While I was playing “Battlezone” on the computer last week I couldn’t help being extremely frustrated by the controls of the game. The Mac keyboard I was using was so efficient that it did not leave any room for nuances. As I recall when playing arcade games, it is the nuances of a controller that can often help one win a game.
This made me aware of how essential the design of the console is in the illustration of a game's content. As I sat in front of the computer playing I reminisced of the pleasure of sitting down at a “Pac-Man” table looking down at the screen with my competitor across from me. For me, what made many of the games like “Battlezone” or the ones that Wolf describes in his essay “Abstraction in the video game” so abstract are the consoles themselves. Through an art world lens, the sculptural and interactive qualities of the console for “Star Wars” would still be considered cutting edge even today’s art world.
Wolf attributes the movement from experimental and abstract video games towards realist video games to the market audience’s desires. Still, I wonder why there has not been more multi-media creativity in game design. Wouldn’t it be cool to interact with a variety of real objects as well as virtual ones to win a game? It would be like the way one must interact with a Rauschenberg painting to begin to understand its meaning.
Wolf, Mark J.P.. "Abstraction in the Video Game" Chapter 2.