December Days 01: In The Beginning, There Was Spacewar...

[This is Part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]

The idea of a game that can be played with the assistance of computers is not new, but before MIT got their hands on a PDP-1 in the early 1960s, game-playing computers usually had something custom-built for them to play with, and even though those game-playing computers were often very popular at the demonstrations where they were put on display, general-purpose computing, as we think of it now, hadn't really come into existence yet. While early game-playing computers were a step up from the fradulent activities of the Mechanical Turk, in that they actually did the things they claimed to, instead of being a housing for a person to play a game, it wasn't necessarily the case that computers were going to be used for the purposes of playing games. Most of the time, the game was supposed to be demonstration of the processing power, storage capacity, and other features of the computer itself, with an eye toward getting people to purchase the computer. By showing what it could do in a human capacity, it would be easier for someone to understand what they could use a computer for.

This was still the case for the PDP-1 and the MIT folks that developed Spacewar!, even if it might not have officially been meant to do something like that. Spacewar! turned out to be an excellent soak test for the machine, as well as showing what it was capable of doing. It's also the first game to be played with controllers, as trying to play the game with a keybaord didn't work out so well for the players' comfort.

As with a lot of things, we owe an entire industry to some people at MIT who were given a piece of technology and tried to figure out what they were going to do with it. You can play Spacewar! in a number of iterations, across the Internet, as the PDP-1 is emulatable in Javascript, apparently.

At this particular point in time, of course, computers are still things for academics, and networks like ARPANet are still in their infancy. So is e-mail, for that matter. Computers are still mostly mainframes that take up a significant amount of space, even if they will eventually acquire terminals as access points and eventually drop using punch cards to run programs in favor of magnetic tape memory, and then eventually have internal memory and storage spaces so that programs don't have to be fed in when they are to be loaded and run. That's still a long ways off, and in the interim, we have to talk about the Odyssey and Nolan Bushnell.

Because it turns out that while general-purpose computing is still very expensive (and won't get cheap enough to be part of a regular household for several decades), computing designed with limited purposes in mind is a lot cheaper to design and manufacture. So Magnavox markets a device designed to be plugged into a television for the purpose of playing games using the television screen, rather than providing a screen of their own. It doesn't do a whole lot on its own - the Odyssey displays squares on screen and needed to have plastic overlaid on the television screen to provide rules and bounds for the game that wants to be played. There are also some peripherals, like a light gun, that will come back into prominence later. But it's a demonstration of what is possible on inexpensive (USD $100, in 1972) hardware using a device that a lot of people already have in their homes for the video display. Consoles continue to basically take this approach as they continue through the generations, even though at the point, many of our consoles use and have gained enough general-purpose computing power that they could be used as general-purpose computing devices. (And that several of our general-purpose computing devices now can emulate the entire instruction set of many of these older gaming consoles.)

There also ends up being a lot of patent lawsuits over the technology involved in displaying things on the television screen, which Magnavox either wins or settles over the next two decades. Nolan Bushnell, who goes on to found Atari, is also one of those people who ends up getting sued, but he settles, and his implementation of a table-tennis game, called Pong, is where a lot of people start when it comes to video games, because Pong is extremely commercially successful, and also an arcade device, to complement Magnavox's home console. (The Internet Archive hosts one of many, many implementations of Pong.) Atari would eventually release a home console system of their own, based on a piece of hardware and interchangeable software cartridges that contained the games on them, and it is here, with the Atari 2600, that the journey of a very small Silver begins in earnest. (There's also general-purpose and game-playing computers, but we'll get to that in time.)

Throwing out more links into the void - October-November 02019

Hi, everybody! A quick reminder that as envisioned in the United States, the "Thanksgiving" is a holiday that doesn't tell an accurate story about how the First Nations were treated by colonizing forces. Cultural Survival offers some suggestions on how, if you want to celebrate that holiday, to make it less a celebration of colonization.

A further reminder that a person's identity is not a reason for their murder, and yet, trans people are far too often not extended that right. Would for the day that what you do is what produces consequence for you, rather than what you identify as, but that day is still long off, it seems. Also, have a detailed refutation of a theory commonly used in anti-trans rhetoric that points out its supposed science-ness is essentially nil.

Making surgical masks with a clear window so that lips can be read is excellent for patients who have hearing loss or are Deaf and need to be able to read lips.

Brains that are more focused on interests than other potential motivators may need to change the ways they motivate themselves to do tasks to make sure they get done. Which might include doing thigs for a set amount of time and then taking a break, or other rewards along the way kinds of ideas. (For others, it might be setting oneself up to succeed in such a way that a task has several defined stopping points that can be enforced if necessary.)

