(Not) Game Genres, pt. 9: Steven Poole's Construction of Space in Video Games

In my previous chapter in this series about game spatiality, not game genres, I reviewed Nicholas Caldwell's paper, Theoretical Frameworks for Analysing Turn-Based Computer Strategy Games. Caldwell based his methodology for analyzing strategy games on Steven Poole's use of Charles Peirce's typology of signs as found in Poole's book, Trigger Happy (2000).

Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Video Games

Trigger Happy (Poole, 2000, Arcade Publishing)

Trigger Happy was an early text that took a serious look at digital game history and made attempts to analyze the aesthetics of such games, comparing them to techniques established in painting and cinematic arts. This was an era when academia all but ignored video games, one year before Espen Aarseth co-founded the journal Game Studies, back when we still referred to digital media as "new" media. Thus, the task of penning this book fell to a journalist, not an academic. Steven Poole has written articles for The Guardian, Edge, The Telegraph, and other publications, along with a number of other books. Since Trigger Happy's publication, it has been cited many times in refereed journal articles and books.

[References to page numbers in the analysis below refer to the "2007 web download edition" that Poole freely released on his website for a limited time and is under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. It can now be accessed on archive.org.]

Digital Games as Art

Aside from the aforementioned typology of signs analysis work, Poole's work corresponds with my research in a number of aspects, including the need for a language to speak to the unique aesthetic qualities of digital games: "Videogames are an increasingly pervasive part of the modern cultural landscape, but we have no way of speaking critically about them" (pg. 30). Video games were not generally accepted as a serious form of art. Then again, neither were films or jazz music in the early 20th century, yet now they are generally accepted as important aesthetic forms of human expression worth of critical study and analysis. Poole predicts that digital games will hold the same appreciation by the middle of the 21st century (pg. 32). Hopefully, we are well on our way to beat that timeline.

Game designer Chris Crawford similarly stated that "computer games constitute a new and as yet poorly developed art form" over a decade earlier in The Art of Computer Game Design (1984, Osborne/McGraw-Hill). This pioneering book is now regarded as the first full publication devoted to what would later be named game studies (Wolf and Perron, The Video Game Theory Reader, 2003, Routledge). Crawford stated that we need to establish "a framework for criticism" as part of our "path to understanding" digital games as an art form (1984). Since Crawford's and Poole's books were published, game studies scholars have adapted "frameworks for criticism" from "new art history" methods used in Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial theories, for example.

I argue that the last missing element for Crawford's "path of understanding" is "our principles of aesthetics" (1984). We have the structure to critique digital games, but still lack an agreed-upon language for discussing digital games as an art unto themselves and "speaking critically about them" (Poole, 2000).

Poole cites a French text, L'univers des jeux vidéo (Alain and Frédéric Le Diberder, 1998, la Découverte), which includes digital games as the "tenth art." The six classical arts are music, poetry, architecture, painting, dance, and sculpture. The Le Diberders add new arts for the 20th century: television, films, graphic novels, and digital games (Poole, pg. 29).

The "ten arts" concept reminds me of Henry Jenkins' declaration that digital games are one of the "lively arts" (Jenkins, "Games, the New Lively Art" In Handbook for Video Game Studies, 2005, MIT Press, pp 175-189). Jenkins refers back to Gilbert Seldes and his early critical text on pop culture, The Seven Lively Arts (1923, Sagmore Press). Seldes defends "lowbrow" entertainments that he terms "lively" arts (including slapstick comedies, musical theater, popular music, vaudeville, and comic strips) against the seven major "hibrow" arts. At that time, the classical six arts referenced above had been updated to seven modern arts: painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, theater, film, and music. Jenkins declares that digital games are a new lively art, "one as appropriate for the digital age as those earlier media were for the machine age" (Jenkins, pg. 177).

Art History of Games?

"Videogames have... repeated histories of representation in art, on jittery, caffeine-fueled fastforward. But it is immediately apparent that so far, they have only reached a surprisingly early stage in that development, for by the eighteenth century in painting the classical ideal of beauty based on some cosmic mathematical order was already being challenged, and the shortcomings of perspective were already being identified. Videogame scenery, being an artifact of computers, is clearly still in thrall to the god of mathematics. Of the myriad post-perspectival ways of seeing such as impressionism or cubism, there is as yet no sign in the apprentice draughtsmanship of videogames" (Poole, 2000, pp 236-237).

I often feel that AAA studios seem like the French academic painters of the early 1800s, highly skilled at rendering ever-greater levels of visual fidelity, delicate interplay of light, and beautiful forms. Digital games only slowly creep toward what might be considered our versions of the modern art styles. Occasionally, a Grim Fandango or a Kentucky Route Zero will come along, paying tribute to one or more of these "modern" styles of last century. Rarely does a game attempt a sort of space-bending reality commonly seen in cubist, surrealist, Dadaist, expressionist, and other modern styles.

