![]() Some games, especially the ones that attempt to emulate team sports with only two pawns like Baseball or Football, spiral into arcane knots that run on for pages and are approximately as complex as… let’s say Settlers Of Catan. ![]() Some games, like Fun Zoo or University Of The Solar System which are quizzes to challenge children, or Ski in which you trace a dotted line, could be adequately replaced with two tokens or better yet flashlights to shine on the board to indicate player position. Some games, like Invasion, use the “RESET” button that returns the ball when it leaves the screen instead as a “fire” button. Some games, like Handball, make the line solid. Some games, like Cat And Mouse, want you to move on a grid. These people, who as far as they know are the innovators of the video game, sit at the dawn of the medium and are really roaring to take it for a spin and see what can be done with three squares and a line. It reminds me of the old “creativity test” where you have to write down as many things as you can think of to do with a paperclip. They are all variations on a theme, which is to say all the other games are based on Table Tennis. The games of the Magnavox Odyssey beg to be considered as a whole, like the games of a WarioWare or other minigame compilation, seeing as they all came bundled together with the unit. Lots of the games come with further extensions like board games and cards. Literally, you are given transparent overlays to superimpose on your screen and circumscribe yourself. Thus far, paratext like genre or history has informed how we fictionalize the mechanics of a game, now the rules themselves bare their artificiality and voluntary nature as they leap out of the screen and onto the page. The Magnavox Odyssey can have a lot of rules, they’re just not enforced by hardware. To freestyle with your square of light would be “play”, but it would be the play you do with a toy, not with a game. They could exercise it, but they’re not encouraged to. This freedom isn’t really the players’, though. For example, the players could theoretically completely ignore intended play to create a state of equilibrium and adjust the distance between the pawns for use as a metronome, or at incredibly-close distances, granular sound synthesis. Basic components like the size of the squares or width of the net or speed of the ball can be customized by the player. It inherits something of the designer Ralph Baer’s experience, the sheer delight of drawing light on the CRT. Here, the players are in nigh-absolute control of the game. This marks a distinct change from the inherently hostile gameworlds we’ve seen up until now. Players can cross the pawns across the line freely or eliminate it or change its location. The line exists, but is, in Table Tennis, intangible and powerless. Spin, in real life, is applied at the moment and thereafter set. The ball always travels at a constant horizontal rate, changing direction when it hits something solid, but its vertical position can be directly manipulated by the last player to touch it with an “English” knob, which fictionalizes it as the spin you give the ball… but that’s a lie. It’s a peek at TV from the technician’s perspective, or perhaps the television’s itself, all light and no content. This direct inversion of The Outer Limits’ famous promise is telling of its conceptualization as a “TV Game,” designed by a television manufacturer. ![]() The pawns are controlled with both a horizontal and vertical dial, much like the horizontal and vertical alignment control dials familiar from period televisions. The elements of Table Tennis are the two pawns, the ball, and the line separating one side of the screen from the other. Table Tennis might look for all the world like Pong, (I’m not going to pretend like we can talk about one without the other,) but the way each handles is worlds apart. Despicable! If we are to take gaming as a legitimate art form, though… It behooves me to mention its business legacy, and move on briskly. ![]() If we take gaming as a legitimate art form, which is the essential premise of this blog, then it’s the equivalent of copyrighting the concept of canvas. It was the direct inspiration for Pong, and there is an infamous lawsuit decided in Magnavox’s favor to that effect, which became famously the first of decades of copyright trolling putting up a hundreds-of-millions tollbooth on the mere concept of video games at home. ![]() The most famous Magnavox Odyssey game is Table Tennis. ![]()
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