Nick MontfortRezensionen

61000

I like the writing style but found the book inconsistent with its treatment of future. Clearly a vast challenging subject but the author chooses to look at it from a limited set of views without fully explaining any one in particular.

Overall I think the problem is the format, its impossible to address a subject as vast in a small booklet.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/racing-the-beam-the-atari-video-computer-system-...

I know very little about computer games, and still less about the early history of the Atari system; but sometimes it does you good to read about a field of human endeavour with which you are completely unfamiliar. This is a tremendous analysis of how coding is affected by external factors, especially the way in which the business of game development is financed and structured, but also from learning about player preferences and making crazy bets about game features which turn out to pay off (or not).

This slim volume looks in depth at six games, only one of which I had heard of – Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Pitfall and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, but also in passing at the other games developed before or at the same time in each case, to paint a picture of the intellectual moment in which the writing of the game took place. There is a modest amount of machine code, but a lot of analysis of how ideas get turned into player experience. I don’t think I have retained very much of the information, but I come away struck by the cultural profundity of the whole enterprise. Recommended even for those like me who are not immersed in the subject.

Super interesting in a nostalgic way, but stretching the analysis of one piece of code a little bit too much (or too academically).

Dry at times, but nonetheless a great, inspiring reading. Made me want to develop an Atari game just for fun.

In case you ever wondered, this book demonstrates that a single line BASIC program for a Commodore 64 can provoke an entire book about computers, culture, and context.

Ten academics review a single line of code and take it on tangents about programming, art, culture, history, psychology, math, design, and more. Reading this book took me on a delightful walk down memory lane that has provoked further reading.

Even though I did not grow up with a VCS, this book triggers in me nostalgia for early computer games and systems. Good to see a reflection on the early days of our industry like this.

Neat!

This is well worth the read - for anyone interested in a very good exploration of future making.

A curious history of the Atari 2600 - highly technical at times, rather light on the surrounding history and drama.

A history of the genre, mainly. Not meant to be comprehensive.

A decent early effort in the platform studies genre, this book suffers a touch due to a disorganized feel and shortage of content. While there's a good mix of both technical and contextual/historical information, I believe this book could've easily been at least twice the length, going deeper into the technical details of the VCS platform. Organization of the content into an initial technical deep dive before a discussion of the impacts the platform's limitations and unique characteristics had on game programming and design might've helped the book seem less scattered.

Regardless, it's a very interesting and worthwhile read on the Atari VCS, an iconic video gaming platform and one that really stretched its capabilities both over its commercial life and into the present through the retro, vintage and homebrew communities.

I'm looking forward to reading other entries in the Platform Studies series.

I really enjoyed this. It looks at game design from the perspective of the design of the Atari VCS (2600) system itself -- how the limitations and quirks of that game console led to certain design decisions (good and bad) that affected some very seminal games.

I'm a programmer, so when I think about game design it's very hard for me to completely distance myself from thinking about what would be easy or difficult (or impossible) to actually implement. Sometimes laziness prevents me from making design choices that would be harder to execute. But I like to think that having an intimate understanding of the platform (say, iPhone) gives me a more refined sense of how to make something good particularly for that platform. I can avoid getting mired in things that just won't work. Like how painters study their brushes so they know what the possibilities as as far as texture, stroke weight, etc. So talking about game design from exactly this perspective clicked with me very nicely.

Also: I am just a bit young to have experienced the Atari 2600. I've seen them and probably poked at a game or two as a kid, but I'm of the Nintendo generation. Reading this book with the internet handy to watch some of these games in action gave a really great introduction to the Atari 2600 (or, at least, as good as one could get without really playing one). And this book contains a lot of info about the history of Atari (and Activision and other 3rd party devs) as well as the historical context of all of this.

Finally, this book seems like a great introduction to the hardware history of computers. The book talks about the chips, the design of the motherboard (if that's what it's called), and how the hardware impacted the platform. And get to learn a bit how TVs work. Electrical engineers won't be impressed, but I learned some stuff.

So, yeah -- even though this book can get fairly technical (on an introductory level, at least), it's still a very easy read. Well organized. Fun. Very interesting. Great book!

A fantastic history of one video gaming platform, told through a selection of games. Each of these sections discusses the unique and distinct features of each title, telling the story of the evolution of manufacture, marketing, programming, and ultimately the maturation of the home gaming environment. Easy for the lay person to enjoy as much as it will appeal to people with more than a passing interest in the evolution of video gaming.

