with Jumpin’ Jack Flash whizzes Rodney off to the nearest mixtape. Ghettoblaster is clearly a game which draws deeply on the contested, divided spaces of the inner cities of the 1980s and eclectic histories of music, from a spectrum of influences. This extends to the bedrooms of young, mainly middle-class and White people listening to Black music on their tape-to-tape decks while watching broadcasts of destitute inner cities ‘looking like charred remains from the Blitz’ (Stewart, 2013: 91). It is only a short journey from these places and technologies to those of the videogame: its methods of abstraction and re-representation eliding the boxing ring entirely and placing the player in the Electric Avenue of the ghetto. Yet, for a game with such clearly subversive and political influences, there were two strangely politically correct decisions made around it. The first was the inclusion of an option to change Rodney’s

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colour from black to white. The second was the re-release of Ghettoblaster on the Mastertronic budget label in 1987 under the title Street Beat: An Adventure in the Land of the Good Groove. In the re-release, the music was altered to reflect the sanitized title, which moves away from the ghetto and into a fantasy zone akin to a fairytale than grim urban decay. This whitewashing effectively decouples the player from the space, ensuring that the middle-class White player can remain safe in their own bodily habitus, with the player able to short circuit the poverty and desolation of the ghetto to access the radical, desirable exotica of the inner cities: drugs, music and paraphernalia are only a fire-button away, strangely enabled by technologies that were common to both the bedroom and the street. Yet this link was consummated in rave culture at the end of the 1980s. In rural and metropolitan areas throughout the country, urban Black dance music converged with disenfranchised young people in extravaganzas drawn as much from technology as culture: experimentation focussed on new and established synthetic drugs alongside the use of silicon to drive the ‘Radical Audio Visual Experience’. Its basis in a revolutionary technology as much as the seditiousness of youth gives truck to the change of name of Ghettoblaster in 1987, as rave culture did not divide between the bedroom and the street, but instead brought them together, with music made at home during the day, then played at ‘illegal’ venues at night. This has lead to this underground music, drugs and technology culture being widely perceived as the last great counter-culture movement of the past 30 years (see Fisher, 2014). While Ghettoblaster is not solely responsible for this, the social and political position of the body playing with race in the bedroom, the body of race on the street and the raving body in the warehouse does not divide along gender, race or class lines, but unifies according to age and generation.

Gender trends In the formation of videogames, there is a tacit understanding that females are oblique to the discussion. The success of the original Pac-Man (1980) is often attributed to it being one of the first games to be played by females. Its mechanics, based on the universals of existence, such as eating, allied with the lack of explicit death was a welcome break from the traditions of progression through shooting found in Space Invaders (Wade, 2015). Ms Pac-Man (1982), in what could be seen as a cynical  – but highly effective  – method of capitalizing on

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videogames’ new-found popularity, was a targeted response to rising interest by arcade manufacturers in the untapped coin of female players. Yet even Ms Pac Man, this highly abstract character, recognisable on the arcade cabinet by a feminine-defensive cross of the legs, botox plush red-lips and tight ribbon on her head with a ghost’s tongue lolling leeringly towards her, was at once too twee and stereotypical to be perceived as a genuine shift towards gender equality. It was not even as if Ms Pac-Man was the first female character in an arcade game. Universal Games’ Lady Bug (1981) holds this distinction, a superior Pac-Man clone whose innovations were not reflected in its eventual popularity. Unlike Ms Pac-Man, Lady Bug ’s gender was not advertised as a unique selling point, with this lack of focus perhaps contributing to its lack of commercial success. If Pac-Man showed that videogames interested females as much as males, then Ms Pac-Man showed that videogames themselves were a viable vehicle for female protagonists, be this abstract or representative of the gender: the fact that Ms Pac-Man takes on the name of the male is as hierarchical as it is genealogical, demonstrating that even in an industry marked by experimentation and a field enamoured with innovation, reiteration is never far away and it is the habitus that the game emerges from which holds sway with culture. Yet the literature of the time, consciously or not, has a tendency towards gender neutrality, evident in the illustrations found in the work of Rubin (1982) and Bloom (1982). Amis’s visual ethnography gives prominence to photography of female players and he even hyperbolically claims that he knows of ‘an actress with a case of Pac-Man hand so severe that her index finger looked like a section of blood pudding – yet still she played’ (Amis, 1982: 57). All offer depictions of females depicted as individuals without recourse to Ms Pac-Man stereotypes, or the more masculinereactive girl (‘grrl’) gamer (Valdes, 2012). Neither was this notion limited to the quasi-public spaces of the arcades. Home videogames in the United Kingdom of the mid-1980s are seen as possessing a ‘degree of openness within the computer culture to the reality of female involvement’ reflected in the early days of Newsfield and EMAP magazines, which is ‘telling about the gender neutral nature of games at the time’ (Kirkpatrick, 2015:  114–115). Later, there is less explicit discourse around females, even as regards educational software and hardware. This is particularly apparent in the BBC Computer Literacy Project, whose aim was to provide equal access to computers for all secondary school children, but instead girls using computers are ‘often to be found in the private setting of the family’ (Haddon, 1990: 104) away from the competitive group setting of arcades and classrooms. As Chapter 4 shows, even the private space

