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	<title>Preserving Games &#187; consoleGames</title>
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	<description>Archiving the Creation Processes of the Video Game Industry</description>
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		<title>Book Review: Racing the Beam</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/winget/2010/02/book-review-racing-the-beam/</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/winget/2010/02/book-review-racing-the-beam/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:01:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>walker</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Literature Review]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[consoleGames]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[creation process]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[creative limitation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[creative limitations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[history]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[videogame]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/winget/?p=306</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Montfort, N., &#38; Bogost, I. (2009). Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Platform Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Just want to give a brief rundown on a really great read I&#8217;ve come across. MIT has started a &#8220;Platform Studies&#8221; series of books where the idea is to examine a platform and its technologies to [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Montfort, N., &amp; Bogost, I. (2009). Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Platform Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.</strong><br />
<div class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 250px"><img alt="Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System" src="http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~walker/racingTheBeam.jpg" width="240" height="360" /><p class="wp-caption-text">Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System</p></div><br />
Just want to give a brief rundown on a really great read I&#8217;ve come across. MIT has started a &#8220;Platform Studies&#8221; series of books where the idea is to examine a platform and its technologies to understand how this informs creative work done on the platform. Platforms could range from gaming consoles, to a programming language, to an operating system, or even the Web itself if this is the platform upon which creative work is being made. The platform in this case is the Atari Video Computer System, the first Atari home system, later referred to as the Atari 2600 in the wake of the newer Atari 5200.</p>
<p>The authors examine the Atari VCS as a computing system, and take care to elaborate the unique (really exceptionally odd) constraints found there. Six games are investigated in chronological order, giving the reader a sense of the programming community&#8217;s advancing skill and knowledge of the system: <em>Combat</em> (1977), <em>Adventure</em> (1980), <em>Yar&#8217;s Revenge</em> (1981), <em>Pac-Man</em> (1982), <em>Pitfall!</em> (1982), and <em>Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back</em> (1982).</p>
<p>The most prominent technical details are explained in first few chapters, and they illuminate each game&#8217;s construction as an exceptional act of engineering and ingenuity. Just to give an idea of the unique affordances of the Atari VCS, here are a few of the most characteristic details:</p>
<ul>
<li>The custom sound and graphics chip, the Television Interface Adapter (TIA), is specifically designed to work with a TV&#8217;s CRT ray. The ray itself sprays the electrons onto the inside of a TV screen, left to right, one horizontal scan line at a time, taking a brief break at the end of each line (a &#8220;horizontal blank&#8221;) and a longer break at the bottom line, before resetting to the top and starting over again (a &#8220;vertical blank&#8221;). A programmer only has those tiny breaks to send any instructions to the TIA, and really only the vertical break provided enough time to send any game logic to the system.</li>
<li>It was imperative that game logic be sent at these breaks because the Atari VCS had no room for a video buffer. This meant there was no way to store an image of the next frame of the game, all graphic instructions are written in real time (sound instructions had to be dropped in on one of the breaks). A designer or programmer could choose to restrict the visual field of the game in exchange for more time to send game logic instructions. <em>Pitfall!</em> is an example of this.</li>
<li>This means there are no pixels on the Atari VCS. Pixels require horizontal and vertical planes, but for the Atari VCS, there is only horizontal scan lines. There is no logical vertical division at all for the computational system. As the beam goes across the screen, a programmer can send a signal to one of the TIA&#8217;s register to change the color. Thus, the &#8220;pixels&#8221; are really a measure of time (the clock counts of the processor) and not space.</li>
<li>Sprites, such as they existed for the Atari VCS, were hard-coded into the ROM of the system. Programmers had five: two player sprites, two missiles, and one ball. Reworking that setup (clearly designed for <em>Pong</em> and the like) into something like <em>Adventure</em>, <em>Pitfall!</em>, or even the <em>Pac-Man</em> port is an amazing feet.</li>
</ul>
<p>The book doesn&#8217;t refrain from the technical. I could have used even more elaboration than what is presented in the book, but after a certain point the book would turn into an academic or technical tome, so I appreciate the fine line walked here. The authors succeed at illuminating technical constraints enough for the general reader to understand the quality of the engineering solutions being described. Moreover, the authors leave room to discuss the cultural significance of the platform, and to reflect on how the mechanics and aesthetics of these Atari titles have informed genres and gameplay presently.</p>