While I found the first two chapters to be a bit tedious, this book turned out to be a comprehensive and inspired platform for bringing interactive fiction to a large audience. Montfort is well informed from a technical standpoint and takes a historical approach; he cites just enough literary theory to provide insight without losing focus. I could have done without his little attempts to be cute, but otherwise he writes in an accessible and polished tone that lives up to academic standards. This is certainly a work of scholarship, but it also functions as effective IF evangelism: I found myself wanting to play the games covered in the book as well as to explore developments occurring in the near-decade since its publication. I'm now interested in Montfort's career, and I'm especially excited to experience this collaboration with Ian Bogost.

A little heavy, but an important read nonetheless.

When I was a kid, I wanted to make Atari games when I grew up.

Stupid kid. :)

This book goes through some high-level review of the challenges presented by trying to program the Atari 2600, and uses six specific games to tell about how the programmers figured out more of how to make the system into something awesome.

While it doesn't get anywhere near as mind-bending as the Stella Programming Guide, it will show aspiring programmers that there are probably less aggravating ways to make a living.

If you don't understand any programming principles, it's going to be a pretty dry read with some neat history tucked inside. If you do understand programming, it's still kind of dry but at least you will come to grips with how hopelessly primitive the Atari 2600 is.

The New Media Reader is a massive collection of papers, articles and book excerts anticipating or contributing to the emerging digital medium. It includes most of the significant work from the 1940s onwards, thus in a way sketching a cultural history of "new media."
The first section addresses the complexity and combinatorial possibilities of digital media, including the earliest precursor of what eventually became hypertext and the www: Bush, Engelbart, Nelson and other computing pioneers along with prescient artists such as Ascott and Oulipo. In the second section, the social nature of the new media is explored in an equally appropriate selection ranging from McLuhan to Baudrillard and Deleuze/Guattari. The third section is slightly more loosely connected around activity and action, including work by Papert, Turkle, Stallman, Winograd/Flores and others. In the fourth and final section, countercultural and revolutionary themes are explored in writings of Suchman, Ehn/Kyng, Bolter, Moulthrop, Agre, CAE, Berners-Lee and others. The supplementary CD contains several hard-to-find examples, including a few seminal games and artworks and a generous video excerpt of Engelbart's 1968 demo of the NLS system.
As the selection of names above illustrates, the New Media Reader is an impressive attempt to map the cultural history of the digital medium. It should be required reading for any interaction design student. Even though the history of our field is short, it is substantial and the perspective on digital artifacts as media is growing steadily in importance in the foreseeable future.

Pretty interesting, alternating between history and technical details. This is a little lopsided, as more of the technical details occur early on. If you're a gaming history buff, you might just want to skim the first chapter or two. I must admit, I like the fact they included a couple of my favorite games. (Yars & Empire Strikes back). The yars chapter was easily my favorite, for no other reason but the technical hacking down to create an excellent game.

It's probably as true for lines of assembly code as it's supposed to be for equations that each one halves the potential sales of a book that includes it; but while it's not unreasonable for a work aiming to explore both the technical and the social and economic constraints and opportunities acting on VCS game development to dip its toes into assembler and extract them no less quickly, it is a definite mark of disorganisation that when the authors offer a brief and gentle introduction to some basic concepts of assembly code, on pp. 102-3, they have already engaged in a discussion of another piece of code, on p. 93, in which they assumed the reader knew what the accumulator was. It's fair enough to zoom in and focus on hardware details only when necessary, and so it isn't a problem that sometimes programming necessities are explained down to the setting of a certain bit in a certain register, while at other times a rather broader brush is used; but the authors seem to have been uncertain about their intended audience: sometimes they go out of their way to ensure that lay readers won't be bewildered, but at others they assume the reader knows, say, what it means to strobe a register. Perhaps a glossary would have been helpful.

Readers with the mercifully slight technical background required to deal with this will find the gast-flabbering constraints of the machine (no frame buffer, only 128 bytes of RAM...) vividly explained, and come away impressed with what programmers of the era achieved on an architecture that was never designed with anything like Pitfall! in mind. This is neither as good a technical commentary as could be written, nor as good a history; I suspect the authors would regard that as a worthwhile compromise, given their commitment to analysis of the 'platform' as a whole. They certainly succeed in enhancing the reader's appreciation of the artistry inherent in VCS software.