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of the home becomes contested when boys move into the domestic sphere to engage in legally hazy activities around copying and cracking. These were often executed by using methods of communication such as talking on the telephone and reading magazines, secret consumption which was previously the province of young girls’ hiatus from family life. Girls existed on a threshold, physically part of the home that they lived in, engaging in activities around technology, but seeing this as part of a broader curriculum of activities, rather than something which demands personal and intimate involvement. That these alterations to male orientation occurred in such a short period of time and in spite of educational involvement from a giant, benign national broadcaster shows how quickly spaces and times, technologies and cultures can be organized hierarchically and genealogically, even ‘traditionally’ by the dominant and domineering habitus. This threshold is important to females involved in all aspects of play and games. Boxers cross the threshold on a ring-walk, the point of no return as they duck through the ropes; the threshold where the private of the house meets the public of the street is lauded by the music of the ghettoblaster. Examining these transitional spaces and objects, Nooney reverses the obvious question of ‘where are all the females in videogames?’ and, through a study of Roberta Williams, co-founder of Sierra On-Line, asks why women are presented in a certain way.9 Williams’ games appeared to be inspired by her own experiences of domesticity and parenthood, which were not always positive, or indeed attributable to what would be perceived as typical feminine-maternal behaviour when she ignored her eight-month-old son in favour of playing Colossal Cave Adventure (Nooney, 2013). The threshold between domesticity and technology, where, like the dynamics of a gender relationship, the association is always in flux, always changing, are notions that she would bring to bear upon her position with Sierra On-Line. As a graphical adventure developer, experimentation with identity in the form of being able to role-play was as important to her as experimentation with hardware and software. This helps to explain her focus both on the exploratory aspects of adventure games, and the lush narrative and artistic prowess of Sierra On-Line’s titles. As seen with the examples of race and class above, enabling the player to engage wholly in the wish-fulfilment that videogames offer, through voluntarily crossing into a role, scenario, profession or contested space, is central to their position as a media which compels ergodic investment. Positioned on the threshold, this investment is neither always grasped, or indeed, widely available, so when women are personally invested in a burgeoning field which is male-dominated, their involvement appears as removed from what is viewed as the norm: a woman

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who would rather play videogames than tend to her infant child can only be seen in this way, such is her deviation from the feminine-maternal norm. This was also evident in games development in the United Kingdom. Claire Challis, who worked extensively with Interceptor Micros in the design of graphical adventure games, was the artist for the ladders and lifts title Trollie Wallie (1984), a game where Wallie is the final abstraction of the consumer. Wallie is an asexual mouth with legs who is trapped inside a cavernous supermarket, where the only means of escape is to collect items and take them to the checkout at the other side of the store, with the idea of spending a night shopping as appealing (or not) as a night at the museum, library, classroom, or even arcade. Ease of access to technologies in domestic, educational and social environments where production and consumption folded into one were undoubtedly reasons for experimentation in, around and with thresholds, evidenced in the resistance seen in Trollie Wallie and Ghettoblaster and Super Pipeline from respective racial and class perspectives. Even if these titles drew on the mechanics of arcade games, their portrayal – no matter how abstract – of contested spaces, of subcultures, of being underground and on the street, purveys a wider influence than the narratives rendered by science fiction and fantasy (see Chapter 2) on early developers in the United States and evidenced in the games of Shadowfire (1985) and Cauldron (1985) in the United Kingdom, both of which had female protagonists. Similarly, there is a relative short circuit between Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (or more likely Ron Howard’s 1984 re-imagining Splash) and Mermaid Madness (1986), a game which is either sexual fantasy wish fulfilment, or an inversion of traditional male-female dominion. The mermaid chasing the deep-sea diver, eventually saving him, certainly exists on this threshold, its kiss-me-quick ribaldry reminiscent of holidays in Scunthorpe and Skegness, where work is suspended in the pursuit of leisure and pleasure, yet the threshold remains open to the question as to why females are portrayed in a certain, and in this case, whimsical way. Mad Nurse (1985) is not so fantastical in its portrayal of women and has a peculiar intersection with Roberta Williams’ preference for gaming over infant care. Its position in a neonatal ward where babies wander around supping from medicine cabinets, falling down lift shafts and sticking their fingers in plug-sockets, is dystopian even by contemporary perceptions of NHS care. Yet it is a group of trainee female nurses, with increasingly bizarre names (Brenda Bumwash, Cathy Cuddlecare) who are tasked with bringing order to chaos, by returning the escapees safely to their cots. In a world before health-service targets, league tables and