Digital Game Visuo-spatiality

Trigger Happy also includes a "brief history of the construction of space in video games" (pg. 236) in chapter 6: "Solid Geometry" (pp 199-239). Poole looks at the touchstone moments in stylistic presentations of space that bring developers closer to the "Holy Grail" of game environments: "a 'virtual' space that the player could inhabit" (pg. 204).

These stylistic innovations were afforded by means of technological innovations and advances in display and computing hardware. However, Poole states, "It is important to emphasize... that innovations... did not at once render earlier forms obsolete" (pg. 212). Innovations added more tools to the game developer's toolbox rather than just replacing the old tools. As an example, scrolling screens did not eliminate the need for fixed-screen games. Robotron 2084 (1982) works so well as a frantic, exciting game precisely because the player is trapped on one screen, in a claustrophobic space where there is nowhere to run. An interview with Robotron creator Eugene Jarvis confirms this was a intentional, aesthetic choice:

"With Robotron, I just stuck the guy on one screen... There's two hundred robots trying to mutilate you, and there's no place to hide... It was an incredible sweaty palms experience. It's just confinement. You are stuck in that room. You can't run down the hallway. You can't go anywhere else. You're just totally focused. A lot of times, the games are about the limitations. Not only what you can do but what you can't do. Confining your world and focusing someone in that reality is important." Quoted from Joystick Nation by J. C. Herz (1997, pp 78-79)

Poole intentionally likens the history of the projection of virtual spaces to innovations that developed in art history, especially with painting but also in cinema, "Videogames have rehearsed other histories of pictorial representation and come up with imaginative and original visual strategies themselves" (pg. 206). 

The following is an analysis of Poole's terminology (including some terms from Poole's pseudo-sequel, Trigger Happy 2.0 (2013), as compared to my own Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces. Poole did not name each type of projection method, sometimes merely describing This is similar to my analysis of Mark J. P. Wolf's "Elementary Spatial Structures of Video Games" (1997, 2001) that I posted previously (part one, part two).

1. No environment - "In the earliest videogames... the environment had no characteristics of its own: it was not terrain, but simply a function of the relations between objects or a means by which time could pass while one object traveled across the screen, so that everything did not happen simultaneously" (Poole, pg. 207). I essentially describe this as no environment image plane, but Poole gives a compelling description for what is essentially nothing.
2. Fixed screen - "The boundaries of the TV screen limited the play arena to a fixed, small size, and thus limited the type of action available to game designers... The screen was a prison" (pg. 207). This is a fixed framing device with no mobility (in other words, the game "camera" doesn't move).
3. "Wraparound" screen - "Topologically, the spatial arrangement of Asteroids, though it looked flat, was actually equivalent to the surface of a torus (a doughnut with a hole in the middle)" (pg. 208). Just like Poole describes, I say this is a toroidal topology. Another form of "wraparound" screen may have cylindrical topology (like Pac-Man).
4. "Scrolling" screen - "The superficial limits of the screen were further eroded by the invention of scrolling" (pg. 208). Poole's example of Defender uses smooth scrolling framing device with horizontal mobility.
5. "Ineluctable scrolling" screen - "Unstoppable, ineluctable scrolling." "For reasons rarely explained by the developers of arcade games such as Scramble, your ship had a minimum speed below which it could not operate... moving forwards at a certain rate, towards your doom, was existentially obligatory... in sidescrollers and upscroller, the game scrolls regardless of your input. It's more like an enemy than a tool, even as it is also the engine of your apparent progress" (Poole, Trigger Happy 2.0, ebook, 2013, chapter 2). An auto-scrolling framing device.
6. "Parallax" scrolling - A multi-planar background image plane.
7. "Isometric perspective" - Regarding Zaxxon, "You could see three sides of an object rather than just one. And now, crucially, the game screen was not just a neutral arena - it had become an environment" (2000, pg. 214). For a time, "the most technologically sophisticated means of building a 3D world" (pg. 216). In comparison to "scientific perspective," "Foreshortening implies a subjective, individual viewpoint, so its absence in isometric graphics, along with the elevated position of survey, conspired to give the user a sense of playing God in these tiny universes" (pg. 216). This is dimetric projection environment plane and agent plane. "Isometric" has become a catch-all phrase for a number of related axonometric methods of projection (isometric, dimetric, and trimetric).
8. "Perspectival" - Games like Battlezone use "scientific perspective" (pg. 205). The Battlezone example uses 2-point perspectival projection environment plane and agent plane.

Coda?

"I will reinvigorate the retro game-reviewing vocabulary, since that will be the only way to distinguish oneself in an increasingly crowded media-critical space from the hordes of reviewers who are all now like Huizinga this and affordances that" (Poole, 2013).