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Richard Bartle on the Pneumatic Vehicle
When I was a kid, I remember we had this mysterious box called "The Lost Treasures of Infocom." It came with a bunch of floppy disks in it, and if you put those disks into the computer, they contained a great many games on them. These games were of a kind known as "text adventures," and they're a lot like role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons: the game would tell you (in prose) what was going on, and you would write back to it what you would like to do, and it would respond with what effects that had, and so on. These were a joy to play and the reading skills I gained from them were part of the reason why I was several grades advanced in school.
Video games were a big part of my life and I even worked in the video game industry for a while, but eventually I lost interest. I was thinking about this a bit today and wondered what it was that pushed me away from the field... and I remembered that Richard Bartle—an early pioneer in multiplayer video games similar to those of Infocom—laid out the exact reason in an interview he did for the documentary GET LAMP. I've transcribed (and lightly edited) it below.
Let's have a little thought experiment here.
You're playing [a game] in a virtual world and it's got these pictures and they're looking pretty good. [... But] it's a 3D world, and I'm only seeing it in 2D on a screen. So maybe if I got like a little headset and put that on, now I can see it in 3D. But if I move my head a bit too much [it breaks the illusion.] Well, maybe if you put a sensor on it so I can move my head around and, ah, yeah, now I can see it properly. But I'm still only seeing things. Maybe I could have some feeling as well? So I put on a little "data glove" and oh! it feels warm! But even then I haven't got this sense of being in a place. Maybe I want to be able to move. So, maybe, let's get these big coffin-like things and fill them full of gels and I'll take off all my clothes and put on all these different devices and I'll lay down in it and put these little electric currents through the gels to make it feel hard or soft so that it gives me the impression that I'm actually walking through grass or whatever. And now, now I'm beginning to feel that I'm really in one of these places. But, of course, really all that's happening here is that my senses are being fooled into this. What would happen if I maybe cut out all of that business, stuck a jack in the back of your head and sent signals right into the spinal cord and talked straight to the brain? But you're still not, you're still only pretending to be the senses: the brain may be being told there's a big dragon flying in front of you, and it's seeing this big dragon, but it's still only seeing it.
It's not the brain that you want to talk to: it's the mind. If you could talk straight to the imagination and cut out all the senses, then it would be impossible to ignore it: you couldn't say "oh, that's just an image of a dragon," it would be a dragon. If only there was some kind of technology which could enable you to talk straight to the imagination!
Well, there is. It's called "text." It's been around for several thousand years and I've seen people leap out of their chairs when they've read that that there is an immense, fire-breathing dragon in front of them.
It occurs to me that he's speaking remarkably lucidly about the body and the pneumatic vehicle: why settle for mere senses when the imagination is so much greater? And once one discovers that there are higher capacities even than the imagination, why stop there?
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For me, my favorite videos games will always be the 2-D platformers of the early '80s. Like icons, they do not pretend to full realism, but only suggest a world that the imagination then is required to fill in. They leave mystery, unresolvable mystery, which is forever full.
His description of the problem with 3-D games is perhaps the best articulation I've ever found for (one of the major reasons) why I gave up art (I used to paint and work in other mediums). No matter how hard I worked to real-ize an image, the way it was rendered in my mind's eye was invariably never how it could be rendered on a 2-D surface. The worlds of the imagination, then, were incapable, by the very nature of the medium, of being fully real-ized. (No surprise, perhaps, that the only art I pursue these days is the magical, which allows the imagination full range...)
Axé
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Back when I studied there were multi-user dungeons games. These were text based. There would be a description of the room you were in and the directions you could take. Regular people could write those descriptions and areas, and so act like creators, which made for a lot of fun.
From what I've heard, today the creator aspect is still found in Minecraft.
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