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performance measures, the nurse and the player are still quantitatively evaluated through the ubiquitous videogame ‘rule of three’, where if three babies die, then one of the three player’s nurses is fired for ‘neglect’ to be replaced by another equally unfortunate incumbent. At a variety of levels, Mad Nurse is problematic, not least in the ethical considerations of babies harming themselves, with publisher Firebird originally refusing to release the game due to its portrayal of potential infanticide (Pick, 2003). Much like working for the NHS, the player is placed in a role where prevention is better than cure, yet unlike other games, there is no win condition, just a constant juggling of other people’s problems, namely babies. Yet, in spite of the dank humour of the hospital, it is the ‘co-relational character of space as a political and material context of play, of production, of creativity, of technological use’ (Nooney, 2013) which is instructive here. The first place that this can be found is in the lack of any other intervention: parents and other staff are strangely absent, which is not the case in other games (e.g. Manic Miner, Trollie Wallie) of this type. Even the agency of the nurse is limited: other than saving errant babies, spending too long in the lift results in the avatar bizarrely falling through the floor and down the lift shaft, resulting in a kind of assisted suicide: there is no space or time for rest in the overtasked 1980s hospital. Second, the ascription of females into this role suggests that there are few options outside of traditional roles, other than nursing, midwifery, domestic routines, child care and waiting-on. The emotional and physical labour involved in the care of others (in the absence of others), gives rise not only to the tradition of the ‘triple shift’ (Duncombe and Marsden, 1995) but this triple shift, inverts to become a rule of three, centred solely on emotional work in the private and public sphere. There is little coincidence in the fact that jobs such as this have not decreased with the rise of the postindustrial society, but instead, the skills learnt in looking after infants and elderly relatives  – largely executed in the domestic environment – are put to use in care-homes and nurseries. This allows parents to venture into the public sphere, while the ‘educational’ aspects of this exercise justify the contracting out and privatization of care. For the individual, employment on this threshold, where zero-hour contracts meet minimum wage is economically insecure, but requires the additional payment of emotion too: would a nursery nurse tasked with administering infants have any emotional capital left at the end of their day for their own children, partners or social interactions? Indeed, would an individual involved in emotional exhaustion of the triple shift have any inclination to become emotionally invested – and ultimately frustrated – by the videogame rule of three? In this way it can be seen that the arcade conversions

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of yesteryear and the AAA titles of today are aimed at males at three levels. The first is concerned with time, in that males are seen to have more leisure time to invest in the learning by rote required of discovering enemy attack patterns and skill-trees. Second and related, is the space of the game, with girls signalling an ‘interference to the social space of game play. They threaten to end it through marriage, parenthood, or going out on date’ (Guins, 2004: 204), thereby being actively rejected even from domestic spaces of videogames. Ultimately this leads to the third aim, that if females expend emotional labour on parenting and dating, the concomitant surplus emotional energy of males is invested in administering the rule of three: the three lives and attempts required to reach level three, and avoid the triple shift at all costs.

Resistance is futile? These answers engage with the problem of the perception of videogames’ history, where ‘the only people we have made historically visible are those we have organized ourselves to see, those who have made the game a certain type of culture’ (Nooney, 2013). This is steeped in considerations around class, race and gender, how characters involved in videogames, in their production, presentation and consumption are perceived in abstraction and representation. Undoubtedly, this has skewed the ways in which game history is viewed and is a view ‘not of histories of gaming but a history of gamers’ (Nooney, 2013), the wider political, media, social and cultural contexts are so vital to comprehension, to how games are perceived and presented within histories. Yet the obliqueness of perception of history, is not particularly pertinent to games, if capitalism really is the only game in town, then it is the winners who have the monopoly on historical record. This is compounded in recent moral outrages in the United Kingdom. As they have demonstrated, perception remains as subjective as ever, but the views themselves become morally skewed, emotionally disconnected, ethically crooked. National institutions from the BBC to the NHS are complicit in overlooking cultures of paedophilia which manifest themselves in broadcasters and politicians from the 1970s and 1980s, who patently and flagrantly operated outside of ethical and moral boundaries.10 Police officers, apparently culpable in the death of 96 football supporters at a football stadium in 1989 lied under oath to maintain the omertà common to law enforcement of the time, a complicity seared in the riots of Toxteth and Handsworth and the coalfield battlegrounds of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.

