In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.
In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.
Playing to Win: Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play
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Overview
In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253015051 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Digital Game Studies |
| Sold by: | OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 260 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Robert Alan Brookey is Professor of Telecommunications at Ball State University where he also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the MA program in Digital Storytelling. He is the author of Hollywood Gamers: Digital Convergence in the Film and Video Game Industries (IUP, 2010).
Thomas P. Oates is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa.
Read an Excerpt
Playing to Win
Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play
By Robert Alan Brookey, Thomas P. Oates
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01505-1
CHAPTER 1
The Name of the Game Is Jocktronics: Sport and Masculinity in Early Video Games
Michael Z. Newman
ALTHOUGH IT MAY NEVER BE SETTLED WHICH VIDEO GAME deserves to be called the first, it's notable that two games based on racquet sports always come up in talk of the medium's origins. Tennis for Two, a demonstration using an analog computer and an oscilloscope at Brookhaven National Laboratory (1958), and Pong, the first hit coin-operated game from Atari (1972), are in some ways quite similar. Both are competitions between two players given the ability to direct the movement of a ball, which bounces back and forth between them. Both are examples of sports games, a genre that would prove to be among the most enduring, enjoyable, and lucrative in the history of electronic play. And both can be placed within a tradition of masculine amusements adapted from professional athletics, which had already been popular in American society in penny arcades and around gaming tables for more than a half century when electronic games were new. We can regard Pong not just as an early and influential video game, but as part of a history of sports simulations and adaptations and as an electronic version of tavern and rec room amusements such as pool and Ping-Pong, from which it gets its name.
According to some historical accounts, the triumph of the Pong prototype at Andy Capp's tavern in Sunnyvale, California, launched a new medium in popular culture, marking the emergence of a new format of electronic amusement and a break from the past. By offering an interactive experience of play controlling a small square of light on a video screen, Pong and many similar games in public and in the home did come across as novel and exciting, so much so that according to legend, the original game stopped working when it became overstuffed with coins. Games like Pong were a new use for the familiar cathode-ray tube TV set and a step forward in consumer electronics and high-tech leisure. To see Pong as a first, in retrospect, is to regard its difference from what came before it.
But the introduction of electronic games marked continuity as well as change. There is a tendency in popular media histories to see firsts as wholly original creative outbursts on the order of the Big Bang – at one moment there is nothing, and at the next we have the telephone or cinema or video games, as we would later understand these media. The reality is usually more messy and less teleological, as technologies and formats develop under the influence of available and familiar models. The fact that Pong was first offered to the public at a bar puts it into a context of coin-operated amusements such as jukeboxes, pinball games, and pool tables. As a racquet game it was instantly familiar, just as sports games based on baseball, football, horse racing, and boxing had been to thrill seekers at the penny arcade. In the same way that early cinema emerged out of nineteenth-century shows integrating imagery on screens, early video games drew upon forms of amusement and popular culture of their time.
As video games emerged in the 1970s in the United States, many experiences of this new kind of electronic, mediated play involved some element of sports and relied on the player's familiarity with the most popular types of competitive play. Early games like Pong often had sporting themes. The first several years of home video game history are dominated by "ball-and-paddle" games, which expanded the basic racquet-sport concept to include versions of hockey, soccer, and handball and to add more sound and color. The first home video game, the Magnavox Odyssey, included not only tennis but also hockey and football (as well as several other games). Other popular genres in these years included racing and shooting. With the introduction of programmable consoles such as Atari and Intellivision, which accepted game cartridges sold separately, many of the titles on offer were versions of professional team sports such as soccer, baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, and a number of auto racing games became popular. As competitive amusements calling on the skill and strategy of players using their bodies in pursuit of high achievement, video games themselves were quite sport-like independent of their content and were often discussed as a form of competition not so different from barroom sports such as darts and billiards or country club sports such as tennis. This distinguished them as a more active and masculine use of video technology than watching television, which by contrast was represented as passive. In some ways, video games drew on a heterogeneous array of influences for their content, from pro sports to science fiction as well as pinball and other coin-operated amusements. But despite this heterogeneity, competitive sports were of central importance to the development of their identity.
The affinity between sport and video games can help us understand the development of the cultural status of the emerging medium. We can use this correspondence in putting together a picture of the developing place of video games in popular imagination. Video games developed in these early years into a form of boy culture, drawing on a tradition of masculine play and leisure-time amusement. Despite a tendency to see a new medium as a rupture from the past, as a revolutionary technological advance, video games can also be regarded as a way of playing some of the same sports and games as had been played in American society for decades, mediated through new instruments. The centrality of sports to early video games was one of the reasons the new medium was understood to be active, competitive, and masculine.
