Inventing space: Toward a taxonomy of on- and off-screen space in video games

Film Quarterly

Volumn 51, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 11-23

  Wolf, Mark J P ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0007809807     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/fq.1997.51.1.04a00030     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Besides all the arcade video games based on movies, there are many home video games based on film and television. For the Atari 2600 alone, cartridges based on movies include: 48 Hours, 9 to 5, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, China Syndrome, Deep Throat, Dragonslayer, E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Escape from Alcatraz, Excalibur, Fantastic Voyage, Friday the 13th, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters II, Gremlins, Jaws, Karateka, Marathon Man, Poltergeist, Porky's, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, five different games based on Star Wars films, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Last Starfighter, Towering Inferno, Trail of the Pink Panther, and Tron Deadly Discs. Game cartridges listed based on television shows include: $25,000 Pyramid, A Game of Concentration, Dukes of Hazzard, Emergency!, Family Feud, Flipper, Jeopardy, Joker's Wild, Knight Rider, M A S H, M A S H II, Magnum P I, Mission Impossible, Password, three different games based on Romper Room, Scooby Doo, Star Trek, The A-Team, The Flintstones, The Incredible Hulk, The Price Is Right, Tic-Tac-Dough, and Wheel of Fortune
2. See Sullivan, George, Screen Play: The Story of Video Games (New York: Frederick Warne, 1983)
3. Herman Leonard, Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Home Videogames (Union, New Jersey: Rolenta Press, 1994)
4. Kesten, Lou, "Arcade Classics," Games magazine (October/November 1989), pages 40-41
5. and Cohen, Scott, ZAP! The Rise and Fall of Atari (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989)
6. Although the video game itself grew out of mainframe computer games, home computer games using a television set were first patented by Ralph Baer, on August 10, 1970, as patent #3,829,095 (see Sullivan, Screen Play, page 17)
7. Tout va bien also has a number of long tracking shots which are visually very similar to scrolling video game graphics
8. As for as the player-character's movement off the edge of the screen and back on at the opposite side, it is exactly like the on-and-off movement in spaces of type 3, except for the change of background, which indicates the new space
9. Altman, Rick, "The Lonely Villa and Griffith's Paradigmatic Style," Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Spring 1981), Volume 6, Number 2, pages 123-124
10. See Adams, Robert L., "D. W. Griffth and the Use of Off-Screen Space," Cinema Journal, Volume XV, Number 2, pages 53-57
11. Burch, Noël, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Praeger, 1973), page 17
12. The asteroids in Atari's arcade game Asteroids were vector graphics that passed over each other, superimposed on each other, and so could not be considered to be an example of Burch's sixth segment of off-screen space
13. If one player's Spy enters the room the other one is in, the action appears on one of the screens, and the other goes blank, until the Spies are in separate rooms again; thus there can be times in the game where off-screen space (from either player's point of view) is not depicted on-screen. Likewise, High Velocity also merges its views when players are close together
14. See Bordwell, David, "Space in the Classical Film," in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pages 50-59
15. Prior to video games, flight simulators using computer animation offered first-person perspectives of interactive three-dimensional environments, but these were not commercially available for public use
16. Text adventures created a first-person perspective verbally by describing what a player was seeing, hearing, feeling, etc. (although grammatically employing "you" in the text instead of "I"); but this is, of course, much different than a game with graphics
17. When the elevator in the tall tree is running, it produces a periodic, metallic ka-chunk sound that can be heard even on other parts of the island; likewise, when the right plaques by the fountain are activated, there is an off-screen sound of water indicating that something is happening. Games, then, that have similar spatial structures as those seen in films can use off-screen sounds in a fashion similar to film
18. Benedikt, Michael, "Cyberspace: Some Proposals," in Benedikt, Michael, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1991)
19. For an overview of the technology and how it works, see Milano, Dominic, "QuickTime VR: An Overview of Apple's Virtual Reality Tools," Interactivity (March 1996), pages 34-43