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The wider consideration as to how individuals could avert their gazes from odious acts, even in a divided nation is of tacit sociological importance and one which was not lost in the popular media of the day. Yet often games are not seen as willing, or even able to replicate the tart wit of TV shows such as The Sandbaggers or Yes, Minister, after all games are a trivial pursuit, their thresholds offering separate spaces from everyday life. To follow this line would, again, be adhering to the elision of history an ‘historical trick [which] is why so much gets left out’ (Nooney, 2013). The kind of mass elision is partly due to practical reasons:  there is a considerable volume of history associated just with videogames, leaving aside the cultures which gave rise to them. It is also partly due to the perplexing US-centrism of games studies which continues irrespective of interventions from authors from Eastern Europe, Australia and New Zealand, South America and South East Asia. Just as important is the consideration that genealogical investigation is not entrained on videogames’ history in the right places. For every LA SWAT (1986), where the player cracks down on the looters of a lawless city with extreme prejudice, there is a Hampstead or Manic Miner, providing a moderating counterpoint. There are even videogame equivalents of Spitting Image, satire that delights in dalliances with slander. Taskset’s Seaside Special (1984), set to the tune of ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’, places the player on a beach polluted by leaking radiation from a nearby nuclear powerplant. The aim is to pick up irradiated seaweed, travel to Downing Street and sling it at alien ‘polytikians’, also identified as the infamous Conservative cabinet of the 1980s. The game is completed when Thatcher is defeated, while a line of code reveals the political alliances of Tony Gibson, the coder of Seaside Special and Ghettoblaster: ‘there are only two reasons for voting Thatcher – greed and crass stupidity’ (Gibson, 1984). Partly a rail against Conservatism, partly the world’s first environmental protest game, the original release was slated for 1984, but was delayed into late spring 1985. It is difficult to ascertain the reasoning for this11 but the Grand Hotel bombing of October 1984, where the Conservative cabinet was targeted in an attack by the IRA at a conference in the seaside town may have been a mitigating factor.

Just in time It is tautological to state that the portrayal of race, gender and class in videogames are a production of their time and are therefore instructive as to how a medium

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is perceived and then presented. Early in their technological development, videogames relied on abstraction, both visually and aurally. Compensations and concessions were made in the use of copyright and licensing. Home computer games, sometimes clones of arcade games, often took extreme liberties with their host media. Shaun Southern’s Kikstart series used a virtually identical name of the BBC TV series and mimicked its theme tune, with no licence agreements in place, while Jean-Michel Jarre’s self-styled position as the ‘Godfather of rave’ was taken to its logical conclusion as his music was included on games from Loco to Trollie Wallie. The role and – lack of – licensing in videogames of the 1980s is an important and overlooked area of research, yet this feeds into the wider narrative that this book has drawn upon throughout, that this was an era where experimentation in learning, development, play and creativity positioned videogames at the very boundaries of legality, if not ethics. Yet the evidence for this being a genuinely evolutionary medium, in content, production and consumption remains. Games were still able to challenge the status quo and engage in political discourse and did not always avert their gaze as so many people and institutions did during the 1980s. So, in response to Nooney, perhaps the question that should be asked is not the location of games’ history in the past, but where is the parody, satire and resistance of the past in games of the present? Will Deus Ex provide a narrative to disability and the technologies which alleviate them? Can Grand Theft Auto be seen as satire on the twenty-first-century waking up from the American dream, or is the parody too unsubtle? By tracing the politics of race, class, gender and resistance these questions can be addressed on both a cultural and historical basis. It is their lines of influence, no matter how seemingly faint, trite or tautological that a genealogy of videogames attempts to uncover. The question is not in asking if they are there, where there are, or even how they are presented, but why they are there and the influence they have on the habitus from which they arise.

Notes 1 For further discussion of the relationship of the game to wider society, see Chapter 5. 2 It is worth noting that even at one or two stages removed from the game, unpaid labour is in evidence, as seen in the modding of Grand Theft Auto and gold farming in World of Warcraft. That these instances start as unpaid labour, or even a ‘labour of love’ and can then be sold or even contracted out shows the haziness of the boundaries between play and work in contemporary videogames. See Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter (2009) for a critical discussion of economic models related to this.