In this chapter I will consider three ways in which video games came into this identity during their early years, roughly 1972–1982. First, taking the example of the Odyssey, a game console released in 1972, I place video games into a history of masculinized sports simulations, games played both in public and in private. Second, looking at 1970s popular press discourses, I identify a recurring theme in these discussions of sports games representing a redefinition of television as an active, participatory medium, marking its transition from passive commercial broadcasting to active competition. And third, I analyze two TV advertising campaigns of the late 1970s and early 1980s for Atari and Intellivision. In these commercials, sports games figure prominently and cement the appeal of the new medium as a way of simulating professional athletics. In all three examples, video games are understood as a way of combining traditions of masculine amusement with electronic media technology.
ODYSSEY BETWEEN OLD AND NEW SPORTS SIMULATIONS
The Magnavox Odyssey has a special place in video game history, functioning as another first – first game for use with a consumer's TV set – and also as a bridge between two kinds of play. Odyssey is the clearest example of the debt early games owe to the amusements of the pre–video game years. Odyssey came on the market in the same year as Pong, and the two have a common origin point in Ralph Baer's Brown Box, now in the collection of the Smithsonian. Baer created this TV game prototype for the electronics firm Sanders Associates in 1967 and 1968; Magnavox later acquired the rights to market the technology. But before it was released it had been demonstrated publicly, and Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn created Pong in imitation of Baer's invention, which they had seen. Odyssey functions historically as a point of connection between two technological eras, incorporating elements of both board or cabinet games and video or electronic games. By contrast, Pong is self-contained as an electronic game.
Bushnell and Alcorn had previously failed to arouse significant interest in an earlier coin-op cabinet game called Computer Space, modeled after the mainframe game Spacewar, which Bushnell played as a student in Utah during the 1960s. Computer Space was thought to have failed because it was too challenging or confusing, and Pong was famously simple: its only instruction was "avoid missing ball for high score." By basing the game on the familiar concept of racquet sports, the player was oriented instantly and understood the objective and operations. Odyssey and Pong both worked in more or less the same way, giving the player operation of a paddle to use in directing the ball against an opponent's paddle. Unlike Pong, however, Odyssey came packaged with an array of other games. Odyssey Tennis was equivalent to Pong and required no elaborate instructions or paraphernalia. The rest of the games one could play on the Odyssey by inserting game cards into the console did require these accouterments, sometimes requiring elaborate ensembles of paper and plastic game components of the kind found in board game boxes.
In a number of ways, early video games picked up on traditions and ideals of play that already existed and were well established in the 1970s, particularly those associated with the suburban recreation room. Basement sports such as Ping-Pong and pool and table games like cards and Monopoly were supposed to bring the middle-class family together in companionate leisure. Advertisements for early games including Odyssey and Atari often pictured family members together in the family or living room, united in electronic play, much as earlier ads for televisions and radios had pictured a family circle integrating all members of the household together in the pleasure of each other's company. Images of video games in department store catalogs of the 1970s placed the electronic amusements alongside other rec room products such as bumper pool and Ping-Pong tables. Sometimes the video games were pictured alongside other tabletop games like chess (or electronic chess). Imagery in magazines and catalogs pictured players in sociable settings, combining participants of mixed age or gender. Similar images were often seen in television commercials, including one Atari ad from the later 1970s in which a mother repeatedly rejects inquiries from babysitters, preferring to stay at home with her husband, son, and daughter playing video games.
At the same time as home play was represented integrating the family, throughout the postwar years some games popular for home play were addressed particularly to boys and men. These games often have professional sports themes. Numerous versions of baseball, football, basketball, horse racing, auto racing, boxing, and bowling were released in these years as board games. These might use the traditional board game materials of cards, dice, and tokens, but some were also similar to penny arcade cabinet games and integrated mechanical, electrical, and electronic components. Penny arcade sports games go back at least to the 1880s, when automatic machines for shooting and horse racing were introduced. These games, like many similar coin-operated machines, proved popular with gamblers. Numerous penny- or nickel-in-the-slot sports games were fixtures in arcades beginning in the 1920s, when free-standing cabinet football games were particularly popular alongside boxing, racing, and other types of mechanical amusement.
Compared with the physical skills demanded of penny arcade versions, some board games were considerably more cerebral and strategy oriented, such as APBA Baseball, a predecessor of Strat-o-Matic, Rotisserie, and fantasy sports leagues. APBA, first sold in 1951, claimed to be "scientific" and employed real Major League player statistics to allow for simulated games, series, and even seasons. But sports games for the home could also be physically oriented, such as those using balls, levers, figures, buttons, lights, and other moving objects. Jim Prentice Electric Baseball (1953) combined buttons and lights with tokens moved by the players around a metal baseball diamond board. Tru Action Electric Baseball Game (1958) employed a magnetic ball and a spring-loaded bat, and play involved aluminum ballplayer tokens. ABC Monday Night Football, a board game released in the same year as Odyssey, boasted "computerized" play and employed a combination of cards, buttons, lights, and a plastic green football "arena" field. The board in these games represented a field (or track), and the rules and processes of the real sport were reproduced and simulated using paper, plastic, and metal objects, sometimes including electrical components. Whether focused more on reproducing the physical performance or intellectual strategy of professional athletics, games based on sports offered players a simulation of the real thing and a taste of the thrill of high-level athletic competition.