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		<title>Spawn Labs and Mobile Gaming</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/winget/2009/04/spawn-labs-and-mobile-gaming/</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/winget/2009/04/spawn-labs-and-mobile-gaming/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2009 01:25:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>walker</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[News and Commentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[consoleGames]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mobileGaming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[preservation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/winget/?p=118</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When I think of mobile gaming, whether it&#8217;s on a laptop, iPhone or other device, I think of games sensitive to the processing constraints of those platforms: web-based items like Bejeweled or Tower Defense, a retro-graphics piece like Battle for Wesnoth, etc. The latest games on the PS3, 360 or Wii do not come to [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span>When I think of mobile gaming, whether it&#8217;s on a laptop, iPhone or other device, I think of games sensitive to the processing constraints of those platforms: web-based items like <em>Bejeweled</em> or <em>Tower Defense</em>, a retro-graphics piece like <em>Battle for Wesnoth</em>, etc. The latest games on the PS3, 360 or Wii do not come to mind. </span></p>
<p><span>Peter Walker of <a title="Spawn Labs" href="http://www.spawnlabs.com" target="_self">Spawn Labs</a> and <a title="Vircion, Inc." href="http://www.vircion.com/" target="_self">Vircion Inc</a>., based out of Austin, gave a talk last week for the <a title="Texas Advanced Computing Center" href="http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/" target="_self">Texas Advanced Computing Center</a> that explained the company’s plan to break this mold in the realm of console gaming. Their ambition is to allow gamers to play their console games on any computer at any location. The central idea behind this technology is that remote servers will handle the processor-intensive rendering of graphics and other game computation, sending an audio/video stream of the processed results to the user’s computer. That would allow the client’s computer to strictly handle those AV streams, rather than be responsible for the serious number-crunching. Gamers would essentially be playing the AV streams of the processed results, which would be dictated by whatever input the player sent to the server.</span></p>
<p><span>Walker identified some trends in gaming: gigabyte requirements increase, as do CPU and GPU processing requirements. <a title="Moore's Law" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law" target="_self">Moore’s Law</a> seems to be in full effect. But Walker points out that cooling power can’t keep up. Already an increasing percent of battery power is spent just cooling the processing chips. As a result mobile platforms like laptops simply cannot pack the cooling power necessary to run resource-intensive games (at least not without burning your lap). Walker points out the success of smaller-scale games, but notes that these are a different kind of gaming experience, casual and less time-intensive than the likes of <em>Call of Duty 4</em> or <em>Mass Effect</em>, and constitute a gaming experience of a different order. Spawn’s research is aimed at bringing the gaming experience of the most graphically intense console works to a mobile community. </span></p>
<p><span>This is achieved through utilizing the increasing pervasiveness of broadband and the efficiency of audio and video codecs, specifically the <a title="H.264" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264" target="_self">H.264</a> standard. Key to this standard is the <a title="SVC" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Video_Coding" target="_self">Scalable Video Codec</a>. This would allow the client computer to select whichever particular bitstream it was set up to decode, among the many a gaming server would offer. That allows a gaming server to only encode and transmit once and simultaneously support a range of client machines with different codec-decoding capabilities. </span></p>
<p><span>So what could all this mean for game preservation? Well, in a certain sense it will make the job much more challenging. Technology like this continues the trend of client computers handling less and less of of the actual content. In this model, gamers are essentially reacting to, and playing in, a movie (the AV stream) that their input incurs. Very little of the game’s actual binary content resides on the gamer’s computer. Compare this to a classic like <em>Ultima 4</em>, where a considerable preservation step is accomplished by possessing uncorrupted copies of the original 3.5” or 5.25” disks. Move ahead to <em>World of Warcaft</em>: the client side CD contains a lot of code and information, but a very large part of the game itself is not to be found there. In the model being developed here, gamers could possess even less of the binary makeup of the game, and might simply purchase a license to play the game. That leaves the individual’s personal game material as a minor component of preservation. </span></p>
<p><span>At the same time, it’s a fascinating model for more flexible, platform-agnostic gaming, and it could point the way to interesting methods of preserving games. After all, if gamers could be happy interacting with a dynamic video stream, perhaps a preservation effort could employ a similar approach. If nothing else, the success of a model like this might open up the possibility of remote access to actively preserved games.<br />
</span></p>
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