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3 In a neat, and quite postmodern, twist, Trashman would often be asked to take away a computer by an anguished parent who would decry the influence home micros were having: ‘Take this away, my son spends too much time on it.’ Trashman, unperturbed, would respond by not being able to believe the kind of stuff people would throw away. 4 Later iterations of the game attempt to move the fighter to a first person perspective when the player is on the verge of knocking down an opponent, or by being knocked down themselves. This coincided with access to greater processing and graphical power on the Xbox 360 console (Fight Night Round 3). 5 Wacquant (2004) offers extensive discussion of the tensions experienced by black boxers in Chicago, who, in the shadow of the University of Chicago, toiled and sparred to find ‘something positive’ in neighbourhoods ravaged by poverty and the deprivation it brings with them. Boxing, in this sense sits alongside hip-hop and rap music as providing genuine alternatives to disenfranchised groups and the close ties between music and boxing reflects this. 6 There are many instances over the years where fights have broken out in press conferences and on television, but unlike with other sports, it appears that this display of masculinity, if not encouraged, is condoned, which is pronounced in other martial arts, suggesting that trash talk is par for the course. 7 The contemporary (and politically correct) term for ghettoblaster is ‘boombox’. 8 The Beatles’ song Strawberry Fields Forever was alleged to detail a trip on LSD. The term strawberry had a resurgence in the mid-late 1980s with the appearance of ‘strawberry’ LSD, sold on perforated blotting paper. 9 Although, comprehensive, Nooney’s assertion that Roberta Williams was involved in ‘the first major graphical computer game with a recognizably human female avatar’ (2013) is incorrect. This can be ascribed to the arbitrary US-centric model employed by Nooney, which is all the more surprising given her methodological and theoretical approach, yet the thrust of her argument remains patent in that it is not the lack of females but how they are presented that is important. 10 At the time of writing, Ted Heath, the ex-Conservative prime minister, is alleged to have been involved in the rape of a 12-year-old-boy in 1961 (Anderson, 2015). Investigations into this are ongoing. 11 During the writing of this chapter I attempted to contact Tony Gibson through a variety of means, but this proved unsuccessful.

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‘Fair play’ is the way of playing the game characteristic of those who do not get so carried away by the game as to forget that it is a game. Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question

As set out in Chapter 1, this book has brought into relief the spaces and times of 1980s videogames in the United Kingdom in relation to their wider social, cultural, technological and political context. In effect, this examines their habitus, how they fit within society, how their genealogy in the private, public, national and international, individual and collective spheres was inductive, and ultimately influenced the cultures and technologies which they emerged from. Allied with the recent – and not so recent – call from writers such as Raiford Guins (2014), Mark J.  P. Wolf (2012) and Erkki Huhtamo (2005) to position videogames within ancillary, but connected, media and culture discourses the outcome appears to be self-evident. As Chapter 2 outlines, developers of early videogame hardware and software were influenced by television, the dominant media form of the mid-twentieth century, while the technology that hosted early videogames, heavily reliant on military investment in ballistic missile technology, was to have fall-out in the civilian sector. The combination of the media and technological habitus provides the basis for the US-centrism in games studies. This has a special, almost exclusive resonance with the histories of videogames, where the origin story focuses on the crash of 1983 and which, over the following decade, moved games from the public of the arcade to the domicile of the home. As Chapter 3 shows, the accession to the chronological and linear notion of history elides the less evident influences of videogames, in the United Kingdom and internationally. Narratives around sci-fi, fantasy and railway inspired early

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developers, providing the imaginative glint so important to innovation. With hardware and software in tandem, videogames demonstrated how the nonnegotiable rules of games could co-exist with the interpretivity of stories: what recent games studies has pertained to be a separate and contradictory trajectory is more likely to be based on historical and cultural differences and both are vital to the rich histories of videogames. Indeed, McLuhan (2001) notes, games, perhaps more than any other media, are reflective of the dominant economic and cultural paradigms of the time. This was especially prevalent in the United Kingdom, where a strong narrative tradition implored individuals to code, while a background in play, games and sports, allied with a hi-tech manufacturing tradition based around mail-order distribution and hobbyism meant that computers which could be used for production as well as consumption became commonplace, cheap and, with the aid of the BBC, accessible to young people and children. Knitted into a network where English was rapidly becoming the lingua franca and silicon technology enabled rapid dissemination of information, many of the United Kingdom’s computers were popular in Australia, New Zealand, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, with the opportunity to program and build hardware on the same machines, providing a genuine nexus for a habitus imbued with the connaissance and savoir of auto-didactic, experiential learning. Using traditional venues of technological and educational habitus, such as the classroom, bedroom and the playground, children and young people copied, cracked and coded videogames in cahoots with others whose parents and teachers believed that computers were by their very nature educational. They were educational, but not always in the ways that care-givers expected them to be. At once siloed, but connected through a welter of new and traditional communications technologies, individuals and institutions from Washington to Walsall to Warsaw traded ideas and games in pursuit of money, notoriety and even nobility, but the methods employed could be ethically dubious and even illegal. This is a major indication that the culture in and around videogames was being generated as quickly as code was being written, that there was little lore and even fewer laws established to mitigate the growth of an industry which drew upon international markets and innovations in technology to remain beyond the sphere of political, parental and pedagogical inference. There were moral panics which grew allied to this, not least in the famous motion by the member of Parliament George Foulkes to outlaw videogame use in public areas by children. Yet, the experiential learning continued as if by habit: as the respondents of Chapter 4 demonstrate, many of the methods, tactics and strategies employed in 1980s