( And, of course, there's always more to be had. )

Last for this post, a map of where accused witches resided in Scotland during investigations in the 16th and 17th centuries CE. What programming with punch cards and shared machine access time looked like in Sweden in 1969.

The Baltimore Museum of Art is spending their entire 2020 calendar year acquiring works made by women.

And the advice columnist Ms. Mantis, whose advice is sensible and practical.

Write Every Day: Final November Tally

Here's what I have for the Write Every Day exercise in November. If I'm missing something, pelase let me know. And then go on to blasdespark for the December challenge!

( Rally-ho! )

/run/media/silveradept: On Fandom Negativity And Its Appropriateness

xparrot suggests that when fans speak negatively about their fandoms or creators in those fandoms, they do so carefully, both in the degree of the negativity, and the breadth of where the negativity is posted. Because fandom is often an emotional space, and too much negativity, or negativity too widely broadcast, might turn fans away from the fandom or cause them to stop, and less fans in fandom is no good. It's not a question of being Pollyanna, because there are real problems that happen in fanworks and canon that need to be brought out, examined, and discussed, but if you are trying to sink a ship by throwing every terrible accusation about that ship at it, without regard for any other perspectives, you're doing your fandom a disservice. That doesn't mean you have to like the ship, but it does mean that it's a better idea to not like the ship in more private spaces than harshing on it on main. (Generally speaking.) It's a really nice, nuanced argument about how gatekeeping can happen even if you're not intending to gatekeep. After all, if you're the person who likes that ship in a group of your friends who don't, you might be discouraged from writing that ship if all the people you're going to rely on to support you aren't fond of it.

Thinking about this also had me thinking about a couple of pieces of negative feedback I've received so far, unsolicited, in some of my works, and in both cases, I think they were unmindful of what xparrot was talking about. Example One was feedback about what would be a useful piece of information -- the French school system does not have homeroom, as the United States school system understands it. They have a different, but related, concept that, admittedly, a little research could have uncovered, but I hadn't done the research. The person who was trying to tell me this piece of information decided to take an approach that they thought was of the correct form of the compliment snadwich - say something nice about the work, say the thing that is the criticism, then say something nice about the work again. Unfortunately, the way that they phrased the opening compliment was "Yeah, this was cute and all that." and ended it "I roll my eyes whenever I see 'homeroom' in [this fandom] fic". As you might guess, this did not set a receptive tone for the piece of useful information contained in the comment, as it is far too easy for that phrasing to be read as someone being insincere or strongly negative about the work in question. Even if they had no intention of being harsh or negative in the delivery of the information. The information was still useful, and I took the useful information under advisement, did some research, and made a change.

And also responded hostilely to what I had perceived as someone coming across with hostile intent. After a certain amount of back-and-forth, where I also apologized for the initial hot take, because it was still true that even if someone hadn't a clue about how to get the thing across, the information was useful and they should be thanked for providing it, it ended with a "see if I ever read you again, because you reacted harshly and rudely to me when I was trying to help you." I still contend that it was help packaged in a nearly-perfect hleppy way. Anyway. The entire set-up could be used as an example of tone-policing someone who genuinely was tired of seeing this part misrepresented all the time in works and was out of fucks to give for yet another clueless author. And when it comes to things like someone being -ist in their work, or perpetuating harmful stereotypes, the people who ceaselessly call in / out others on those actions are exhausted from having to do it all the damn time. To tell them "Well, you could have been more polite about it" chooses to substitute a person's feelings as more important than the harm they've done.

It may be hypocritical of me to say that one standard should apply for -isms and another for details such as whether or not another school system has a homeroom, but there does seem to be a distinction of degrees that could be useful in this manner. The actual fix was changing one line in the work, and not particularly hard to do, so, in my own head, the amount of scorn let out in the comment was disproportionate. Live and learn and try to figure out when it is appropriate to be a hothead at someone and when it's not. "Be careful about how negative you are."