The Odyssey is a device very clearly looking both back and forth in time, integrating elements of rec room games of the 1950s and '60s with those of an increasingly electronic age. The original Odyssey console released in 1972 was primitive by comparison even to later ball-and-paddle consoles, and Ralph Baer evidently thought that the way it straddled the board game and TV game forms was a failing. Historically, however, this ambiguity in form demonstrates how video games drew upon a context of pre-electronic games in establishing their identity, and it reveals continuity as well as disruption in the history of leisure and amusement.
The electronic component of gameplay in Odyssey games was often rather slight, and the games required additional nonelectronic materials to be played at all. In most of the original Odyssey games, each of two players could control a square of light by moving it vertically and horizontally, and sometimes the player could put "English" on a ball that bounced between the rectangles, causing it to curve rather than travel straight. Odyssey had neither sound nor color. In some games, the image on screen could be made to move somewhat at random to come to a stop at a point on the display, an effect similar to spinning a wheel or rolling dice. To complete its representation of game spaces, the Odyssey came packaged with translucent plastic overlay sheets that adhered to the glass of the CRT screen by its static electricity charge. Odyssey Tennis had a green court overlay, Hockey was a white rink, Football a green field, Roulette a red and black wheel, and so on. These overlays remediated the tabletop sports games like Electric Baseball, adapting them for play with a television set. Odyssey also came packaged with a variety of paraphernalia, including game chips, cards, dice, paper money, and game boards. In Football, the electronics functioned as one component of a wider ensemble of devices and materials, including a cardboard football field similar to the fields in sports-themed board games. Football players would sit across from each other with this field between them on the table. Playing Odyssey Football also required a paper scoreboard, a roll of frosted tape, a football token, a yardage marker, and six separate decks of cards for different kinds of plays, including passing, running, and kicking off. The manual spent six pages describing the process of gameplay, and players would have needed to keep it open while playing at least at first. Odyssey Football bears a strong resemblance to the football games for home play sold over several decades before electronic TV games came along.
As its game titles suggest, Odyssey, like many early consoles, was aimed at families. Haunted House, Cat and Mouse, and Simon Says are juvenile in their cartoonish representations and in their cultural associations. States and Analogic were meant to be educational. Shooting Gallery, a popular title using a rifle controller, was similar to the basement Daisy BB Gun ranges marketed to fathers and sons in 1960s issues of Life. Sports games might appeal to boys seeking indoor diversion on rainy days, perhaps in the company of parents, siblings, and friends. That most of these games were designed for two players rather than one indicates the sociable intentions of the producers and advertisers. Like later video game consoles and titles, the original Odyssey appealed to the suburban, middle-class family as a means of bringing them together. But in its continuation of traditions of masculine sports-themed play, Odyssey was also a way of further mediating and simulating the competitive amusements of boy culture, integrating the television set into the ensemble of technologies used for sporting leisure. From the start, home video games were helping children to fashion "virtual play spaces" where they would continue the modes of gendered fantasy and interaction that date at least to the nineteenth century. For boy culture these would include competitive feats of physical achievement modeled on adult roles (professional athletics in this case) and performed for the recognition of peers. In maintaining this tradition, Odyssey was not so different from the sports games that preceded and influenced it.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Playing to Win: An introduction. / Thomas P. Oates and Robert Alan Brookey
Part I: Gender Play
1. The Name of the Game is Jocktronics: Sport and Masculinity in Early Video Games / Michael Z. Newman
2. Madden Men: Masculinity, Race, and the Marketing of a Video Game Franchise / Thomas P. Oates
3. Neoliberal Masculinity: The Government of Play and Masculinity in E-Sports / Gerald Voorhees
4. The Social and Gender in Fantasy Sports Leagues / Luke Howie and Perri Campbell
5. Domesticating Sports: The Wii, the Mii and Nintendo’s Postfeminist Subject / Rene Powers and Robert Alan Brookey
Part II. The Uses of Simulation
6. Avastars: The Encoding of Fame within Sport Digital Games / Steven Conway
7. Keeping it Real: Sports Video Game Advertising and the Fan-Consumer / Cory Hillman and Michael Butterworth
8. Exploiting Nationalism and Banal Cosmopolitanism: EA’s FIFA World Cup 2010 / Andrew Baerg
9. Ideology, It’s In The Game: Selective Simulation in EA Sports’ NCAA Football / Meredith M. Bagley and Ian Summers
10. Yes Wii Can or Can Wii: Theorizing the Possibilities of Video Games as Health Disparity Intervention / David J. Leonard, Sarah Ullrich-French, and Thomas G. Power
Contributors
Index
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