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bedrooms, classrooms and playgrounds were actually extensions of a society on the cusp of a movement between the industrial and the postindustrial and from relationship of production to relations mediated through consumption. If these elements of grey practice and hazy ethics point towards the development of a subculture, then the practices in the spaces and places of the arcades of Chapter  5 compound the notion. Throughout history, amusement arcades, which have housed gamblers, pinball machines and videogames, have been the focus of moral panic, while the game, with its sacrosanct and separate universe, shows how the subterranean notions of play seen in the classic sociology of Jock Young are given a focus-point with the notion of arcaves. Arcaves, with their position socially – and following Herbert Marcuse – geographically, underground provide a venue for both patrons and workers to experiment with attitudes and behaviours around drugs, alcohol and stealing along with other, more nefarious practices associated with young people, which, as highlighted by several writers of the time, intimated the presence of child abuse, and was a tragedy common to the society of the time, permeating all arenas from entertainment, the health service, through to politics and education. The decline of the quasi-public space of arcades, combined with the movement of powerful new videogame technologies into the domestic environment seems to coincide with the wider decline of seaside venues of leisure and pleasure, yet the education gained by the floor-walkers, gamers and gamblers of the 1970s and 1980s are still evident in the seaside arcades of Southend-on-Sea and the inland retro arcades where the currency and currents of yesteryear continue to flow and, for those who own and work in arcades, continue to be a viable economic venture. The movement of videogames’ technologies into the domestic environment was predicated on the formation of an industry which took individuals’ convictions in their products and projects and, through sharp use of advertising and public relations, moved computers and videogames into the home. Analysis of this technology has frequently taken the position of the linear-generational ‘format wars’, yet the high-street stores, distributors, charismatic leaders, programmers and publishers have a tale to tell which indicates that it is the vagaries and demands illustrated in a society based around consumption, and critiqued in Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society which are most valent. The result is a loose affiliation between the press, programmers, publishers, hardware manufacturers, distributors and shops which collapses into one with the genesis of videogames development houses owned by newspaper proprietors and magazines outlets such as Mirror Group, EMAP and Newsfield. Ultimately, through

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discussion with programmers and publishers of the time, the essence of the videogame habitus is not situated in magazines, the Silicon Fen of Cambridge or Boots drug stores, but in a ‘dev house’ in Ilford, Essex, where many of the trades learnt experientially in playgrounds, bedrooms, classrooms and computers were exchanged and cross-pollinated. Like many of the experiences of consumers and workers in and around videogames in the 1980s, their practices and attitudes echo through to the present day where they find realization, in the altered form of mobile games, chiptune music and retro revival. The schism which ensued in a decade in which the United Kingdom’s reliance on primary and secondary industries was superseded by tertiary and service industries, inspired the tones – and narratives – of many games released in the 1980s. Often, games would reach back to previous generations where there was a (perceived) surety through the use of music, graphical abstraction and themes. This allowed for critique on the precarious position of work within the time: games using past tasks from heavy industry as its inspiration, such as Super Pipeline, were represented on hardware of the future. Others were able to show the contradictions inherent in society of aspiration and liberalization, where Hampstead gave a story to the ‘coin-drop capitalism’ of Kocurek (2012a) where the striving for achievement was more contingent on a utopian state-ofmind than hard work and aptitude. Divisions were evident in the relationships between race and authority too. The urban spaces of England’s inner cities were provided soundtracks by the Brixton briefcases of Ghettoblaster, where interactions with strangers in the rain was the norm, rather than the exception of today’s networked nations. The portrayal of race, like that of gender, fully contingent on the bodily habitus, of the expected position of the individual in relation to others such as children, patients and sportspeople, contrasted with their actual positions as seen in the videogame art and design of Claire Challis and Roberta Williams alongside Nooney’s (2013) critique of these positions, which are as much to do with the presence of females within games as their often highlighted absence. It is instructive then, that as the games industry becomes more homogenized in terms of its production and consumption, the proclivity for difference in content, and ultimately social commentary reduces too: it is unlikely that games such as Seaside Special would be released in the twenty-first century, with the lack of critique in games summed up by Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, which, although portrayed as parody, seems unsure as to whether it is in on the joke, or merely part of it.