The other instance of negative commentary was much more straightforwardly someone full of themselves and feeling like they had the right to say what they were going to say, even though a person who could read context would realize they were definitely not in the right space to be opining. I made sure to tag it as a "fix-it" fic, and mentioned that the character I was using was derived from where I thought the character's growth was in relation to where I thought the showrunners had decided it was. So things turned out differently, because that's one of the things that fic does, right? Produces new results for things that happened in canon that were deeply dissatisfying? So, despite presumably having read the tags on the work, Example Two comes barging in, using a guest account, and says essentially that the work is wrong, and that the way the character acted in canon had been foreshadowed all season, and that it was only logical for that character to have acted that way. Now, people who don't sign their work, clearly haven't read the signs, and are behaving in a generally clueless manner get made fun of. And allowed to stick around until they stop being amusing, at which point they're summarily deleted. So they get a small quip back about the canon not running on logic and an admonishment to at least sign their work, if they're going to be negative. The response to that proclaimed that they didn't need to sign a name, since their obvious correctness was still obviously correct. Which earned them a much longer and significantly more condescending lecture about what other options a person has to express that they didn't like a work other than stubbornly insisting Canon is God in a place that has properly tagged their work that they're not following the way that canon played out. Predictably, the other party flounced after again asserting the correctness of their cause and saying they didn't have to stick around if all they were going to get was insulted. There was not a posted reply of "And don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out," because that would have probably prolonged the thread of conversation, but it was certainly joyously uttered at the conclusion of that particular interaction. If the poster thought that, as a nonnie, they could convince someone of the supposed error of their ways by belittling them and ignoring all the signs that said such argument would not be countenances, merely because they were convinced of the rightness of their cause, well, that's certainly an argument someone with a lot of privilege would make. Or someone who didn't care about the actual argument, and just wanted to stir up some trouble in another person's space. In either case, they most certainly were trolling, and they certainly failed to observe "Be careful about how you are negative." Someone presenting an argument that consisted more of "I'm right, canon says so" might have gotten a treatment that was more polite, even if it would also suggest that this was not the forum for this particular discussion. Someone might be genuinely curious about the decisions made in the work and want to try and understand what brought a particular writer to those decisions, even if they themselves cannot fathom how it is done.

It also makes me think about the Giving of Grief. Where possible, I have tried to focus on things that I find did not age well or do not go well with current morals and ethics regarding how people interact. The idea was to generate a road map to where the Suck Fairy had been in the interim, so that people who might be coming to Pern because it was written by someone who is lauded in the science fiction community will know what they are getting in to, and to decide whether there's enough there to fight off the instinct to chuck the work against the wall and have no more to do with it. I'll admit that I'm also petty about the fragments of poetry and song in many of the newer works, as poetic verse and as supposedly instructional or entertaining works. Which may not be strictly about the Suck Fairy, but occasionally, it is about that, or the poetic form provides an illustration (often unintentional) of another fragment that is firmly within the Suck Fairy's purview.

At a certain point, perhaps when all of the posting is done at its current home, I am thinking about importing the entire series to the Archive of Our Own. Even though it's not necessarily a great place to have meta discussions, it's good to have backups in place, and putting it on AO3 might expose the work to a wider audience who would enjoy seeing its progressions and possibly take issue with some of its conclusions. It's primarily a negative work, because it was intended to find flaws, holes, gaps, and places where things don't work. I've tried to praise parts that do work, where I find them, because no work is composed completely of terrible things, but it wasn't the focus. And now, the question becomes whether or not this hundred-of-thousands of words work is the kind of thing that might fall afoul of being too negative and in the wrong way. I intend, as I import, to go through and make edits and corrections and otherwise examine what I was saying then to see if there are places where it could be said better, more clearly, or otherwise to make the AO3 version the Director's Cut version of the work, but it's a big meta. And it might appeal very much to a certain audience that is interested in discussing the flaws of a work. And it might be distressing to a certain audience that wants to enjoy the work and possibly write about it, but might forbear if they think the angry meta person will go into their comments and stmop all over it. I don't intend to. I might end up suggesting some tags if I feel like I got a different work than what I was expecting, but most of the time, when I read a work, there is something enjoyable about it that I can comment on, or, failing that, I can leave kudos for someone for something written well that I don't have a comment to make.

It's food for thought. Because there's been enough gatekeeping and shaming of people for liking what they like, especially directed toward women and toward people who like what women have written and created. Does it cross into the territory of "these things are profoundly -ist and calling attention to them is a worthy and useful thing to do?" I think it does, much of the time, and other times, I'm confused about things not working the way I would expect them to, given what little expertise I have on the matter. I would like it to be a primer on what kinds of things are likely to appear in the books, rather than sounding like someone being ceaselessly and pointlessly negative about a series that's profound and fundamental for a lot of people.

Ultimately, I'll probably post it, and see how the comments react to it. At that point, much of the work will be publication-date in the past anyway, assuming the importer picks up the original publication dates and assigns them correctly. That way, I won't be shoving a whole lot of this in the faces of the people who would much rather have fic to celebrate than meta to drag themselves through.

Anyway, go read the inspiring post for this one, too, as there's a lot of neat things in there, including someone making a decision not to use "trash" to describe something because it didn't have the same kind of meaning for much of the audience as it might have had for the poster.