Early Video Games: Immersion and Critical Thought
Fig. 1 - Atari joystick!
The kind of gameplay that Roberta and Ken Williams’s interactive fiction game Mystery House offered me as a kid felt oddly familiar and deeply intriguing. The sense that I was there, in that spooky house exploring and discovering things—and that it would be by my wit that I would survive—offered an immersive feel that Atari’s action games lacked. Even though the game was fantasy, it engaged a skill, the use and honing of which mattered in the real world: critical thought.
The skills developed in Pac Man or Adventure or Space Invaders weren’t something I could take into the world with me. My ability to assess the situation with these games and take actions based on that assessment was little more than meaningless in reality. In Adventure, I was mostly polishing the skill of using the joystick to maneuver a square through a maze with the highest level of dexterity and speed I could manage (see fig. 1).
I knew it was a very stupid thing for my adrenal glands to be reacting to. I was being trained, in a Pavlovian way, to jones after adrenaline rushes and the reward of being released from fear if I mastered the skill of cupping that little black stick in the soft skin between the base of my thumb and forefinger in order to hug the maze turns just right. Don’t get me wrong. Adventure was a helluva good time, but after a while I’d feel hollow and zombie-ish. I certainly didn’t feel uplifted by having achieved something through self-directed insight.
Fig. 2 - Atari paddle!
A game called Kaboom was the epitome of the adrenaline drain. In the game, a convict slid back and forth across a high wall dropping lit bombs that you caught in a bucket of water. Instead of using the joystick, you used the Atari paddle, which turned to the right and left (see fig. 2). The convict progressively dropped his bombs faster and faster. Additionally, the splashing noise the bombs made when they hit the water got higher and higher in pitch as you went. It was a maddening game. I freakin’ loved it.
To be fair, I did experience a good deal of immersion in playing Kaboom. But I didn’t personally identify with those buckets. I didn’t feel proud of myself for having achieved anything. In fact, I personally, was absent from this experience, which is a different kind of immersion. I forgot myself entirely and became fused with the system. The game encouraged me to discard my volition and to, instead, do exactly and precisely what it commanded without fail, or I’d lose (see fig. 3).
Fig. 3 - Watch and listen to this vid of a Kaboom session and you’ll see what I mean about the adrenaline-driven madness.
The interactive fiction game Mystery House was different, though. Mystery House asked me to exercise my critical ability—to move my mind toward creative insight for the purposes of solving a problem. It was a game that taught its players how to think skillfully, how to deduce, how to use curiosity to discover and gain knowledge. Captivating players with their own abilities to think and act creatively is vital for positive, memorable, connective immersion.
Atari Graphical Action ADVENTURE vs. Early Interactive Fiction
In the early eighties, just after the Pac Man arcade game had chomped its way into the pizza place around the corner from my house, my next door neighbor’s parents got her an Atari 2600 console.
Pac Man. In the home. Yes! For a ten-year-old, this—was progress.
I. Loved. Atari. But my parents wouldn’t let me watch TV, much less play video games. So, I played Pac Man and Space Invaders in my neighbor’s basement whenever I could. My favorite of all those little fat black Atari cartridges was Adventure.
Adventure was the very first graphical action-adventure video game. It was published in 1979, a few years before I got my hands on it in ’82. The graphics in Adventure were pretty hilarious, but in the early eighties, I was dazzled by them. For hours, dragons shaped like ducks made of big, boxy pixels floated relentlessly after me: a small square (see fig. 1).
Fig. 1 – Want to see Adventure in action? Take a gander at this vid of gameplay (difficulty level 1).
Not too long after my introduction to Atari, my early-adopting neighbor got an Apple II. And it was on that computer that I played my first text-driven interactive fiction game. It was Roberta and Ken Williams’s Mystery House (Sierra On-line, 1980).
An interactive fiction game is story-driven, rather than action-driven. The earliest interactive fiction games, like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork , were text-only games. A player typed moves into a command-line interface and received the results in the form of textual description (see fig. 2).
Fig. 2 – Zork screenshot: text-based interactive fiction at the command line.
Sierra On-line’s Mystery House was the first interactive fiction game with graphics (see fig. 3). Now, let me clarify that by “graphics” I mean there were stick dead people that you knew were dead because they had Xs in their eyes. In spite of Mystery House’s (coff) visual accompaniment, I thought this text-driven game was a massive step up from Atari’s action games.
Fig. 3. Mystery House screenshot. Check out those x’s!
Honestly, I didn’t care how bad Williams’s corpse illustrations were. (It’s not like she had Adobe CS4 on hand.) As a pint-sized game player, all I was interested in was exploring the environment—an interactive story!—and piecing together the plot with hints (and bodies) dropped by the author as I went.
Instead of the game running me through a maze like an adrenaline-crazed rat, Mystery House adapted to my internally directed behavior. Instead of forcing me to do the will of the machine, it was human-centered. Instead of using technology to drive the players’ experiences, Roberta and Ken Williams let players’ behaviors drive their experiences. Arguably, Roberta and Ken Williams were one of the first user-centered, immersive, interactive experience design teams.