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Past, present and future In spite of their popularity, financial success and cultural influence, videogames seem to remain somewhere in the margins of society. Some commentators (see, e.g., Kirkpatrick, 2013)  provide an historical explanation for this, in that videogames, particularly in the United Kingdom, were not able to move beyond the casual sexism engendered through magazines and the anti-authority teenage cultures which were central to this. This argument has its merits, particularly when viewed in the wider context of the quasi-legal subcultures around bedroom copying and cracking, arcades and software and hardware manufacture. Yet magazines of the 1980s were not only a reflection of this culture, but active generators of it:  their promotion of games and companies, practice and attitude culminated in both EMAP and Newsfield inaugurating their own software houses. This is indicative of the absolute commitment to experimentation and innovation through iteration, the touchstone, for better or worse, of the historical – and contemporary – videogames industry. It is perhaps due to the fact that processes and games themselves have become more standardized and homogenized that the contemporary industry can be said to be staid and stunted. The ‘maturation’ of the industry, so desired by so many from Grand Theft Auto to the ‘Hot Coffee’ debacle, seems to be inexplicably out of reach, yet the field of games, with its diffusion into other media and art forms, continues apace. Its current status as a medium of education in hospitals, care homes, libraries and factories through the use of serious games and simulations silhouettes the argument that videogames have always been about education and lifelong learning, and by design will never fully reach maturation. This can be seen in videogames’ genealogy. The learning experienced by the individuals in the locations discussed in this book was experiential, the technology as much about adapting to and evolving with the culture as being a generator of it. In the contemporary realm, the education inculcated by videogames may have altered, now taking place in the more anodyne spaces of game jams and Xbox Live, rather than the comparative wild west of teenagers conducting grey imports from Singapore, the arcaves of terraced houses in Workington and dev houses in Ilford. Yet the genealogy ripples on in Nottingham’s National Videogame Arcade and Game City, the BBC micro:bit, the archives of private and public collections of software and hardware encouraging a worldwide interest in videogame histories. These show that the habitus of play and development,

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publication and consumption, is not tied to one specific place or date, but is simultaneously global and local. Videogames are not exclusive to one discipline, one country, one economic or social paradigm, but are archaeologies which are at once common and uncommon to everyone, everywhere. As this book has shown, a genealogical approach to videogames doesn’t specify the place and time for this, so much as position it as part of a continuum between past, present and future. Spatially, videogame histories are everywhere. The time for academic investigation is now.

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Index Acorn 10 Amis, M. 1, 16, 27, 34, 80, 142 amusement arcades 3, 4, 11, 25–6, 35, 63, 67, 77–99, 153 Atari 25, 63, 106 Australia 2, 3, 15, 17, 24, 33, 59, 108 Baudrillard, J. 11, 59, 103–26 BBC 9–10, 19, 29, 41, 57, 113, 119, 142 BBC Micro 3, 10, 28, 42, 46 bedroom coding 10, 24, 52, 57, 59, 68, 70 body (see also Habitus and Body) 137–8, 141 Boots the Chemist 112 Bourdieu, P. 5, 42, 65, 82 British Telecom 14, 42, 43 child abuse 7, 35, 48, 80, 153 Cold War 3, 10, 32, 53, 55, 61, 65, 69, 89, 129 Commodore 24, 44, 64, 70, 103, 106, 123 Computer Literacy Project 10, 41, 45 connaissance 5, 45, 51, 58, 64, 73, 95, 109, 124, 152 consumption (see also Production) 16, 20, 29, 37, 39, 43, 44 and childhood 47, 67 and fast food 55, 93 and gender 61–5, 144, 146 and magazines 58, 121, 125 values of 83, 93, 104 and work 55–7, 72 copyright 56, 148 cracking 56, 57 Crash (videogame magazine, see also Newsfield and Zzap!) 36, 45, 109, 122–3, 126 Czechoslovakia 2, 56 DEFCON (Game) 53–5, 57, 72, 75