Within the first ten pages of Twisty Little Passages, Montfort remarks on the need for "a book-sized resource on interactive fiction's history and implications—one that considers how the form came into being and how it developed through the decades, with basic theoretical discussions of the nature of the form and at least an introductory critical discussion of important works," and it is apparent that the rest of the book intends to fill that need. To quibble with the book's subtitle, one could argue that the different strands in that list do not really constitute a single "approach," but rather several different approaches: there's really enough there to fill a couple of different books. By attempting to tackle each of them in a single concise volume, a certain scantiness ensues (I had no trouble completing the book in a day), but Montfort deserves credit for ambitiously staking out the territory: other scholars of electronic literature will undoubtedly see this book as a valuable starting point to branch off from.

The most successful chapters, to me, are the ones that consider "how the form came into being and how it developed through the decades." The history of Zork and Adventure's development is especially interesting reading, as is the overview of the contemporary IF scene, which has apparently thrived as a non-commercial subculture in the years following the decline of Infocom and other commercial IF publishers. Montfort's critical overview of the major IF works (of the both the commercial and post-commercial era) is pretty condensed—only the most important works get more than a page or two—but valuable nevertheless: I'm hard-pressed to say that I'd trade it for a deeper read into a smaller handful of works. That can come later.

The weaker chapters are the ones that attempt a theory of the form. The first chapter does some decent work establishing a useful terminology with which to discuss IF works: distinguishing between replies and reports, for instance, or distinguishing between which commands are digetic and which are extradigetic. This material, however, is dispensed with in under ten pages, and is forced to share space in this first chapter with the standard "what is interactive fiction?" boilerplate.

The second chapter, probably the book's weakest, unconvincingly attempts to situate the text adventure within the literary tradition of the riddle. Some of the parallels that Montfort attempts to draw have numerous exceptions: for instance, although it is true that riddles are "presented for solution," it is less true that all interactive fiction can (or should) be thought of as doing the same: for instance, notice that many of the IF works available through Adam Cadre's IF page are said to contain "almost no gamelike elements." ("If stuck, just keep exploring," Cadre writes of his latest work, and, in the release notes, he writes "even if you get to an ending, you may have only seen a small fraction of what's possible," neither of which seem like statements that usefully apply to any riddle I know of.)

I take less issue (at least initially) with Montfort's statement that interactive fiction creates a systematic world, but again, the parallel flags for me: is it accurate to say that a riddle also creates this sort of world? Perhaps technically, but the experience of solving a riddle feels to me substantially different from the far more immersive and ludic experience of exploring the world of a work of interactive fiction.

I think Montfort is more on the mark when he touches on the idea of IF as a "literary machine" or what Espen Aarseth would call "ergodic literature." The literary tradition there dates back at least as far as that of the riddle: the I Ching is commonly cited (including by Montfort) as a "literary machine" that dates back to antiquity.

Quibbles aside, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone studying electronic writing, and I even think that most of it is accessible enough to be of interest to people who remember the old Infocom games fondly and might have an interest in seeing what's new in the field.

Permanent URL for this review: http://raccoonbooks.blogspot.com/2004/01/twisty-little-passages.html

Sadly, I found this rather dull. It's literary criticism about Infocom-style text adventure games. Because this is a pretty new field (the games have been around for decades, but apparently nobody has given them a serious critical reading), the author spends a good deal of time just defining terms and providing a history of the genre.

Montfort spends an early chapter arguing that text adventure games are descendants of riddles, a more established literary form. This seems to be the meaty idea in the book, but I felt it wasn't very well-developed. Perhaps I'm just not used to reading criticism, but it seemed like he was constantly telling the reader about the point he was about to make, rather than making the point.

I'm tempted to play a bunch of the recent works he describes. I didn't get much more out of the book than that, though.

At best, this is a mediocre history of interactive fiction games. But the writing is often disorganized, and rarely interesting. It has the leaden feel of a grad student dutifully chugging through all the essential points of a research summary paper. The early chapter on riddles seems tacked on and disconnected from the rest of the book, and generally quite poor; it makes me think that the inclusion of that chapter was at the behest of the author's supervisor.

It's now available as an ebook on the MIT press portal http://mitpress-ebooks.mit.edu/product/racing-beam