What Counts

With regards to electronic computing, Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort make several observations: computer systems exist in standardized forms, or platforms; each platform affords designers particular computational opportunities; these opportunities influence the character of the artifacts made for the platform; and lastly, these relationships were hitherto overlooked. For example, the stringent memory constraints of the Atari VCS made pseudo-random number generation prohibitive (even the small space an algorithm would take up was valuable), but the system’s instruction set allowed access to the bytes used in running the game code. So for Yar’s Revenge (1981), Howard Scott Warshaw used data from unrelated instructions that the machine was running to create the kind of pseudo-random data needed for drawing the game’s “neutral zone”. As Montfort and Bogost state, “When the player looks at the neutral zone on the screen, he is also literally looking at the code.” This kind of technical perspective can reveal hidden authorial fingerprints and allow us to better understand such games in relation to similar artifacts