education 10, 12, 16, 32, 36, 40–2, 52, 58, 73, 138, 143, 155 Elite (videogame) 41 Elite Systems (company) 132 Falklands War 11, 37 Firnberg, D. 9, 40 Format Wars 4, 11, 24, 29, 103–26, 153 Foucault, M. 6, 7, 136 Foulkes, G. 7, 34, 45, 84, 152 games studies 8, 22, 46, 82 Gazzard, A. 3, 77, 80 gender 61–4, 130–1, 141–6 genealogy 6–7, 12, 14, 16, 24, 48, 79, 108, 124, 135, 148, 155 of games 26, 29, 32, 69, 70, 72, 92, 103 and history 103, 148 grey imports 66–7 Guins, R. 1, 2, 7, 16, 20, 25, 26, 80, 104 habitus (see also Bourdieu) 3–5, 12, 52, 60 and body (see also Body) 17, 45, 60, 61, 63, 136–41 and capital 36, 59, 117, 125, 126, 154 gaming 11, 17, 45–8 Mauss and 10, 44, 52, 60 social 11, 68, 79, 138 technological 36, 52, 54, 58, 59–61, 64, 68, 70, 72, 117 videogame 124–6 Haddon, L. 2, 7, 16, 27, 32–3, 39, 62, 64, 70, 142 Hirschfield, T. 7, 25–6 hobbyism 29, 152 homogeneity 68–9, 73 Hong Kong 66

168

Index

Ireland 24, 25

publication 113–21

Japan 2, 13, 19, 22, 23, 28, 39, 99

race 12, 130, 136–41 RAND Corporation 78, 88–91 Raspberry Pi 28, 74 Retro Gamer 28, 57, 103, 126 Rignall, J. 67, 123 riots 11, 37, 140, 146

Kirkpatrick, G. 5, 45–8, 104, 121–2 learning 5–8, 14, 17, 23, 45, 73–4, 85, 87, 88, 109, 152, 155 Lego 23, 30, 58, 70 linear chronology 6, 11, 28, 43, 104, 108–9, 124, 126, 151, 153 ludology 16, 22, 23, 31 Manic Miner 58, 130, 133, 145, 147 Maxwell, R. 11, 113 McLuhan, M. 12, 13, 31 Microbee 24 Microsoft 12, 13, 25, 30, 36, 63, 87, 107 Minitel 39 Mirrorsoft 104, 119–21 moral panic 4, 39, 59, 81, 90, 92 and cover-ups 33–4 and outrage 7, 34–7, 81 and Parliament 34, 36, 42, 152 and semiconductors 9, 41–2 music 12, 38, 58, 134, 139–41, 147, 148 narratology 16, 22, 31 National Videogame Arcade 73, 74, 108, 113, 155 New Zealand 2, 3, 15, 24, 42, 59, 108 Newman, J. 4, 16, 22, 104 Newsfield Publications 36, 37, 45, 104, 122, 125, 126, 153 Next Gen report 51–2 Nintendo 36, 37, 51, 63, 103, 106 Ocean 119 OutRun 17, 29, 32, 67, 98 Pac-Man 18, 21, 26, 88, 97, 141 pinball 3, 84, 85–8, 91, 99 piracy 56–7, 70–1, 95 Poland 2, 56, 57, 71 postindustrial 8, 13, 27, 37–9, 113, 145 postmodernism 12, 27, 43, 113 Prestel 39 production 62, 70, 83, 84, 113, 115, 119 Psion 116

savoir 5, 45, 51, 67, 105, 108, 152 Scandinavia 33, 48, 108 semiconductors 9, 32, 34, 40 Sega 2, 20, 24, 46, 53, 66, 103, 106, 114 Silicon Valley 9, 40, 86 Sinclair Clive 11, 15, 103, 104, 109–12, 115–7, 119 Spectrum 10, 24, 44, 58, 70, 103, 104, 112, 123 QL 116, 117 ZX81 110, 112 sleep 60–1, 68 social media 10, 21, 34, 65 Sony 12, 51, 63, 103 space 21–3, 25, 67, 73, 90, 97, 117, 136, 141, 146 Space Invaders 17, 18, 31, 44 subcultures 4, 80, 81–4, 90, 99, 144, 155 Sudnow, D. 1, 19, 25, 63, 87 Swalwell, M. 15, 24, 59 The Chips are Down (BBC Horizon documentary) 9, 39 Therrien, C. 4, 15, 104 Time 18–21, 25, 67, 73, 136, 146 TRS-80, 58 Twin Galaxies 2 United States 2, 3, 15, 16, 23, 24, 26, 27, 40, 43, 62, 78–9, 133, 144 US Gold 44 WH Smith’s 112, 113 Wolf, Mark J. P. 15, 26 Woolworths 112 work 53, 54, 55–7, 58, 62, 70, 83, 115, 131–6, 145 Zzap! (see also Newsfield and Crash) 36, 45, 122–4, 126